 Though this passage gives us strong reasons to accept that Śāntideva is committed to assigning impartial benevolence a central role in how we should live and behave toward others, a number of scholars have questioned whether we have enough evidence to interpret him as a utilitarian (e.g., Harris 2015). And as Michael Barnhart and others have argued, even if Śāntideva himself actually was a utilitarian, it does not follow that such a view can be attributed to the Buddhist tradition as a whole (Barnhart 2012, 19).