From the mailbag of Salon answerman Cary Tennis:

Dear Cary,

I work for a biotech research company focused on developing pharmaceutical treatments for neurological diseases. I’m also a lay Buddhist who believes in the principle of right livelihood (i.e., work that brings true benefit to oneself and/or others). While I’m proud of working to develop treatments that could ease suffering for many people, I am also troubled by the enormous amount of material waste and animal experimentation needed to conduct this research…

Thus my dilemma: Do the ends justify the means? … Any thoughts on how I can clear my conscience or if I should change my livelihood?

Thanks,

Burdened Biologist

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Dear Burdened Biologist …

Do you have responsibility for the killing, and does the good done by your proximity to the killing outweigh the bad? These are questions that I think you show yourself capable of entertaining.

How does one go about auditing one’s own work to see in what ways it accords with one’s ethical and spiritual path? Well, as I said, I do not know much about Buddhism, but it seems to me there are a couple of common-sense ways. One, the analytical or deliberative way, would be to examine the degree of responsibility you have for the proscribed actions engaged in by your company.

On one end of the scale would be, I suppose, if you yourself thought up and executed the procedures that result in the deaths of animals. On the other end would be if you were the person who swept up the floor of the lab where the animals were killed, or, at an even further remove, if you simply were a bricklayer who laid some bricks in the building where the animals were later killed. Somewhere on that scale, define your actual involvement. Then you might continue at your job but gradually move away from those actions that are most objectionable.

For instance, when it is time to consider a promotion or new project, look at it in that light. At the same time, identify those areas of your work that are most welcome in the world, most helpful, and try to move closer to those kinds of actions. If jobs at your company should open up that are more in tune with your beliefs, give them special consideration…

We must all live in the world we are born into and try to find our way. My own sense of it is that we are trying to live in harmony with the world but we cannot merely try to be in harmony with the pleasing aspects of the world, the “natural” world, the flowers and trees and fuzzy little bears. The world means the world of factories and slaughterhouses and electrical generation plants and oil refineries as well: It is all our world. If you attempt to be in harmony only with those aspects of the world that you deem worthy of your harmonious regard, if you are too doctrinaire, you may find yourself blind to ways in which you can expand your harmonious participation in the world’s many complicated wonders.

It is all the world: The asphalt and the juniper tree, the slaughterhouse and the bubbling brook. Harmony, it seems to me, means harmony with all of it. That means harmony with disharmony. That means harmony with evil. That means loving your enemy. Embrace it all. Move slowly toward the light — or toward nothingness, as you please!