Euthyphros dilemma...

[Angrboda]

I didn't say I believed in it. I just said it's a religious morality that can't be duplicated by secular means. I don't believe in Karma.

Would poetic justice count as secular karma?
[/wondering]

What has been written on karma in the traditions of India and East Asia could fill libraries.

The conception of karma differs in different traditions. Buddhist ideas about karma are very different from traditional Hindu ideas of karma, and there are other major splits (the Jaina envision karma in the traditional Astika Hindu way, but they emphasize not doing harm [creating bad karma] to an extreme degree; the notions of karma in the Buddhist traditions of East Asia tend to differ from the earlier traditions of the early Buddhist traditions and Indian Sramana [a set of heterodox movements within India reacting against the Brahimic traditions of Vedic / Puranic Hinduism; Buddhism, Jainism, and the Lokayata / Carvaka are examples of such]; and there are atheist, secular Buddhists who might agree that karma is just nature causing one hand to wash the other).

Obviously, with that much diversity, there are few hard and fast rules, but I'd say the most common core doctrines to qualify as being karma includes:
1) It is caused by actions, words, or thoughts;
2) there is good karma, which yields rewards, and bad karma, which yields punishments; [If you think about this, it becomes somewhat circular, as in: being a bad person / entity [leads to] > doing bad acts and acting without virtue [leads to] > bad karma [leads to] > rebirth as a worse person [leads to] > even more bad acts and less virtuous conduct [leads to] > more bad karma, etcetera, etcetera...]
3) karma is inescapable; it's a law of nature - the effects of bad karma cannot be avoided;
4) rebirth occurs, and karma is carried over from past lives;
5) the goal is liberation from the cycle of rebirth by building up enough virtue and good karma.

In traditional Hinduism, there's an additional element being that souls / entities / beings are eternal; [they have been being reborn infinite times, and so there are no new souls being created, just the recycling of old souls; some traditions see time as a circle, some as cycles initiated and ended by the gods, and others just an infinite past with no end]


So, with that in mind, the reframing of karma as just "poetic justice" or "you reap what you sow" tends to back away from some of the core religious and metaphysical components of traditional Asian views of karma. [India is in Asia, remember.]

Some argue that the Buddha, Siddhartha, was agnostic about the existence of karma and rebirth, but to my mind, his philosophy doesn't make sense without these core components that I suggest above. In a number of the old canons [different strains of Buddhism have different sets of "core documents" or canon, usually numbering about 1,000-3,000 texts], the Buddha is reputed to have given elaborate lectures on the practical effects of karma in the here and now [the sutta or sutras], and it's hard to believe he was really that "agnostic" about the metaphysics of karma if he spent such care in describing its effects. (Remember, the Buddhist conception of karma, and the Hindu conception of it, differ in important ways in terms of the metaphysics involved, but the practical result is almost indistinguishable from the point of view of what philosophies or life guides flow from the two conceptions.)