moral conduct would survive critical reflection on the concepts of theistic
judgment and heavenly reward. Most have concluded that the benefits of
critical thinking about morality outweigh the risks, and that the possibility
of further development and refinement in the sphere of human morality
warrants energetic effort.
The primary reason that karma is a promising ethical concept for us
today is that it appears to propose a natural connection between a human
act and its appropriate consequence, or, in traditional terms, between sin
and suffering, virtue and reward. The connection requires no supernatural
intervention: we suffer or succeed because of the natural outcome of our actions
themselves, rather than through the subsequent intervention of divine
punishment or reward. Moral errors contain their own penalties as natural
consequences, and every virtue encompasses its own reward. Although some
dimensions of Western culture presuppose such an arrangement today, it is
instructive to recall that this kind of understanding wasn’t articulated in
the West until Rousseau in the eighteenth century.2
Throughout Asia, karma defines the ethical dimension of culture and
remains the key to understanding Buddhist morality. Karma is the teaching
that tells practitioners that it matters what they do throughout their
lives, and how they do it. It articulates a close relationship between what
one chooses to do and who or what that person becomes over time. The
extraordinary sophistication of this early concept should, in fact, be counted
as one of the most significant achievements of south Asian culture, and an
impressive gift to contemporary ethical thinking globally.
A number of scholars3 have claimed that one of the primary contributions
of Buddhism to Indian culture was that it “ethicized” an earlier pre-ethical
concept of karma in extending it beyond the sphere of religious ritual by
applying it not just to ritual behaviors that pleased the gods but to all good
acts.4
The domain of “all good acts” is, of course, the sphere of ethics as we
know it today, and the applicability of the concept of karma to this sphere
is the primary issue of this essay. The essay is based on the thesis that a
naturalistic concept of karma, inherent in the concept as articulated in the
many Buddhist versions of it, can and should be developed, and that with
further cultivation for the emerging context of contemporary global culture,
the concept of karma could constitute a major element in the ethical thinking
of the future. Doing that, however, requires critical thinking. This essay,
therefore, raises questions about four dimensions of the concept of karma as