Welcome to the course ‘How to Live? What to Do? Five Ethical Dilemmas’ with John Peacock.
“When we think of ethics, we tend to think of it in terms of ethical theories and prescriptions; lists of the kinds of things we should or shouldn’t do. For the majority of people this is immediately a huge ‘turn off’. From school onward, haven’t we been told what was right and wrong in an incredibly moralising fashion? So, when we come to the Buddhist path probably the last thing we want to know about is ‘ethics’. Yet, at the very heart of that path and its practices is ethics, but not in the moralising way that we may have become familiar with in the course of our lives. If we think instead of ethics as about questions of ‘How we live?’ and ‘What we do?’ and not about prescriptive rules, then we enter the territory of the everyday dilemmas that we are all confronted with; dilemmas that have to be confronted with awareness.
This series of talks examines questions around five ethical dilemmas that we have to confront in modern life, not with a view to conclusively answering those questions, but more towards keeping them open in a way that guides our behaviour in the various contexts in which we find ourselves. We look at questions concerning the ethical nature of communication, ethical action in the political and social sphere, living a ‘good’ life when confronted with environmental catastrophe. In addition, we will look at the role of thought and rationality in ethical judgement, and the possibility of, and implications of, an ethics of not-self. Throughout we keep in view the practical questions of ‘How do we live?’ and “What do we do?’”
-John Peacock