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Tom Welsh's avatar

"Great thinkers of the past have reacted in different ways to different questions, which implies that absolute truth about any important issue is actually not possible".

While your argument is sensible up to a point, I think you miss a vital distinction: between facts and values.

As far as facts are concerned, absolute truth exists in principle and we can get arbitrarily close to it (asymptotically close, in mathematical terms) depending solely on the quantity and quality of evidence.

But as far as values are concerned, there can be no truth, absolute or otherwise, because values are essentially matters of opinion. Is cheese delicious? Is exercise enjoyable? Is it good to get drunk? Should you requite good for evil, or good for good and evil for evil? Is it proper for two or more people of the same sex to perform sexual acts together, or to get married? Which is more important: for every citizen to have a say in government, or for government to be as fair and benevolent as possible? And so on indefinitely.

Of course there is usually a consensus about such questions. But there can be no "right" or "wrong". Jesus Christ preached one set of ethics; the fictional Dr Hannibal Lecter lives by another; the Nazis, the ancient Spartans, and Machiavelli all had ethics that most people nowadays would find distressing. People may find it convenient to team up with others who share similar ethics. But only foolish prigs imagine that their own codes of morality have any objective justification.

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CCG's avatar

I think on the subject of objective truths Buddhism has the edge.

2,500 years ago, someone (who tradition calls the Buddha) formulated the so-called four Noble Truths (he borrowed a formula from Indian medicine): dukkha (dissatisfaction with existence), the origin of dukkha, the way to the cessation of dukkha and the state beyond dukkha.

Next to this, the origin of dukkha was said to originate in the impermanence and insubstantiality of phenomena. Nothing else much was formulated in the way of the nature of reality.

After this, the whole Buddhist endeavour is about the practice of the way to the cessation of dukkha. You’re basically left to realise the truth of these basic tenets in your own mind, which is basically what reveals the world to us (or even originates it!).

Buddhism avoids speculation and focus instead on the appreciation of that minority of conditions that can be readily perceived, while keeping in mind the existence of infinity of conditions and impossibility of knowing all of them. All this is underpinned by the sense of all beings sharing the same essential nature, which naturally express itself in compassion. In comparison to this way of seeing the world western philosophy can come across as speculative, overly rational and blind to simple realities. My penny’s worth.

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