Research

Doctoral Thesis

Thesis Title: ‘Ignorance and Ethics in Stoic and Madhyamaka Philosophy’

Thesis Supervisors: Prof Simon Shogry (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford), Prof Jan Westerhoff (Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford)

When assessing and trying to improve our behaviour, we often find a tension between imagining ourselves as acting freely and acknowledging the underlying factors that influence our actions. My doctoral research brings together Graeco-Roman Stoic and Indian Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, in order to understand and resolve this apparent tension. Both of these traditions, I argue, agree that there is something misguided about focusing on directly changing our actions. Instead, we must address the root cause of unethical behaviour: ignorance.

My thesis has roughly two parts, one focusing on philosophy of action and one on ignorance, with a final chapter drawing both parts together. I begin by showing that neither the Stoics nor Mādhyamikas hold that action is the result of an agent’s completely free and unconstrained choice in the moment. For the Stoics, I argue in Chapter 1, action is the result of an agent’s judgement that a particular action is the appropriate one to perform. That judgment, however, is entirely determined by our pre-existing beliefs. Hence, if we want to change our behaviour, we must change the underlying beliefs that give rise to it. 

The Mādhyamikas, as I demonstrate in Chapter 2, have an even more radical conception of action, which sees actions as caused by a collection of impersonal conditions. The the existence of a separate agent, over and above these conditions, who intends or chooses how to act is thereby rendered superfluous. Accordingly, Mādhyamikas seek to reframe our approach to ethical progress, moving away from a model of individual agents intending to act better towards one of identifying and attending to the underlying causes of unethical behaviour, the most fundamental of which is ignorance. 

For both the Mādhyamikas and Stoics, the main cause of unethical behaviour thus turns out to be ignorance. Crucially, however, our ignorance does not concern merely ‘moral’ matters. Chapter 3 of my thesis proposes a novel interpretation of Stoicism, according to which our widespread misapprehension of the good is, in fact, rooted in a more fundamental ignorance about our nature as human beings. Similarly, I argue in chapter 4, Mādhyamikas, too, hold that most of us are ignorant or deluded about the nature of the self and eliminating this false belief is central to their ethical programme. 

My thesis concludes by arguing that both Stoics and Mādhyamikas regard our beliefs as having ethical consequences: they are, above all, what determines how we act. Accordingly, the central task of ethics is the acquisition of correct knowledge, from which correct action automatically follows. Philosophy, for these ancient thinkers, thus leads to ethical progress not merely by giving us reasons to act in one way or another, but by more fundamentally eliminating the ignorance that causes unethical behaviour in the first place.