Breaking Sila
Hi all,
I don’t mean to ask overly analytical/philosophical questions but I had an experience that gives this a degree of personal relevance that I’ve been having trouble with.
A hypothetical: there is a country in which doing a particular trivial action - say stepping on the grass - is punished by death. A man steps on the grass accidentally and is brought to court. He is asked: ‘did you step on the grass?’ He says no to avoid the death penalty. Is he morally justified in breaking sila here, given the absurdity of the relationship between truthfulness and consequence?
My own experience: in my freshman year of college some years ago, I wrote the word ‘poon’ on a whiteboard and was charged by my RA for sexual harrassment, which led to a deans hearing in which I denied having written it and the charge was immediately dropped. If I had admitted to it, and been found ‘guilty of sexual harrasment’, that would have affected my entire life until my dying day in the way people view me, regardless of the significance of the original action. I still quite guilty for my dishonesty in that hearing, as I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that I should fee the need to hide from others, and i’m confused as to what I should have done in that hearing to have retained my sense of morality, and to what extend it was breached by my saying - untruthfully - that I didn’t write the word. The hypothetical I shared above perhaps has blind spots in my interpretation of what I said in the hearing - it’s where my feeling of the situation rests now, and I’m completely open to the perspectives of others to grow my own.
With metta and thank you for your time.
[link] [comments]
from Buddhism https://ift.tt/2N79Cpb
Post a Comment