A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about reincarnation, where I discussed the doctrine of karma. In that post, I argued that there is no clear way to tell whether the doctrine of karma is true in a metaphysical sense, but that it is nonetheless wholesome in an ethical sense because it impels us to care about strangers, and therefore to act better towards them.
But there is another way in which the doctrine can be interpreted, one that is undeniably true. Reflect, for a minute, that our actions, good or bad, shape the kind of person that we become in this life. If you make a habit of behaving kindly, that habit shapes you over time into a kinder person. If you make a habit of behaving callously, that habit shapes you over time into a more callous person. We all know this is true. Aristotle talks about the importance of habit in training for virtue. Plato spends most of Books 8 and 9 of the Republic talking about the very same effects. And we can see it in our own lives, and the lives of the people we know.
What does this have to do with karma? The word karma literally means "action, work, or deed." The doctrine of karma is, in essence, no more than a doctrine that the laws of cause and effect apply in the ethical sphere just as much as they do in the material world: the actual details of how these laws operate can be left vague or can change around depending on the author. But the effect that our actions have in shaping our character, as I described in the previous paragraph, is precisely a kind of causality in the ethical sphere. This means that it fits the basic requirements of the doctrine of karma; and because it is a phenomenon that we can all observe in this life, it requires no belief in any further lives beyond this one.
What's more, the action of these laws is pretty relentless. If you are a thief, you are punished by having to live your life as a thief: this means among other things that you start seeing other people inescapably as either predators or prey, which reduces or eliminates your ability to form solid friendships with them. And living a life without friendship is a heavy burden for anyone. For more horrible crimes, it's like I wrote in a post two years ago about the moral side of natural law:
As long as you are a human being, your inner nature will reject with disgust any attempt to violate the Good for Man. You can talk yourself out of it ... and if you do that then you probably won't listen to any of my arguments to the contrary. But some night, at 3:00 in the morning, you will find yourself huddled in a ball under your blankets keening softly to yourself, "Dear God what have I done?"
For what it is worth, when I started to look up the references for this post I stumbled across some early Hindu verses concerning karma that make exactly the point I've made here about the nature of karmic causality. Since karma is, after all, a Sanskrit word, maybe it is appropriate if I let these verses stand at the end.
Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
— from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th century BCE, as quoted in the Wikipedia article "Karma"
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