[This entry is the summary of the second meeting of the seminar «Appearance and reality. On Living, Dreaming and Dying», held last Thursday, 17 February 2022].
1. The Current Moral Order and Critical Ethics
In the second session we began with a brief summary of what had been covered in the previous session. In particular, we returned to the notion that there are two perspectives on ethics proposed by the Philosophy of Liberation, and insisted on the idea that this distinction can be fruitfully applied to a better understanding of Buddhist ethics.
In short, the critical proposal of the Philosophy of Liberation can help us to «free ourselves» from conservative perspectives, which tend to create or defend systemic injustices, producing victims voluntarily or involuntarily due to the attachment to the dogmatic formulations of tradition, and to established institutional forms.
Let us remember that Buddhism is, before anything else, an ethic. That is, a system that teaches us how to act, that helps us to distinguish what we should or would do well to cultivate, and what, on the contrary, we should avoid, because it is harmful.
Continue reading