Category Archives: Ethical Theory

ToC: Asian Philosophy 23.3

A new issue of Asian Philosophy 23.3 (2013) has been published. Five out of the six papers are on Chinese Philosophy:

Moral Emotions, Awareness, and Spiritual Freedom in the Thought of Zhu Xi (1130–1200)
Kai Marchal

Dōgen and Wittgenstein: Transcending Language through Ethical Practice
Laura Specker Sullivan

Han Fei’s Enlightened Ruler
Alejandro Bárcenas

Han Fei, De, Welfare
Henrique Schneider

Clearing Up Obstructions: An Image Schema Approach to the Concept of ‘Datong’  in Chapter 6 of the Zhuangzi
C. Lynne Hong

Relation-Centred Ethics in Confucius and Aquinas
Qi Zhao

New Book: Ethics Unbound: Chinese and Western Perspectives on Morality

ethics-unboundEthics Unbound: Chinese and Western Perspectives on Morality, by Katrin Froese

Chinese University Press
May 2013‧229 x 152 mm‧264 pages
ISBN 978-962-996-496-2‧Hardcover‧US$49

About the Book
This book closely examines texts from Chinese and Western traditions that hold up ethics as the inviolable ground of human existence, as well as those that regard ethics with suspicion. The negative notion of morality contends that because ethics cannot be divorced from questions of belonging and identity, there is a danger that it can be nudged into the domain of the unethical, since ethical virtues can become properties to be possessed with which the recognition of others is solicited. Ethics thus fosters the very egoism it hopes to transcend, and risks excluding the unfamiliar and the stranger. The author argues inspirationally that the unethical underbelly of ethics must be recognized in order to ensure that it remains vibrant.

About the Author
KATRIN FROESE is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Daoist Thought: Crossing Paths In-Between (2006) and Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic Morality (2002).

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New Book: Springer, Communicating Moral Concern

cmc My Wesleyan University colleague Elise Springer’s new book, Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness (MIT Press, 2013) has just been published, and I’d like to recommend it to all blog readers with interests in comparative ethics, especially if you are tempted by the idea that the job of moral philosophers — and indeed, our jobs as moral agents — are not exhausted by making determinations of what the “right action” is. Her view is that such “verdicts” have at most a small place in our daily efforts to live good lives, and this rich and fascinating book explores the rest of the terrain. In the words of one of my teachers:

“This book is simply spectacular. I am stunned by its originality, intellectual sophistication, philosophical maturity, and depth of vision. I learned new things from virtually every page. Philosophers have a huge bias in favor of examining already articulated judgments, and thereby ignore the incredibly difficult and important work of developing an articulation of what is the matter. Elise Springer persuasively argues that this work deserves sustained attention in its own right, and offers new conceptual tools for making sense of what we are doing at that stage.” — Elizabeth Anderson, John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan

As if that wasn’t enough, in a few places Elise explicitly engages with Confucian ideas, and in general is very open to a broadly global scope of philosophical endeavor. I myself find a great deal of continuity between her work and current work at the nexus of Confucianism, moral psychology, moral education/cultivation, and virtue ethics, though I also find some of her key ideas very challenging to certain Confucian pieties. Finally, while it is only available in hardcover right now, at Amazon the price is only a little over US$30.00 :-).

Call for Commentators-ACPA at APA Eastern 2013

MOVED TO TOP WITH THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE:

We still need commentators, and please let me know if you are interested.  Dr. Kim’s and Mr. Lu’s papers already have commentators (and there are three other commentators who are not set on any particular paper yet).  Thanks!

– Tongdong Bai (baitongdong@gmail.com)

ACPA Group Meeting at the APA Eastern Convention
December 27-30, 2013, at the Marriott Waterfront, Baltimore

 

Session 1: Moral Cultivation and Moral Agency in Confucianism and Western Philosophy
1. Mental Blindness and Moral Rectitude: The jiebi chapter of the Xunzi

David Chai, University of Toronto, Canada, david.chai@utoronto.ca

Abstract: The idea of being figuratively blind is a well-used trope in early Confucian thought. Confucius referred to blindness of virtue while Mencius to blindness of the senses and speech. For Xunzi, blindness stems from a person having ‘two minds,’ that is, one’s mind is caught between two principles or goals of moral conduct. Xunzi’s solution, like Guanzi’s theory of ‘mental arts’ (xinshu 心術), was to engage in ‘singular concentration’ (jing 精). Through a close hermeneutic reading of chapter 21 of the Xunzi (jiebi 解蔽, “Removing Blindness”), this paper will examine Xunzi’s use of jing and how cultivating one’s mental essence by adhering to Dao can result in overcoming mental blindness. It will also look at one of the more interesting metaphors Xunzi uses, that of brightness (ming 明). Moral brightness is a quality every person should strive for in that it reflects the perfect virtue of Dao. For Xunzi, using ming to nurture jing is not enough to cure a person completely of their mental blindness however; they must endeavor to replicate the mind of Dao. How they do this is through studying the principle of men’s minds as Xunzi so clearly illustrates: “Sageliness consists in a comprehensive grasp of the natural relationships between men. True kingship consists in a comprehensive grasp of the regulations for government. A comprehensive grasp of both is sufficient to become the ridgepole for the world.” (Xunzi, 21.9)

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Against Empathy

The following article in this week’s New Yorker by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has been circulating in social networks:

The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy

Despite what many of us on this blog might initially wonder, the title of the paper does not refer to Mencius’s famous thought experiment.  (Instead, it refers to the famous case of an actual child in a well that led to a worldwide media circus in the 1980s.)  Nonetheless, the article may be of interest to those of us working in Confucian ethics and moral psychology.

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Moral Exemplars and Moral Connoisseurs

A number of scholars in our field have suggested that the model of connoisseurship is helpful in understanding Confucian moral education and the nature of the Confucian moral exemplar (the junzi or sage). Eric Hutton’s “Moral Connoisseurship in the Mengzi” (in Liu and Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, 2002) is a classic essay; more recently, Hagop Sarkissian (“Confucius and the Effortless Life of Virtue,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 27:1 [2010]) and P.J. Ivanhoe (“McDowell, WANG Yangming, and Mengzi’s Contributions to Understanding Moral Perception,” Dao [2011]) have also developed related ideas.

I’m going to excerpt here a bit from an essay of mine that is currently unpublished, part of a volume that will eventually wend its way through the review process and see the light of day. My concern in the essay is to further develop some comparisons between Neo-Confucians and contemporary psychological literature that I began in Sagehood and continued in “A Productive Dialogue? Contemporary Moral Education and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Ethics,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy (2011). In particular, I refine the idea of “active moral perception” introduced in Sagehood, and as part of that process, find myself arguing against the idea that moral exemplars are best understood as people who have honed their sensitivities to moral reasons or moral properties in a connoisseur-like way. My target here is not, at least explicitly, the interpretations of Kongzi and Menzi suggested in the essays cited above, but rather to argue that a common-sense idea (supported by recent psychological research) of what moral exemplars are like, and what they do, actually fits very well with key elements of Wang Yangming’s picture. I’d love feedback!

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Virtue Ethics and Confucianism Book Inches Toward Publication


VE&C_cover

I am happy to report that the book that Michael Slote and I have been editing, Virtue Ethics and Confucianism, will see the light of day before too many more months pass. Routledge now has a webpage for the book which includes its cover, table of contents, and so on, and it can even be pre-ordered. For those of you who are neither independently wealthy nor buyers for academic libraries (i.e., virtually anyone reading this), please be assured that a more reasonably-priced paperback edition will be forthcoming in a couple more years.

 

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Confucian ethics March 22 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes ANDREW LAMBERT,  Department of Philosophy, Wester New England University

With responses from Warren Frisina, Dean of Honors College, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on March 22, 2013 at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

A Confucian Account of Ethical Obligation?

ABSTRACT: The Confucian doctrine of the five cardinal relationships is often taken as a defining feature of the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on family life and relationships. However, objections arising from more modern ethical ideals threaten to undermine the doctrine, or at least render it irrelevant to contemporary ethics. I present three such objections.

In seeking to deflect the objections, I suggest a different way of understanding the purpose and effects of the five relationships doctrine. Instead of seeing the doctrine as a constellation of concrete practical norms and duties pertaining to individuals occupying certain social roles and positions, I suggest we understand the five relationships doctrine as a kind of training device, which cultivates a certain kind of personal sensibility. This is a sense of obligation to engage with and find a basis for familiarity with those people encountered in the subject’s local social world.

I argue that when understood in this way, the discourse of the five cardinal relationships is not subject to the three common objections noted above, and presents a distinctive form of ethical obligation.

I finish by locating this account of ethical obligation within a larger moral vision, thereby suggesting this is a genuine form of ethical obligation rather than mere etiquette or psychological conditioning.

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Columbia Lecture on Buddhist Metaphysics and Ethics

UPDATE: Today’s Columbia Seminar on Comparative Philosophy meeting, with Jonathan C. Gold and Robert Wright, is CANCELLED due to blizzard forecasts in New York City.  We are planning to reschedule for NEXT Friday, February 15.  Full details to follow.

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes, JONATHAN C. GOLD (Princeton University)

Please join us at Columbia University’ Department of Religion on February 8, 2013 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled,

Accepting the Conditions: “The Ethical Implications of Vasubandhu’s Buddhist Causal Theory”

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The Daoist Nazi Problem

I am pleased to present a guest-post from Donald Sturgeon. Donald is a PhD candidate in philosophy at HKU and founder, editor, programmer, and general man-behind-the-curtain of the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), an extremely useful online etext database with which many blog readers are familiar, I’m sure. Donald reports that according to Google Analytics, over the last 30 days the site has exceeded 1 million page views and 100,000 unique visitors! Please address all comments to Donald.

The Daoist Nazi Problem

Donald Sturgeon

Suppose there is a person, or a group of people, committed to practicing what we can for convenience call a “Nazi Dao”: a Dao that, though practically successful from the perspective of its followers, involves commitment to some abhorrent practices that all “right-minded people” would condemn as exemplary immoral acts that should be universally condemned – “killing innocent babies for fun”, for example.

What can a Zhuangist – someone committed to a relativist position about differing practices and the nature of their justification, questioning of conventionally accepted values, and skeptical about certain kinds of knowledge – say about such a Dao? Can he condemn it? Is it a “bad” Dao, and if so in what sense? Or is it just as good a Dao as any other? Continue reading →