Ueda’s Metaethics

This paper does two things: it discovers the latent metaethical view of Kyoto School philosopher, Ueda Shizuteru, through a reflection upon and development of Bret W. Davis’s commentary on Ueda, and, in the process, develops a novel metaethical view that can slot into the contemporary metaethical taxonomy. I call this view moral dialetheism. It says moral facts both exist and do not exist, and that moral judgments end up being both true and false, a true moral contradiction. I argue that this is in fact Ueda’s latent metaethical view. This paper thus contributes to a growing literature aiming to discover the implied metaethics of figures in the Mahāyāna and Madhyamaka Buddhist ethical tradition like Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, and Śāntideva. Ueda’s moral dialetheism, as developed through his Zen-inspired non-mysticism, is noted for not only its theoretical novelty, but for its therapeutic benefits.