By my lights, there are interesting connections between these various candidate
interpretations of“emptiness.”I claim that notreallyexisting implies not being a
substance and not having an essence in the strict sense. (The latter will be discussed
in section 9.2.) However, if something is a being by courtesy, it is not an illusion that
it exists. And itmighthave an intrinsic nature in some sense, though it certainly does
not have a fundamental intrinsic nature. (It might be part of one’s intrinsic nature
that one lacks a fundamental intrinsic nature.) However, it might be that ifeverything
is a being by courtesy, then nothing has a fundamental intrinsic nature; see Turner
(2011) for an argument that ontological nihilism understood as the view that nothing
really exists implies a kind of holism. Finally, I take it that if something exists merely
conventionally—that is, it exists in virtue of our conventions—then it is a being by
courtesy, although the converse needn’t hold. Nāgārjuna interpretation isveryhard
and I am not prepared to defend here an interpretation on which he holds that nothing
reallyexists—but from my amateurish readings, such an interpretation looks tempting,
and given the interesting connections between being-by-courtesy (emptiness?) and
non-substantiality, lack of essence, and so forth, this interpretation stands posed to
make sense of a lot of the positive data for its apparent competitors.^53 A big part of
assessing this involves determining how much ofNāgārjuna’s interpretation ofBuddhist
normative theory and its accompanying practice is either really justified by or requires
understanding emptiness as conventional existence rather than being-by-courtesy.^54
If there must be some fully real things, which things are they? Perhaps the entities
of our most fundamental scientific theories are good candidates. But what aboutus?
It is a Moorean fact that I have hands, that is, that my hands exist. But are there
Moorean facts about themode of existencehad by hands? Perhaps it is a Moorean fact
that my hands do notsubsist—this is the mode of being had byabstracta—but it is
not a Moorean fact that my hands are not mere beings by courtesy. Similarly, we can
grant that“I think, therefore I am”is a certainty, while denying that“I think,
therefore I am a genuine being rather than a being by courtesy”is certain. That
I might be a mere being by courtesy is especially disturbing. Our own ontological
status is the focus of chapter 6. Unfortunately, we willfind in that chapter nothing to
conclusively calm our disquiet.
We have seen that there are interesting metaphysical questions about being-by-
courtesy. Mapping the realm of being-by-courtesy is apt to be a fruitful project. In this
respect, I once again side with Suárez (2005), who thought that one of the tasks of
metaphysics is to classify various kinds of beings of reason under different headings.^55
(^53) It might be that“emptiness”has no precise translation, and at best what I have a suggested is a good
philosophical model in the sense of McDaniel (forthcoming-a). 54
Interestingly, if being empty just is being a being by courtesy, then we can see whybeing emptyis itself
empty. As will be discussed in section 5.7, plausibly beings by courtesy enjoy no perfectly natural
properties. If being empty were non-empty (if it were a real property), then empty things would enjoy it. 55
Perhaps to fully complete this task, we must further distinguish between ways of being a being-by-
courtesy. For example, Stein (2002: 121–5) discusses the mode of being of privations, but holds that it