Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: Freedom, Agency and Ethics for Mdhyamikas*

The problem of the Freedom of the Will appears to the modern Western sensibility as an obvious and natural problem, and is often taken to be one of those perennial philosophical questions that arises simply upon reflection. Nonetheless, the problem as we know it in the Western philosophical and religious tradition is in fact a very specific cultural and religious artifact. For this problem to arise at all, one needs to have a will, and a sense of the possibility of uncaused agent causation, as well as a thesis of causal determinism. Only with these three idea in place can one ask the question whether that will is subject to a universal determinism or is capable of causing acts without its own activity being caused. Of course once one poses that question, one can immediately perform the intellectual rope trick that makes philosophy possible, and ask not only whether the will is free in this sense, but also ascend to the question of whether the freedom of the will is or is not compatible with determinism, if so, how, and if not, whether one opts for the libertarian or determinist view. And of course this set of questions has engendered a massive literature in the West, remaining active topics of philosophical research to the present day. (See Pereboom 2009, Watson 2003, Kane 2005, Campbell et al. 2004 for surveys of these debates, and Meyers 2010 for a superb discussion of this meta-issue.) It is not, however, my purpose to survey that literature or to weigh in on any of these questions in this essay. * Thanks to Edwin Bryant John Connolly, Matthew Dasti, Dr Bronwyn Finnigan and Dr Karin Meyers for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. It is important to note that none of these problems have ever been raised in the Buddhis