Some of the stuff here is a little over my head every now and then, to be fair (it is aimed as people with engineering degrees after all), but it is a good break from a lot of the watered-down or hyped-up stuff the mainstream newspapers report on science articles. http://cen.acs.org/index.html

aldaily.com is a really good curated website that focuses on literature and intellectual correspondence. It puts out three articles a day - a book review, an in-depth article, and an essay, as well as bearing a long list of special links on the sidebar for respected sources of news and insight.

Being a South African news website, http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ might not be what all of you are looking for, but it has some of the world's best investigative journalism (something that seems to be evaporating the world over), and provides a good outside perspective on US politics, as well as well-written literature reviews and broad coverage of African goings-on. Just a really good paper.

I'm not sure what you are saying is fair - my argument was largely that ethics is a discipline which consists of using rational arguments to attempt to underpin all morality with simple logically consistent principles.

Buddhism is doctrinal, and so there is an inherent difference. Besides, what is being practiced is morality, not ethics - it is an expression of certain values, rather than an attempt to derive a single central principle from it. Most ethical disciplines in WP can be boiled down to single-focus principles - maximisation of happiness for the greatest number, rational self-interest, universalisability, etc.

Buddhism perhaps could be seen as a minimisation of suffering, but the structure of the texts don't work in quite the same way. It is not that there isn't an assumption of objectivity, but rather that it is more than that - it assumes universality, not mere 'objectivity' (which properly refers to commonly available perspective rather than universal or absolute truth, though the phrase 'objective truth' necessarily entails something which is true, and the truth of which is objectively available), and does not argue from abstracts like WP, but rather from resonant observations, such as the Buddha's journey where he encounters an old man, a sick man and a corpse. It is a very different approach, is all I'm saying.

I was not arguing against the idea of an objective framework - I have a very strong detestation of relativism. I was merely making a direct comparison between two isolated disciplines.

Ethics is 'objective morality' in the sense I speak of it - morality is just a set of normative behavioural judgments held commonly to a certain group or society, whereas ethics attempt to make these values commonly available for scrutiny by using universal metrics - reason and empathy.

Finally, mine was not a comparison between Western and Buddhist morality, it was a direct response to the topic of discussion, which was a comparison of the concept of ethics, and how it applies to the Western Philosophical tradition (which is a specific thing, different from practiced social values, and actually rather ivory-towery if I'm being honest) and Buddhism (which as a doctrine, can be assessed in the WP tradition as if it were another theory) respectively.

Having taken a few classes in philosophy, I can tell you, it is far different from just reading and comparing opinions, although there certainly is a lot of that. There is a lot of rather anal attention to syllogistic argument and the construction of useful conceptual definitions, consistency of semantics, etc. The late 19th and 20th century saw it formulate universal rules for logic and codify them into mathematical formulae. So it leans with a good deal of heft on a priori reasoning, logic, rational discussion, structure, and so on. Often it gets very nitpicky, mainly because all premises must be justified.

You'll notice a lot of people talking in terms of 'but here you assume xyz', or speaking of logical fallacies, unsupported premises, etc. That's the imprint of WP. Not western culture, which is a different thing, but rather Western Philosophy, which has its roots in the Elenchus, Socrates's teaching method, which consists mainly of eliciting more and more foundational explanations from the interlocuter until a contradiction is revealed. Plato's Republic is full of examples of this in practice.

Socrates's whole method was formed in response to the dogmatic and doctrinal teachings of what were called Sophists, and were essentially private tutors with their own curricula, and own ideas of what made for a good man and the good life, etc. Socrates changed the focus to truth for truth's sake, so that learning was no longer an instrumental activity, but a good in itself.

Of course, these are all crude reductions, but this isn't an academic article. Anyways, I don't think there are 'apples and oranges' comparisons. Those are only the case if you haven't narrowed your parameters sufficiently. I mean, if someone assked me 'are apples or oranges better', it would be meaningless, but if 'better' meant 'a more viable farming option', that is certainly an answerable question, we just look at soil conditions, planting time, time to maturity, output, market price projections, labour intensivity, etc.

Same here - I think the question is narrow enough - how does the WP concept of ethics apply to Buddhism? My answer is 'weakly', basically.

Becoming enlightened frees you from the eternal cycle of suffering and rebirth on earth, essentially. It's where things start getting metaphysical.

But it's difficult to deal with Buddhism as a whole in the WP tradition, unless we directly and exclusively address the Sutras (which is not what I have been doing here), and even then, extracting arguments is not as straightforward as would be for a WP text.

I think it is quite interesting to note the difference in focus -

In Western Philosophy (WP), ethics is, if I may frame it really crudely, an attempt to create a cohesive picture of an objectively preferable morality (morality being distinct as the set of preferences of a particular culture or society). So many different philosophers have their own models and spent centuries disagreeing, I think mainly because the focus of WP is on the pursuit of truth, and what arises out of this is a sense that transcendent truth is largely inaccessible, and so all texts must rely on thorough reasoning to escape the muddiness of common ideas. As such, it is not common to find WPs who advocate a full 'recipe' for ethical character, except perhaps, for the Stoics, whose focus is much on practically applicability, which is not the grand focus of WP, which as said above, is precisely an epistemic exercise.

Buddhism, as a doctrine rather than discipline, can advocate a set of behaviours and regard them as instrumental to something higher. WP has slowly abandoned spirituality because it is not something which can be examined with reason, and this puts a ceiling on the kinds of things you can do. It means that one is forced to justify everything one says, and fully expect to be contradicted. Religious disciplines, on the other hand, can rely on charismatic language to persuade.

That said, Buddhism does not rely as much on charismatic language and persuasion as other doctrines. Nor does it rely on myths or fables, rather on what is a very philosophical reflective process. It seems almost obvious once it has been said, that we will all die, we will all suffer. Stoics felt a similar need to remind us, and both had the idea that this perspective would make us better people - treat ourselves and others better, by realising that we have nothing to gain from anger or selfishness. In fact, this being part of the idea that coming to see the world as it is will be liberating, goes beyond the explicit statements of many WPs, who often take it as read that knowledge is a good in itself, and with understanding, we will all just sort of know what to do with it. Buddhism seeing enlightnment as instrumental to something in particular - transcendance - I think is an important difference.

Overall though, there is an emphasis on discipline rather than inquest. The answer has been reached, we just have to follow it. This is the fundamental difference as far as I can tell. Which is why there is no term for 'ethics' in the writings - there is no need to examine or formulate or criticise, the answer is assumed to be reached. Not a terrible answer, but for good or ill, certainly lacking in challenge.