Transcript Buddhist Bioethics - Center for Ethics of Science and Technology

Buddhist Bioethics
Soraj Hongladarom
Department of Philosophy
Chulalongkorn University
Outline of Talk
The role of culture and religion in
bioethics
Buddhist viewpoints on a number of
issues
Life and death
Genetic modification of organisms
Global justice
Bioethics and Culture
This will be the main topic for my other
talk.
However, one should start with
consideration of the issue, since
bioethics concerns questions of value,
which are naturally related with how
cultures shape attitudes and value
judgments of a people.
Buddhism
Buddhism is the main religion of the people in many
countries in SE Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka,
and Nepal.
The main goal of the Buddhist is to become liberated
from the cycle of samsara, the process of becoming
born, dying and being born again.
According to Buddhism, this process continues for an
individual because he or she does not see the truth
as it is in itself—that things do not have inherent
existence and look as they are only because one is
attached to certain false views.
Buddhism
Liberation is possible when the
individual sees through this illusion and
acknowledges the truth as it really is.
Thus he or she is freed from
‘defilements’, i.e., mental traits such as
greed, anger and delusion, that result
from ego formation, and it is this ego
formation that compels the individual to
go through the process over and over.
Buddhism
The state of being liberated is called
‘nirvana’. Literally the word is ‘being
extinguished.’
The entire corpus of the Buddhist
teaching can be summed up as follows:
Do what is good.
Avoid what is evil.
Practice so that the mind is clear.
Buddhism and Ethics
Naturally Buddhism has a lot to say about
ethics.
The first two teachings alluded to above deal
directly with ethics.
However, it is always contentious to judge
what kind of action is good or bad, and this is
especially the case in the contemporary world
where advances in science and technology
have complicated the picture tremendously.
Buddhist Ethics
In Buddhism there seems to be a key toward
understanding which action is right or
virtuous, or the opposite—one needs to
discern what kind of consequences that
action will bring.
Hence it appears that Buddhist ethics is a
kind of consequentialism. This is
understandable since what is valuable is
judged as whether it will bring about the main
result, nirvana, or not.
Buddhist Ethics
Even so, however, one still needs to find
one’s way, especially with regards to
questions in ethics of science and
technology, because actually it is not
the actions themselves that will bring
about the Main Goal; rather it is the
quality of the mind of the one who is
making the decision that is at issue.
Buddhist Ethics
Thus there is no necessary conflict between
Buddhist ethics and the secular brand of
ethics popular in the West nowadays.
One still needs reasoning and deliberation
among members of one’s groups and
communities to find out the optimal course of
action in these issues. One cannot just take a
passage from the Canon and pronounce that
this is what Buddhism says regarding issues
such as GMOs or abortion or others.
Specific Issues: Life and
Death
Be that as it may, Buddhism can also
give general guidelines to the specific
ethical issues that are being debated
today.
Let’s start with the issues of life and
death, especially cloning and death
criteria for transplantation purposes.
Cloning
My colleague Somparn Promta has written a
number of works dealing with the Buddhist
attitude toward cloning of mammals.
His idea is that Buddhism does not have an
objection in principle to either therapeutic or
reproductive cloning, the reason being that
these are the technologies that facilitate
giving birth and hence are unobjectionable.
Cloning
According to him, the moral objections to
cloning do not hold their ground in Buddhism
because they hold false presuppositions.
For example, the objection that cloning is
wrong because it means humans are playing
God is not accepted because in Buddhism
there is no God. (Actually there are gods, but
they are not given much respect.)
Reproductive Cloning
According to Somparn, Buddhism has
little against reproductive cloning, since
it is aimed at producing a human being,
not killing it.
However, when the process involves a
lot of killing (as when many embryos
have to be destroyed), the process can
become objectionable.
Therapeutic Cloning
The case for therapeutic cloning is a little
different. Here intentional ‘killing’ of embryos
are involved.
But Somparn has the idea of distinguishing
the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ aspect of
Buddhist ethics. An action may be wrong
according to the first regard, but may be
acceptable according to the second.
Abortion
At present Thai law does not allow free
abortion. Abortion can only be
performed when the mother has been
raped and keeping the baby would
fatally harm the mother.
There have been calls for expanding the
restriction so that the mental health of
the mother is included too.
Abortion
The rather severe injunction against abortion
presumably comes from the Buddhist belief in
the sanctity of life and its prohibition of killing
in general.
A result is that there are more than hundreds
of thousand of cases of illegal abortions each
year, and reports of mothers abandoning or
killing their babies have become
commonplace in the media.
End of Life
Buddhism pays special attention to death and
dying.
As for the question of death criteria,
Buddhism in general holds that someone is
dead when he or she stops breathing.
So the brain-death criterion is something new
for the Buddhist to think about.
Brain Death
The key question is whether the
consciousness (vijnana) has left the body for
good or not.
This can be translated as whether the death
of the brain is reversible or not.
More problem ensues when the criterion
becomes the death of higher brain, not the
whole of the brain.
In that case, has consciousness gone from
the body for good?
Organ Transplantation
Is selling one’s own bodily parts
objectionable according to Buddhism?
There are stories of bodhisattvas (those
who are intent on becoming the Buddha
and to help sentient beings) intentionally
giving their flesh to a hungry lioness
who has to feed her cubs but is to weak
to hunt.
Genetic Modification of
Organism
One of basic arguments against GMO is that
it violates the course of nature.
But according to Buddhism nothing is
unnatural, and in fact the Canon has stories
about magicians transforming life forms into
many strange shapes, and there was nothing
particularly wrong about such action.
So it can be inferred that Buddhism has
nothing in principle against genetic
modification of organisms.
GMOs
What could be wrong, on the other hand, is that in
many instances producing GMOs is motivated not
through altruistic attitude to help mankind, but to gain
profit and power over food producers.
Thus the motive becomes greed rather than altruism,
and as such the action becomes unwholesome.
Perhaps this can be rectified if the developers of GM
technologies and the traditional food producers and
consumers deliberate together without one side being
disadvantaged as to the real benefits and the course
of action society should take on this issue.
Global Justice
Many contentious issues surrounding GMOs
involve the lack of balance in power between
the large multinational corporations and the
poor farmers in developing countries.
This brings in the topic of global justice: How
can global justice be assured in the case of
production, distribution and utilization of GM
technology worldwide? And what can
Buddhism contribute to this?
Socially Engaged Buddhism
Recently a growing number of Buddhists
have come to see that the way the religion is
being practiced in their own societies
contributed little to social activism because it
paid too much emphasis on individual
liberation and esoteric rituals. So they formed
themselves and tried to introduce another
way of practicing that could lead directly to
concrete changes in society.
Social Engaged Buddhism
and Global Justice
So it is conceivable that this kind of
Buddhism might contribute quite a lot to
the quest for global justice.
First of all, the GMO issue has become
one of global justice because it is much
involved with equality (or lack thereof)
among the nations of the world.
Conclusion
Buddhism can contribute significantly to the
global debate on bioethics.
Its most significant contribution can be found
in the teaching that it is the quality of the mind
that is crucial to the question whether the
action is ethical valuable or not.