Christopher Gowans

The paper is a defense of the thesis that there are situations in which morally virtuous persons who are epistemic peers may disagree about what to do without either person being rationally required to change his or her judgment (a version of the Steadfast position in the epistemology of disagreement debate). The argument is based in part on similarities between decisions of virtuous agents and other practical decisions such as a baseball manager’s decision to change pitchers during a game. In both cases, the role and responsibilities of the person making the decision and the complexities of the decision favor the Steadfast position. At the end of the paper, the argument for this position is compared with discussions of traditional arguments against moral objectivity that are based onmoral disagreements, and it is suggested that they involve rather different considerations.

I argue that the Buddha did not discuss the free will and determinism problem because he only considered issues relating to overcoming suffering and his teaching about this did not raise the problem. As represented in the Nikāyas, the heart of his teaching was an empirically based account of the causes of suffering and how to modify these to end suffering. It was primarily a practical teaching about how to achieve this goal, more a craft knowledge than a philosophical theory of causality. Similarly, the no-self teaching was more about living selflessly than about developing a theoretical analysis of agency.