At Flapping Mouths”, there’s a discussion of “eyes-open vs. eyes-closed” question that always arises when meditators from various traditions get together.
BTW, the anecdote/koan that gives FM its name is worth repeating in its entirety:
Four Zen monks were meditating in a monastery. All of a sudden the prayer flag on the roof started flapping. The younger monk came out of his meditation and said: “Flag is flapping” A more experienced monk said: “Wind is flapping” A third monk who had been there for more than 20 years said: “Mind is flapping.” The fourth monk who was the eldest said, visibly annoyed: “Mouths are flapping!”
Bet this AP story will attract some attention from bloggers. The gist is that, according to a recent study at Baylor U., “10.8 percent of Americans have no ties to a congregation, denomination or faith group. Previous surveys had put that figure at 14 percent.” I hope that in these kinds of surveys there’s a category for those of us who consider ourselves agnostics or atheists on the question of God, yet are affiliated with a “congregation or denomination.”
In a post entitled “Eastern Intuitions about Framing the Innocent,” guest blogger Brad Cokelet at The Splintered Mind discusses precisely the kind of problem that more Western moral philosophers should be thinking about:
Consider this stock problem case for Utilitarians: if a judge frames an innocent person and has him killed in order to placate a violent mob, he will produce better overall results than if he refuses to do so.
Assuming the Utilitarian thinks we should choose to do whatever maximizes utility, he has to bite the bullet and condone the framing. . . . To avoid condoning framing the innocent, many Utilitarians adopt forms of indirect Utilitarianism. . . . On this view, then, all reasonable people share the intuition that framing the innocent is an injustice and therefore wrong. But is that true?
In a forthcoming paper . . . John Doris and Alexandra Plakias raise doubts about that very claim by citing empirical evidence that the anti-framing intuition is a parochial artifact of Western culture. More specifically, they appeal to a study (which is forthcoming) that contrasts the intuitions of, “Americans of predominantly European descent and Chinese living in the People’s Republic of China,†and suggests that people in China are more likely to have pro-framing intuitions. Doris and Plakias suggest that the variability of intuitions (if it exists) is evidence for a surprising conclusion: the intuition that framing an innocent is unjust and wrong is something about which reasonable people can disagree.
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