Category Archives: Ethical Theory

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I’m going to excerpt here a bit from an essay of mine that is currently unpublished, part of a volume that will eventually wend its way through the review process and see the light of day.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 →

ISCP at AAR Conference in Chicago (11/17/2012)

The International Society for Chinese Philosophy has an Ethics and Chinese Thought panel session at the American Academy of Religion meetings in Chicago. From Eric Nelson (U. Mass. Lowell):

The International Society for Chinese Philosophy panel at the American Academy of Religion is scheduled for November 17th, Saturday from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the South Building, Room S106b at the McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago, IL
M17-202
International Society for Chinese Philosophy
Theme: Ethics and Chinese Thought
Saturday, 1:00 PM–4:00 PM
MPS-106B
Chair: Michael Paradiso-Michau (North Central College)

  1. Jinli He (Trinity University), Qing Ethics: An Alternative Thinking?
  2. Rafal Banka (Jagiellonian University), Philosophy of Action in Confucian Ethics
  3. Leah Kalmanson (Drake University), Now I Get It!: Thinking Slowly about Sudden Enlightenment for Ethics Today
  4. Eric S. Nelson (University of Massachusetts, Lowell), Killing the Buddha: Chan Buddhism and Antinomian Ethics

Role ethics as virtue ethics?

In case you are not tired of thinking about the issues raised by Henry Rosemont’s and Roger Ames’s defense of “role ethics,” I’d like to offer one more perspective on the matter. Rosemont and Ames see Confucian role ethics as a full-scale replacement to the current moral theories on offer, which in their writings seem to be consequentialism, Kantian deontology, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. As Bill Haines suggested in a comment to a previous post on this subject, some readers of Aristotle find the version of Aristotle that is rejected by Rosemont and Ames to be a caricature, but I am going to set that issue to the side and look at the possible value of recasting the ideas and values driving Confucian role ethics as a version of a broad notion of virtue ethics. Continue reading →

Role Ethics and Criticism

In a previous post, I sketched the two major premises on which Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont rely in their argument that we should attribute “Confucian role ethics” to the Analects and other early Confucian texts. Here, I’d like to consider one potential objection to Confucian role ethics, both as a plausible moral theory in its own right, and as a theory that fits with the texts. The Analects clearly sees the need for critical evaluation of the ways that roles are inhabited by particular people. Does “Confucian role ethics” provide adequate critical purchase for such assessment? Continue reading →