Jay Garfield at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: A final idea that frames Harris’ interpretation of Śāntideva—one that is clearly correct, and unappreciated—is that the universal altruism and the attitudes of kindness, care, impartiality, and joy in the accomplishments of others that Śāntideva recommends do not constitute self-sacrifice or self-abnegation. Instead, Harris demonstrates that, on Śāntideva’s view, they are both constitutive of and instrumental to human happiness (40 ff., 60 ff.). So, when Śāntideva compares pleasure in the everyday world to honey on a razor blade, he is pointing out that the pursuit of our own pleasure in the end yields only pain, because of the attachment it generates to a fragile commodity; when Śāntideva argues that we only become happy when we dedicate ourselves to the welfare of others, the freedom from attachment to our own narrow interest expands our sources of joy. As Harris puts it, “Perfect giving, for Śāntideva, is private, but other-focused; self-benefitting, but radically benevolent; total, and yet not self-injurious” (67).
Early Buddhist moral psychology places great importance on developing virtuous mental states which stabilize the mind and constitute progress towards liberation. . . . An important role that these virtuous mental facts play is to eliminate the afflictive mental factors which cause suffering and bind sentient beings to saṃsāra: wisdom eliminates delusion; love and compassion act as antidotes to anger, and so on.
The terminology developed by these Buddhist theorists of virtue refers primarily to the mental states themselves, rather than habitual dispositions, as in a virtue theory like that of Aristotle. Compassion (karuṇā), for instance, refers to the present wish to remove sufferings. (22–23)
Harris thus frames Śāntideva’s text as a guide to escaping from the suffering of ordinary life by cultivating virtue, grounded in the insight that we succeed in advancing our own true interests only by detaching ourselves from apparent narrow self-interest and from a concern with the immediate present in favor of a longer and broader moral vision. This reading opens the text beautifully, and it helps the reader to unpack Śāntideva’s arguments.
Most of this framework is laid out in the introduction. The first full chapter addresses the question of the relationship between ethics and the Madhyamaka Buddhist doctrine of the emptiness of all phenomena. One might think that if everything is empty of intrinsic reality, and exists only conventionally, then ethical principles are unimportant—just matters of custom, with no normative force (Williams 2013). Harris addresses this issue carefully, explaining that emptiness is not non-existence, but interdependence; the absence of intrinsic nature. To say that everything is empty is therefore not to say that nothing really exists, but to say that everything that does exist does so in a network of causal, mereological, and conceptual interdependence. This is what makes it possible for us to be agents and patients, and this is why what we do matters. Emptiness is therefore not an underminer, but the necessary condition of ethical engagement. Śāntideva presents these arguments in the ninth chapter; Harris is wise to rehearse them at the outset before returning to them at the end, as anyone reading this text in a Buddhist context would be aware of these points as they are made by Nāgārjuna (2nd C CE) and by Candrakīrti (7th C CE), on whose work Śāntideva relies.
More here.
