Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319765389
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Ethicality of Curricularising Mindfulness

I now want to bring out into the open a dilemma that has been lurking in the background of this chapter. While there is complementarity between radical humanist ethics, which promotes emancipatory social transformation, and spillover from educational uses of mindfulness meditation, it is more coincidental than deliberate. Mindfulness teaching can be done with the goal of emotionally equipping young people to challenge neoliberal capitalism, and perhaps some teachers do have this in mind, but the influence of psychological discourse on teaching practice means that other motives are likely to take precedence. After all, challenging oppression is not the rationale that empirical psychology typically provides for teaching mindfulness. As a result, just like the wellness syndrome-derived vaccination effect, the spillover effect is an unintended consequence of school-based mindfulness training. Does mindfulness training’s intended good outcome (better emotional self-regulation) and unintended good—derivative, second-order—emancipatory outcome outweigh its unintended bad outcome (namely, ideological subordination to the wellness syndrome)? This section goes down some different ethical pathways to see where an answer might be found.

Some further questions are in order. For a positive effect of mindfulness training to be deemed morally justifiable, must it be intended? More precisely, when a good outcome and a bad outcome are possible effects of an action, must the good outcome have been intended? When making moral judgements about the outcomes of teaching mindfulness, are the intentions of educational policymakers and teachers relevant? From a consequentialist standpoint, they are not. For the consequentialist, irrespective of whether they emphasise preferences or rules, what matters are outcomes (Malik, 2014, ch. 12). In consequentialist terms the intentions of the teacher, as a moral agent, are immaterial. As we have seen, by teaching mindfulness in the classroom, a teacher can inadvertently provide schoolchildren with an emotional skill set that aligns with radical humanist ethics, thereby priming them to change society somewhere down the line. Under consequentialism, if social transformation is deemed a desirable outcome, the teacher’s actions are morally permissible, even though the teacher did not intend the good they caused. Whether the actions are morally praiseworthy is another matter.

Utilitarian consequentialism weighs positive outcomes against negative outcomes. (For the hard-line preference utilitarian variant, see Singer, 2011.) If the positive outcomes of mindfulness training outweigh the negative outcomes and are better than the alternatives, such as not providing this training at all, the action can be considered good. Even if we can predict what the consequences of teaching mindfulness meditation might be, using this chapter as a guide, balancing the ledger is a difficult exercise not least because of the lengthy time period required for an assessment of the emancipatory effect of mindfulness training. The latter is a long-run effect, whereas the (positive) emotional self-regulation effect and (negative) wellness syndrome’s effect are more immediate. Trying to combine long-run and short-run effects in a utilitarian calculus would entail constructing an exceedingly complex matrix of outcomes. Something like that is well beyond the scope of this discussion.

In any case, I think it

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