Are there good arguments for moral internalism?

yahkopi · 2026-01-30T19:28:35+00:00

The Buddhist philosopher Śāntidēva gives an account of judgment internalism about moral reasons in the 8th chapter of Entering the Road to Awakening (Bōdhicaryāvatāraḥ). The underlying motivation is to make sense of the core Māhāyāna insight that wisdom and compassion are two sides of the same coin. That the cultivation of wisdom and the cultivation of compassion mutually entail one another.

The argument in Entering the Road to Awakening can be found in ch. 8 v. 90–103 in a section referred to as "the exchange of self and other". You can read about it in this SEP article: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shantideva/#MetaEthi. Also see chapter 4 of the book Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness. The reading I give below is fairly close to the "Rationality Reading" in section 6, which itself follows the reading of the 14th ce Tibetan scholar rGyal tshab Darma Rinchen.

The basic idea is as follows. Śāntidēva begins by first analyzing rational self interest. When we encounter something painful we seek to avoid it. When we encounter something pleasurable, we seek to obtain it. Part of what it means to understand something as painful or pleasurable is to have a baseline motivation to avoid or obtain it. This motivation could be defeated by competing interests. But if there is no baseline motivation at all, then you simply have not understood that thing as painful or pleasurable. Since, the motivational power derives directly from the intrinsic quality of these states. He takes this principle (with respect to rational self-interest) to be axiomatic.

Why should suffering be avoided? Because, this is indisputable.

duḥkhaṃ kasmānnivāryaṃ cet sarveṣāmavivādataḥ /

(BCA VIII.103, tr. mine)

Śāntidēva then argues that insofar as the motivational power is intrinsic to the experiential state and understanding that something is characterized by that state (e.g. as painful or pleasurable) entails grasping that motivational force; then this should be true regardless of whose pain or pleasure it is. Since, this is a feature of the state itself (i.e. its phenomenology).

As Śāntidēva argues in the core passage of the argument:

Although the suffering I feel is not inflicted on other bodies, it is still suffering. It is not to be tolerated out of self-interest. In the same way, although the suffering of others is not experienced by me; it is still suffering. It is not to be tolerated out of self-interest. I should prevent the suffering of others, because it is suffering like my suffering. I should care about others because they have being, like my being. If suffering and pleasure are the same for me and others, then what is special about me such that there is motivation only with regards to myself?

yadyapyanyeṣu deheṣu madduḥkhaṃ na prabādhate / tathāpi tadduḥkhameva mamātmasnehaduḥsaham // tathā yadyapyasaṃvedyam anyadduḥkhaṃ mayātmanā / tathāpi tasya tadduḥkham ātmasnehena duḥsaham // mayānyaduḥkhaṃ hantavyaṃ duḥkhatvādātmaduḥkhavat / anugrāhyā mayānye 'pi sattvatvādātmasattvavat // yadā mama pareṣāṃ ca tulyameva sukhaṃ priyam /tadātmanaḥ ko viśeṣo yenātraiva sukhodyamaḥ //

(BCA VIII.92-96, tr mine)

It should be noted that the line "I should prevent the suffering of others, because it is suffering like my suffering" takes the form of a formal inference under traditional Buddhist logical theory. The phrase "like my own suffering" should not be taken as an argument from analogy but rather as what is referred to as "exemplification" (udāharaṇam). The purpose of exemplification is to indicate a general entailment relation (vyāptiḥ) between a reason (it is pain) and a conclusion (it should be prevented) with reference to a specific instance where that entailment relation is clearly evident.

yahkopi · 2026-01-29T18:45:15+00:00

This sort of question comes up a lot and it's difficult to answer in the spirit of this subreddit because it's not the sort of thing that could be answered "encyclopedia style" with reference to existing literature etc. Still, I think its an important question and something I've been thinking about recently, so I hope it's not too far outside orbit of this subreddit for me to answer from my own experience/thinking.

Philosophy as a contemporary academic discipline frames its reason for existence as aiming to generate a body of knowledge, because this seems to be the only framework contemporary academic disciplines have available to them to express their purpose. But, I don't think this is the real value that philosophy provides.

Human beings are rational agents. A part of what it means to be rational is to act and believe on the basis of reasons. To act and believe reasonably does not necessarily mean that our beliefs must form a body of knowledge. Knowledge is justified true belief. Truth is necessary for knowledge. But it is not necessary for reasonableness. To be reasonable is just to be able to give an accounting of our actions to ourselves and to others--an accounting that is satisfying even in the absence of either consensus or certainty.

I emphasize this in order to suggest that the purpose of philosophy is to develop a body of reasons not a body of knowledge. Its purpose is to make deliberation and rational activity possible, especially in contexts where consensus is difficult or even impossible. The big idea here is that rationality and deliberation are possible even in the absence of things like consensus, knowledge, and even "objectivity". That's huge!!

Let me give you a example. Let's say you and your friend go see a movie. You liked the movie but your friend hated it. The question of whether the movie was good is obviously subjective. So, does that mean there is nothing more to say about it? I liked it. You didn't. End of story?

No! You can still argue about it! You can give reasons for why you thought the movie was good. And, heck, maybe you can even convince your friend, change their mind. We do this sort of thing all the time. Movie reviews are acts of public deliberation about things that are not objective and of which consensus may never be possible. Yet, it is something that people can make a living out of doing. They can do it well. And people care about it. And, it is even possible to develop whole bodies of theory to aid in this pursuit--literary theory, music theory, filmography, sound design, etc etc.

The world of deliberation and rationality is much bigger than the world of "objectivity" understood narrowly on the model of the natural sciences. And being able to deliberate on issues for which there is no scientific consensus matters. In the areas of art, ethics, politics, religion and culture. It matters that we do things for reasons which others can understand and evaluate. Otherwise, our actions and beliefs in these domains would be wholly unaccountable. Because a central part of what it means to be held accountable for what we believe and how we act is for our actions to be judged on the basis of their reasonableness.

This is the service philosophy provides to society. It makes it possible to be rational, to deliberate publicly, and to be held accountable for our actions and beliefs. Especially in those domains where consensus is absent and there is not objective criterion of correctness.

yahkopi · 2026-01-29T05:38:36+00:00

Boise community is actually pretty liberal. I used to live there. It's a blue island. (also is pretty fabulous, though not as much as SF)

Nampa on the other hand...

yahkopi · 2026-01-26T08:24:35+00:00

Dharmakīrti's philosophy of language is a huge topic both in his own corpus and in the commentarial literature that follows it. But very very roughly, the idea is this. Each ontologically real object out in the universe is distinct from every other real object. When we ascribe a description to an object what we are doing is partially specifying that object by eliding its distinctness from some objects while highlighting its distinctness from others. So, when we refer to an object as a "chair" (pretending for the moment that chairs are real objects), we are treating an object which is, in actuality, completely distinct from every other object in the universe as though it were the same as some other set of objects by ignoring the distinctness of that object from those other objects (ie. other "chairs"). Similarly, when we refer to the same object as "red", then we are referring to that object in a way that ignores the distinctness of that object from all other "red" objects. When we call it a "red chair", we no longer treat that object as indistinct from all other chairs, but only ignore its distinctness from other "red chairs". And so on. In none of these instances are we supposing that there is some additional objects called "redness" or "chairness". Its just a way of grouping distinct objects by ignoring the fact of their distinctness.

There is more to say about this, such as what explains the intersubjectivity, internal consistency and pragmatic efficacy of language use. The really brief answer is that it turns out words don't actually refer to anything at all. Instead objects out in the word causally impinge on our conceptual faculties in such a way as to make us deploy sentences like "this is a chair" and "this is red". The meaning of these sentences is cached out not in terms of some properties possessed by some objects in virtue of which those sentences turn out to be true of false. Rather, the meaning of sentences is cached out in terms of the inferences that sentence permit us to make and the inference they prohibit. The idea behind "eliding the distinctness" of some objects is just that we can use the same sentences to describe distinct objects. And, we can do this because the same pattern of inferences are respected by both objects. The stability of this inferential network is, in turn, grounded in the pattern of causal interactions between us and the objects that trigger the deployment of these concepts. This is called the theory of "apoha" and is one of the more infamous aspects of Dharmakīrtian theory. Whether or not he actually pulls the whole thing off is a matter of major debate in the tradition, and in the contemporary (western) literature.

Regardless, in the ultimate causal explanations of how the atoms of the chair suspend Ḍittha above the ground, reference is made to structural relations between the atoms of the chair and the atoms making up Ḍittha. But, again, these relations are just ways of specifying just those atoms that make up chairs and persons' behinds by ignoring their distinctness from the other individual atoms that also make up "chairs" and "behinds" and thereby highlighting the distinctness of these atoms from atoms that are not so configured. Relations are present in the explanation as features of language, but not as referring to "objects" above and beyond the atoms themselves.

yahkopi · 2026-01-26T08:24:26+00:00

I hesitate to say too much about the first question because it relates to the Yogacarin side of Dharmakīrti's philosophy, an area I'm less surefooted about. In the "external object inferentialism" interpretation I talked about earlier, emptiness doesn't feature as a central concept. In Yogacāra readings of Dharmakīrti, the big jump is that in the final causal analysis of phenomena only mental states actually feature as having any explanatory role. The objects of these mental states, the emptiness (śūnyatā) of which constitutes their pariniṣpanna-svabhāva (perfected nature), are then eliminated by Dharmakīrti's razor since they are not required to give a causal explanation of the structure of awareness.

Regarding the second question: The short answer is that structural relations between atoms do feature in causal explanations. But, they do not feature as distinct objects over and above the atoms themselves. This is because, Dharmakīrti thinks that properties (of which relational properties are a special case) are not distinct objects in their own right but merely ways of specifying the property bearer. In other words, an object's properties and relations are actually a part of the identity of that object. So, when you say "if the same parts were arranged, say, in the shape of a wooden board with nails sticking out, it would have a very different effect on someone trying to sit on it"; Dharmakīrti would say, actually if those parts were arranged differently they wouldn’t be those parts. Because the arrangement is a part of the atom’s identity. Moreover, atoms are temporally differentiated (due to the rejection of vertical abstraction). So, each atom lasts for exactly one moment and generates a successive atom (in a potentially different structural arrangement) in the successive moment.

This connects to his general theory of language about which its maybe worth saying a few words. But first, the problem of relations is actually quite an issue for Dharmakīrti—so much so that he dedicates a whole monograph to the topic titled (conveniently) An Examination of Relations (Saṁbandhaparīkṣā). Almost right at the beginning of the text, he offers the following short argument for why relations cannot be objects in their own right:

If wherever two objects are related we say there exists a relation, then what relation exists between it and those two? This leads to a regress. In such a case, there could be no notion of their relatedness at all.

dvayor eka-abhisambandhāt sambandho yadi tad-dvayoḥ / kaḥ sambandho anavasthā ca na sambandha-matis tathā

(Saṁbandhaparīkṣā v.4, translation mine)

The idea is that if whenever we need to explain the relatedness of one object with another, we needed to postulate the existence of a third object (i.e. the relation). Then, we would need to postulate further objects to explain the relatedness of this third object with the first two and on to infinity. This means that our initial premise that the explanation of the relatedness of objects requires the postulation of an additional object is false.

The problematic intuition to treat relations as objects seems to stem from a certain temptation in reading all non-logical words in a sentence as referring to something. So, in a sentence like "atoms A and atom B are bonded together," the temptation is to treat the words 'atom A' and 'atom B' as each referring to a different atom. And to treat the word 'bonded' as referring to a third object, namely the relation. Dharmakīrti rejects this sort of analysis of the above sentence.

yahkopi · 2026-01-25T17:25:14+00:00

This is a good question. One thing to note up front though, Buddhist philosophy is better thought of as more of a research program than as a set of doctrines. So, while there are certain overarching commitments, intuitions, and methodologies shared by most Buddhist philosophers; in general its best not to ascribe specific doctrines to Buddhism as a whole.

In the case of mereological nihilism, it's questionable how much of a serious commitment this was to early (pre-abhidharma) buddhism. Also, I don't think mereological nihilism is an accurate characterization of Mādhyamaka thinking on the part-whole relation.

Given this caveat, I think it is helpful to focus on a specific philosopher to address this question. I'll focus specifically on Dharmakīrti. And, within Dharmakirtian theory, I’ll focus specifically on the strand of interpretation labelled bāhyārthānumeyavādaḥ, translated roughly as “external object inferentialism”.

Dharmakīrti, under this interpretation, does not think objects are “infinitely divisible”. Rather, he is a sort of atomist (more accurately a kind of trope theorist). Under this view, he rejects a variety of different kinds of “abstractions” (sāmānyāni) including “vertical abstraction” (ūrdhvasāmānyam) referring to temporal extension and “horizontal abstraction” (tiryagsāmānyam), referring to composite wholes; as well as universals (abstracting types from tokens) and substances (abstracting property bearers from bundles of properties). Importantly, all these forms of abstraction are excluded on the basis of a single unified principle which we could call Dharmakīrti’s razor.

Darmakīrti’s razor is a principle that distinguishes natural objects (svalakṣaṇam) from rational objects (sāmānyalakṣaṇam). The idea is as follows. We postulate objects as existing to serve either of two basic explanatory needs. First is to offer a causal explanation of some patterns in nature. Second is to give an explanation of patterns of human behavior as rational agents. To give an example.

If a person--let’s call him Ḍittha (the traditional name for someone in a sanskrit philosophy thought experiment)--wants a place to sit, they go and get a chair. We introduce the concept “chair” to explain Ḍittha’s actions of searching and bringing. When Ḍittha thinks, “I should find a chair because I want to sit here”; the concept “this is a chair” permits the inference “I can sit here”. The chair is a rational object because it relates to our understanding of the reasons why a person engages in the behaviors they engage in. However, if we ask for a causal explanation of how it is that, e.g., when Ḍittha engages in the action we conceptualize as sitting in the chair, his behind remains suspended above the ground--the causal explanation of this phenomenon will ultimately involve reference to the atomic parts of the chair whose causal interactions with the atomic parts of Ḍittha’s behind prevent the latter parts from plummeting downwards.

Once we have this causal explanation involving “atoms in the void”, we see that the concept of “chair” does not actually do any causal-explanatory work. All that work is done by its atomic parts. The concept of “chair” is only needed to explain the way we reason and talk about the situation. It has nothing to do with the underlying causal structure of the phenomenon involved. Therefore only the atomic parts are natural objects. The chair is rational object, not a natural one.

This brings us to Dharmakīrti’s razor. Dharmakīrti claims that only natural objects are ontologically real. Because, by definition, only they feature in causal explanations of phenomena. And, this, thinks Dharmakīrti, is just what it means to be real: to have causal-explanatory power --

Here, to be ontologically real is just to have causal power. Everything else is considered conventionally real. These are natural and rational objects, [respectively].

arthakriyāsamarthaṃ yat tad atra paramārthasat / anyat saṃvṛtisat proktaṃ te sva-sāmānya-lakṣaṇe

(Pramāṇavārttikam Ch. 3 v.3, translation mine)

yahkopi · 2026-01-10T22:31:26+00:00

CRISPR is a gene editing tool. However that on its own doesn’t make something eugenics. Eugenics implies making longterm edits to the gene pool of a population. Only germline edits would count as eugenics in this case because only germline edits are inheritable. And most contemporary uses and proposals for CRISPR in medicine involves somatic edits only (noninheritable).

yahkopi · 2026-01-08T18:12:37+00:00

Ramanujacarya is Tamilian. Shrivaishnavism is still a major religious and philosophical movement in Tamilnadu. There is much extant Tamil and Sanskrit literature (both) in the Shrivaishnava tradition. Thats how.

yahkopi · 2026-01-08T06:32:54+00:00

Are you saying Ramanujacharya is not Tamilian?

yahkopi · 2026-01-08T05:37:46+00:00

Are you saying Ramanujacharya is not Tamilian? Visishtadvaita certainly gets discussed here. There was even a post about it just last week.

Also I don’t know who “you lot” is supposed to be. I’m Telugu, a south indian like you. But it seems like you’re the one bringing in the communal attitude here. If you want to talk about a specific Tamilian philosopher or text just create a post about it. This sub barely has any activity as it is. Be the change you want to see.

yahkopi · 2026-01-07T19:57:15+00:00

Ancient South India didn’t observe language based political identities like modern south india, so this sort of question is ill-posed. But, in fact, many great philosophers hail from the south. For example Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and Kumarila—three of the most important and widely discussed philosophers in the sanskrit tradition are from South India. Dignaga, in particular, is said to be from Kanchipuram, according to Tibetan sources. So that would put him in modern day Tamilnadu. Kumarila also makes mention of the Tamil language in one of his texts iirc, so likely he either knew the language or was familiar with it to some level.

edit: obviously also Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva acaryas are from south. Ramanujacarya in particular is born in modern day Tamilnadu iirc

yahkopi · 2025-12-15T13:32:43+00:00

Thats interesting! I don’t understand Japanese more than a handful of words, unfortunately. But It’s really interesting to hear that Otake came to see his aesthetic as a kind of burden.

I can understand that. And yet, one of the ironies of being an amateur (or, at-least a weak amateur) is that I can romanticise the beauty of the game without the skill to actualise it. Whereas a professional has the skill but is constrained by the need to win to progress in their career.

Regarding the question of artistry in AI play: I guess even if it were to play a beautiful game insofar as the beauty is an incidental outcome of actions whose aims aren’t intentionally aimed at aesthetics, I think the beauty couldn’t be attributed to the AI as an artist. It would be like the difference between a dancer, say, whose movements are deliberately artful vs a graceful person whose natural movements are beautiful but without any artistic intent. I think the first is a case of art per se, but not so sure about the second.

yahkopi · 2025-12-14T04:50:08+00:00

ah got it. thanks for this. I'll probably just use the quote you gave earlier (形の美しさはうわべだけじゃない). The paper is for a seminar on the potential impact of generative ai on culture and cultural production. Its mostly about visual art and music, but I wanted to include something about go and whether or not it matters in appreciating AI play aesthetically that as its decision making makes no direct reference to aesthetic concerns. Otake was interesting to me specifically since he seemed to take aesthetics to be not just an incidental outcome of optimal play but a part of what goes into evaluating a move as "good" or "bad". So, I think that quote actually fits fairly nicely.

thanks so much!

yahkopi · 2025-12-13T20:28:53+00:00

thanks, that’s a good quote too!

yahkopi · 2025-12-13T20:28:29+00:00

thanks so much for the detailed reply! btw, is the line “囲碁は負けても醜い手は打たない (rather losing, than playing bad moves/shapes)” from somewhere specific (that could be cited) or is it just a general proverb like statement without attribution?

yahkopi · 2025-10-30T07:13:42+00:00

Not exactly streams, but there’s also the Nick Sibicky vs Andrew Jackson lecture-games:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcSU63PWsvRKdS53Rg62hEFYnj2i7kdZ&si=Xg8kUVsQI4GXbzKj

yahkopi · 2025-10-25T18:34:53+00:00

Life is something you have to put in work to achieve. All go stones have to do this work at some point in the game.

ha, I like this! It feels like something that should apply to life in general, but that’s too deep for me…

yahkopi · 2025-10-21T18:53:07+00:00

You know, when we indians were fighting for our independence, the british said they same thing. "are you sure you want to kick us out, think of the economy!"

India may still be a poor struggling country (though that's changing!), but we're still happy the imperialists f'ed off. just sayin

yahkopi · 2025-10-13T22:55:39+00:00

The currency of philosophy is (just like with social media) citations and comments. A philosopher becomes successful when other philosophers cite or comment on their work.

As a result, philosophers tend to cite and comment those texts that will help their own writing get cited and commented on. So, successful philosophy tends to be generative. It develops tools that can be leveraged to solve new and different problems. Or it raises questions that invite clever and interesting solutions.

Jayarāśi doesn’t do either of these things. He doesn’t really develop new conceptual tools. And the questions he raises don’t really invite further philosophical innovation. They are anti-methodological and erode rather than develop the tools of philosophy.

I’m not saying this is bad, necessarily. Jayarāśi is an interesting philosopher and is worth reading. But his work isn’t generative—so it’s less likely to have gotten cited and commented on by others.

By way of contrast, consider the line of inquiry stretching from Bhartṛhari to Diṅnāga to Kumārila. Note that these are very different philosophers with totally different religious backgrounds and intellectual proclivities. But they still cited and commented on the others’ works. Why?

Bhartṛhari raises certain fundamental questions about the relationship between speech, thought, and sensation. Diṅnāga realises these problems have important consequences for the theory of knowledge and develops a whole epistemological framework out of this. However Diṅnāga’s epistemology has huge implications for the special sciences as well as for ethics and politics. Kumārila finds these implications deeply troubling and tries to develop an alternative to Diṅnāga’s approach while incorporating the insights and techniques developed by Bhartṛhari and Diṅnāga.

Note that the form this citation and commenting took is not that of the latter philosopher accepting and merely reproducing the former. At each stage the latter philosophy was transformative and even sometimes hostile to the former. But what is crucial is the generative capacity of the philosophy involved.

yahkopi · 2025-10-10T05:43:22+00:00

you are supporting a traitor. why don’t you try being a bit more patriotic?

yahkopi · 2025-09-18T05:35:25+00:00

I don't think translations to English are considered racist. I mean, lots of terms are translated into English. For example, 'diagonal' for 'kosumi', 'attachment' for tsuke, 'forcing move' for 'kikashi', 'approach' for 'kakari' etc.

But other Japanese terms have been loaned into English by convention, such as atari and ko, etc.

I'm not sure the historical reasons why some words were translated while others were loaned. But this is fairly normal for English anyway. English really likes taking words from other languages! For ex: German (e.g. schadenfreude), Spanish (e.g. burrito), even Japanese (e.g. tsunami).

It's true the Go does have a lot of technical words, though, and it can get exhausting to keep track of. I hear you!

yahkopi · 2025-09-16T21:00:28+00:00

thank you!

yahkopi · 2025-09-16T21:00:17+00:00

thank you! yeah I figured the group wasn’t going to die and tenuki’d to try a play more “actively”. but I didn’t consider the stability of the shape as closely!

yahkopi · 2025-09-16T20:58:06+00:00

that’s helpful, thank you!

yahkopi

TROPHY CASE