This is Philosophy Bytes with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Monomer Chadr, Professor of Indian Philosophy at Oxford University, has been influenced by both Buddhist philosophers, such as the 4th to 5th century Indian thinker Varsabandu, and by the Oxford

philosopher Derek Parfit. Buddhists and Parfit both face a puzzle. They deny the existence

of an enduring self. But without a self, how can there be moral responsibility?

Monomachada, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you for inviting me, Nigel. It's a pleasure to be here.

The topic we're going to talk about today is responsibility without selves. There is a almost clichéed view about

Buddhism that at its heart, it has this view that we do not have ourselves. Could you just explain how that could possibly be so?

Because most of us go around most of the time feeling very much that we have selves or a self.

One popular understanding of the Buddhist view is that we don't have something like a metaphysical soul substance,

you know, very much like Descartes thought and even the

Hindus in the Indian tradition thought of the Atman as the soul substance which accounts

for identity over time. That's the thing that makes us the same thing over time. So what the

Buddhists want to say, they want to deny that there is an enduring self, in virtue of

which you are the same person over a lifetime and even perhaps beyond lifetimes. But I think their

critique of the self goes deeper. The argument that I have in mind was given by a fourth, fifth

century, Abidharma philosopher Vasubandu,

who questions not just the metaphysical soul substance, but also our intuitive conception of the

self, where we think of the self as the agent who acts, as the subject of experiences, and the person who bears responsibility. Vasubandhu

wants to give an account of all of those phenomena without a self. If I've understood this

correctly, at a metaphysical level, there's just flux. The self is a kind of illusion that is

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