Moral motivation and comparative ethics: Bonaventure, Buddhaghosa, and the problem of material simplicity.

摘要

This study argues for the importance of investigating notions of moral motivation in the comparative study of religious ethics to explore basic issues in moral theory such as character formation, agency, and moral failure. This central conceptual problem in ethics, known to Western philosophy as akrasia or weakness of will, has frequently been obscured in comparative studies by approaches that focus primarily on the justification of moral claims across cultures, thereby neglecting the logically prior question of whether individuals or groups can live by the moral guidance they espouse. As a result, the sources for the study of ethics across religious traditions have often become artificially constricted, neglecting the full scope of religious beliefs, practices and questions which form the moral lives of religiously motivated persons.; Drawing on the examples of the 13th century Franciscan Catholic priest, Bonaventure, and the 5th century Theravada Buddhist monk, Buddhaghosa, my dissertation argues for a multidimensional expansion of the concept of moral motivation by examining religious understandings of moral weakness from the vantage point of practices involving voluntary poverty and material simplicity. By focusing on practices of personal transformation (meditation on the body, the natural world, and the psychology of limit experiences), I argue that (1) contemporary discussions in comparative ethics should focus more attention on the techniques by which religious thinkers envision strengthening moral resolve, and the place of moral exemplars in fostering these techniques, in order to overcome the apparent impasse that often results from comparing similarities and differences in moral principles or basic valuations; and (2) religious themes such as ritual, meditation, faith, and tradition as developed variously by Bonaventure and Buddhaghosa may be used to nuance and supplement prevailing notions of moral motivation that focus solely on the interplay of practical rationality and affective expression.