Date: 12 March 2024 (Tuesday)

Time: 19:00 - 21:00 (HKG Time GMT+8:00) (Please arrive 15 minutes before the talk for registration)

Venue: The Buddha-Dharma Centre of Hong Kong
28/F Pacific Plaza, 410 Des Voeux Road West, Hong Kong
(Close to HKU MTR Exit B2)

Organizer: The Buddha-Dharma Centre of Hong Kong

Speaker: Dr Oren Hanner

Dr Oren Hanner is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University in Abu Dhabi and Research Fellow at the Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, University of Hamburg. He works on the history of Indian and Buddhist philosophy, ethics and action theory, and cross-cultural philosophy. His current research interests include the meaning of life, collective agency, and justice in Buddhism.

Synopsis: Contemporary scholarship on Buddhist ethics, in particular works that are motivated by the vision of Engaged Buddhism, has made various attempts at reconstructing Buddhist answers to modern ethical problems. Some of these issues are collective and political in nature; for instance, how Buddhist teachings can inspire environmental activism or provide principles for a just society. The present talk will seek to introduce a theoretical foundation for Buddhist ethics in a social context by considering the question of shared responsibility; that is, the responsibility that individual agents bear for actions undertaken together with other individuals. This account of shared agency and responsibility will be reconstructed based on three vignettes from Vasubandhu’s work on action and its results in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics) and Vimśatikā (Twenty Verses) as well as insights from Buddhist narrative literature. After considering the motivations of Buddhist authors for contemplating the problem of shared agency and responsibility, I will present an analysis of the conditions required for shared actions according to Vasubandhu, linking them to his broader account of action, and propose that his theory offers Western debates on shared agency new perspectives on this issue, including a more elaborate notion of shared agency and an internalist standard of moral evaluation.

Language: English

Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/yC7dt43ZZr8A26Qw7

Mode: Online (ZOOM) / Onsite

Registration: https://forms.gle/FpnruCUz5QUk9QM98 (Onsite)
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvcO-oqDoiGtWQs1TSpMpf5uf4HLA... (Online)

YouTube replay: https://youtu.be/Y70yTMLrZNg

Enquiries: +852 2673 0001 / enquiries@buddha-dharma.org.hk (BDCHK)