Buddhist Bioethics

1
Buddhist Bioethics

• Soraj Hongladarom
• Department of Philosophy
• Chulalongkorn University

2
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

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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.

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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 itselfthat things do not have
  inherent existence and look as they are only
  because one is attached to certain false views.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Buddhist Ethics

• In Buddhism there seems to be a key toward
  understanding which action is right or virtuous,
  or the oppositeone 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.

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Buddhist Ethics

• Even so, however, one still needs to find ones
  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.

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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 ones 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.

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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.
• Lets start with the issues of life and death,
  especially cloning and death criteria for
  transplantation purposes.

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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.

13
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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

17
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.

18
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.

19
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?

20
Organ Transplantation

• Is selling ones 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.

21
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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.