The seminar for this year is in comparative philosophy. I aim to bring some of the primary insights of classical Chinese philosophy to Anglophone contemporary moral philosophy. Three overarching themes structure the content of the seminar.
First, the Confucians Mencius (Mengzi) and Xunzi form much of the base of a rich tradition of The thought on moral psychology, especially on innate and cultural factors in the development of moral agency. A core theme in Mencius’ theory of moral development is the extension of innate feeling impulses and intuitions such as compassion and a sense of right and wrong. Xunzi, by contrast, claims that moral concepts and norms were invented to control the destructive impulses of human nature. My goal in this part of the book would be to explain how the dialectic between Mencius and Xunzi contributes to a plausible view of moral development that acknowledges the way that cultural norms can enter into and interact with native impulses, resulting in the constitution of moral agency. Special attention will be paid to the role of feeling and its relation to perception and judgment, and how this relationship changes with moral development. Readings will come from Mencius and Xunzi, but also from contemporary philosophical and scientific writing on the concept of the innate and the interaction between genetic inheritance and the environment.
Second, the early Chinese thinkers recognized the relational nature of human identity. By “relational nature” I mean that many of the traits that constitute someone as a particular person are patterns of thought, feeling and action activated by certain situations (this relationality will be discussed with respect to recent challenges in philosophy and psychology to the notion that people have stable characters). Much of the thrust of this challenge is to claim that, contrary to Western folk notions of character traits that are stable across a great variety of different situations, who we are depends on who and what relates to us. In Confucianism, the activating situations are social roles and relationships to particular others, while in Daoism, they are more often the nonhuman parts of nature. The Confucian theme is consistent with recent work in psychology and also can support the feasibility and desirability of a kind of autonomy that is constructively different from Kantian notions of independence from the causal nexus. The Daoist relational theme suggests an approach to environmental ethics that is different from either the conservationist approach that seeks to protect nature because it serves human interests or the preservationist approach that seeks to protect nature independently of human interests. The Daoist theme draws our attention to the ways in which nature does or should shape human identity and interests. It suggests how a relationship with nature enables human beings to discover new interests and not just serve the ones they already have. This theme that leads to an illumination of a kind of creativity stimulated by “rambling” through nature.
Third, Mencius and Zhuangzi take seriously the difficulties of balancing and reconciling values when they come into conflict. In the Mencius, we find a model for dealing with conflicts that relies on learning from the actions of wise persons in the past. We learn by constructing analogies between their situations and our current problems. Mencius offers a useful alternative to the principle-based approaches that have reigned in modern moral philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other hand to particularist approaches that too often lapse into the portrayal of moral judgment making as emerging from the black box of brute intuition. The Zhuangzi’s response to the difficulties of moral and normative judgment is surprising: on the one hand it appears to advocate engagement with a particular way of life that includes the aforementioned relatedness to nature; on the other hand, we are urged to take a skeptical stance towards ways of life that have settled into firm conviction, especially ways purporting to be the comprehensive truth. I argue that this combination of stances is not only coherent but also compelling as a way for us to deal with our need to be engaged in a way of life while recognizing our epistemic limitations in coping with the complexity and diversity of value. This duality is one instance of several dualities in the Zhuangzi between engagement and detachment. Another duality is that we are attached to particular others who occupy special places in our lives while knowing how vulnerable these connections make us to the pain of inevitable loss. The Zhuangzi has important things to say about coping with such dualities.
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