Front. Philos. China 2015, 10(2): 315–321 DOI 10.3868/s030-004-015-0024-5

   

BOOK REVIEW

Yang Xiao and Yong Huang (ed.). Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014, 283pp., ISBN: 9781438450957. This edited volume contains critical analyses as well as defense of David Wong’s philosophy, particularly the moral relativism developed in his book, Natural Moralities 1 . As we all know, Wong’s relativism is not a conventional or anarchistic relativism that rejects any rational or common foundation of morality. Rather, his is a refined form of relativism or naturalistic pluralism that supports diverse and sustainable value systems in different cultures and societies. Wong does not focus on defending conventional or cultural relativism where every moral system is equally acceptable. Instead, he specifies and delineates a form of relativism that can be justified and defended as naturally viable moral systems. To do that, he investigates natural foundations (biological, psychological, and social conditions) of morality. According to him, a set of universally valid criteria (UVC) constrain the possible scope of justifiable and sustainable moral systems. These criteria are natural constraints of morality, i.e., they are not derived from speculative metaphysics or a priori principles of morality but from well-observed biological, psychological, and social conditions of human life and flourishing. By analyzing the basic conditions of morality and their constraining yet constructive features, Wong argues that a set of universally valid criteria of morality limits the possible forms of true moral systems and that there exist different but equally legitimate ways of fulfilling these conditions in diverse social and cultural environments. This book does a wonderful job of presenting and providing critical analyses of Wong’s moral relativism. The editors’ (Yang Xiao and Yong Huang’s) introduction is very helpful. It summarizes Wong’s relativism and overviews major issues (criticisms and debates) discussed in this book. The chapters (chapters two to seven) are lined up with designated topics and aspects of Wong’s philosophy that are analyzed and evaluated by well-regarded philosophers from analytic schools of Western philosophy and schools of Chinese comparative philosophy in a style that is clear and argumentative. Critical arguments in these chapters are responded to by Wong’s careful discussion and defense in chapters eight through thirteen. The book is simply a wonderful collection of papers with all the great features (critical analysis, explanation, defense, etc.) one can expect                                                               1   Wong, David. 2006. Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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from books with this particular style (i.e., “X and his/her critics”) of academic publication. For example, Christopher Gowans’ analysis (in chapter five) of Wong’s function thesis (i.e., different moralities have the function of promoting social cooperation) and his discussion of its normative/descriptive nature in comparison with Rawls’ reflective equilibrium are responded to by Wong’s clarification and explanation in chapter eleven. In addition to intellectually stimulating arguments and analyses, this book provides a fine example of how comparative philosophy can be done in highly developed and technical areas of philosophy. Most comparative works in Chinese philosophy focus on classical Chinese philosophers and link them to equally classical Western philosophers (or vice versa). In many comparative writings, one can easily see such comparative pairs as Confucius/Aristotle, Mencius/Hume, Xunzi/Hobbes, and Zhuangzi/Nietzsche, but this tried-and-true approach does not exhaust the way comparative philosophy is done. I think the editors, Yang Xiao and Yong Huang, made a good choice in starting a new approach wherein being “Chinese” is not necessarily being “outdated” or being “irrelevant” to the current development of academic or professional philosophy. The scope and depth of the book clearly demonstrates that Chinese philosophy can contribute meaningfully and substantially to current debates on moral relativism. I appreciate the editors’ effort to take this unbeaten but important path and sincerely hope that because of books like this more and more philosophy departments in universities across America and Europe can accommodate and integrate the comparative approach as a genuine mode of doing philosophy, even in highly specialized areas such as metaethics and moral psychology. In what follows, instead of reviewing and analyzing all the chapters in the volume, which would be another book-length discussion of Wong’s philosophy, I will discuss two arguments (presented and developed in two chapters) and show how comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives can help us to understand and perhaps even support Wong’s relativism. In the second chapter (“Human Morality, Naturalism, and Accommodation”), Lawrence Blum argues that the morally loaded notion of human being should be included in Wong’s universally constraining conditions of morality. This normative notion of human being, as Blum points out, is a very important and foundational element of what we think of as the moral significance of being a human person. For example, in the second article of the declaration of universal human rights, one can see this ideally normative and universal notion of human being: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which

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a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.” (“Everyone,” in his article, refers to a human being who is not relevantly characterized by natural, social, and cultural distinctions but by moral characteristics, i.e., abstract, universal, and normative characteristics of an agent who carries inherent values and deserves certain treatment.) Translated in this way, what this article says is: “simply because” we are human beings (not because we belong to certain groups of individuals and carrying certain identities), we are entitled to have universal human rights. Without this morally specific notion of human being, we lose an important ground to treat each other as inherently valuable agents. For this reason, Blum says that the starting point of morality should be humanity (the normative notion of human being) itself (39). But Wong’s naturalistic approach to morality does not require this normative and idealistic notion of human being as a universal constraint of true morality because a moral system, from Wong’s viewpoint, is not something that is imposed upon us by an a priori or prescribed means (such as practical reason or moral intuition). Rather, it is constructed and evolves in a group-based environment where the morally loaded notion of human being, that includes both in-group and out-group members, is not necessarily available or operative. Because of this limited nature of moral evolution or construction, Blum argues that “the naturalistic approach deprives us of some of the most fundamental moral resources with which our moral thinking provides us” (40). Wong’s response to this critical argument is clear. He rejects the idea that all adequately functioning moralities must contain the universal and morally loaded notion of human being. As far as a morality promotes and sustains social cooperation, it does not have to include the normative and ideally universal notion of human being (184−85). For Wong, it is only a local, not a universal, condition for true morality. The major difference between Wong and Blum is the way they understand the notion of humanity in relation to a true morality. For Blum it is a guiding, overriding, and constitutive element of a true morality. It is what a true morality should include. But, for Wong, it is something that may develop gradually by expanding the scope of one’s moral horizon in one’s interaction with people in other groups. I don’t disagree with Blum that the normative notion of the human being is a critical element of morality we have today but may not have been available or necessary to people who lived in other historical periods or social environments. According to Wong’s naturalistic and constructivist approach, our moral values and principles are constructed by us in particular historical, social, and cultural environments to serve personal and inter-personal needs. This is not a surprise to anyone who understands how our moral norms and concepts are conditioned and shaped by historical events and social movements. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that the universal and morally loaded

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notion of human being did not exist in a primitive hunter-gatherer society (or the environment of evolutionary adaptation of human species) but only arose later, from group-based social environments. Perhaps the same is true of 18th century (ordinary) Europeans. If they say “all men are equal” what do they mean? Does “men” include slaves and foreigners, let alone women? If they say “we have to respect others as human beings” what does “others” mean or include? The universal notion of the human being does not seem to exist in early Confucianism either. This absence seems to be derived from the peculiar moral orientation of Confucianism. Unlike the morally loaded and universally acclaimed notion of “human being” or “everyone” in the universal declaration of human rights, a Confucian human being rarely exists simply as a human being. A Confucian agent is always a person with specific relational roles, i.e., father/mother, son/daughter, brother/sister, friend, student/teacher, and emperor/subject. From the perspective of Confucian moral tradition, therefore, it is strange, if not impossible, to treat another person simply as an individual human being independently of particular roles or relations he or she is serving. One can witness this type of role/group-based morality or moral parochialism in several passages of the Analects. Foreign tribes or barbarians are described as unrefined or petty people (Analects 9.14) and women and servants are regarded as moral inferiors (Analects 17.25). People with different political or moral viewpoints are referred to as birds and beasts, with whom Confucius does not want to associate (Analects 18.6). One may find these passages disturbing because they seem to show that universal and normative notion of human being is inherently lacking in Confucian moral tradition. Some scholars even characterize Confucianism as a role or group-based morality. But this group centered particularism does not close itself permanently against a morally laden and universal notion of the human being. In fact, Confucianism is a quite resilient and accommodative system of morality as one can witness in recent debates on Confucian democracy and human rights. In some passages of the Analects, one may find some degree of universality. Politeness, respect, loyalty, and trustworthiness can be accepted and respected even by barbaric tribes or people in foreign countries (Analects 13.19, 15.6). These passages do not by themselves show that Confucianism is a fully open and universal moral system, but they reflect, perhaps indirectly, that Confucianism, even with its role- or group-based moral orientation, respects some elements of moral universality. Mencius comes close to a universal foundation and broad extension of morality. He seems to have a notion of human being (ren, 人) that is, I think, very close to the universal and normative notion of human being. When he discusses the four beginnings of the moral mind (Mencius 2A6), he declares that individuals who are not affected and challenged by the suffering of innocent victims are not even human. I think this notion of human being is a morally

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specific one that refers to “any human individual” with the moral mind who feels, behaves, and should be treated in certain ways. But it is important to note that Mencius’s is not an a priori moral notion of human being that can be imposed upon any system of morality. According to Mencius, human being refers to a moral agent who has a moral potential that should be developed and extended. That is, morality is intrinsically tied to constructive potential and a process of learning. In the sixth chapter (“The Metaphysics and Semantics of Moral Relativism”), Paul Bloomfield and Daniel Massey discuss whether Wong’s relativism can be interpreted as a form of moral realism. One of the reasons they discuss to support their realist interpretation is that Wong’s moral constraints can be understood as a universal and objective foundation of morality. They say that “the two functions of morality in combination with known facts about humans generate a number of constraints that allow Wong to restrict the content of moralities in a way that forecloses on radical differences. Some constraints are universal. Any morality must meet them. All adequate moralities are moralities that meet the sort of constraints discussed above” (139). Although this is not an entirely wrong interpretation of Wong’s relativism, it can mischaracterize Wong’s pluralism. There are two different naturalistic approaches to morality. One is the constitutional approach where a morality is understood as a system of values with constituting elements that can be shared with other moral systems. Different moralities can be explained by different combinations of or different priorities given to common constituting elements. The constitutional approach is comparable to one of Chomsky’s theories of universal grammar. According to Chomsky2 and Chomsky and Lasnik3, diverse grammatical structures of human languages originate from or are explained by underlying universal foundation and language-specific parametric modifications. Even though all human languages share common linguistic (syntactic) principles and elements, they function as different languages because these universal principles and elements are differentially calibrated to serve particular needs or decisions of linguistic communities. Following this general framework of explanation, Marc Hauser explains our moral intuition (intuitive moral judgments often observed in our responses to moral dilemmas) in terms of innate and universal moral principles.4 If the universal grammar (i.e., innate and universal                                                               2

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. 3 Chomsky, Noam and Lasnik, Howard. 1993. “Principles and Parameters Theory,” in Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, edited by J. Jacobs, A.S. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, and T. Vennemann, 506−569. Berlin: De Gruyter. 4   Hauser, Marc. 2006. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. New York, NY: Ecco.

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principles of syntax) exists in our language faculty, perhaps moral grammar (i.e., innate and universal principles of morality) may exist in the human mind. According to Hauser, different moral systems are different modifications of the same underlying moral principles. But this is not the way Wong explains the diversity and radical incompatibility of moral systems. In contrast to the constitutional approach, Wong’s is a constraint approach where different moralities satisfy a common set of universal constraints but don’t have to share the same set of common characteristics. The constraint approach can be explained through the analogy of a door. A door with a particular shape and a size can block certain objects from passing through, but, within this general constraint, various objects can pass through and there is no reason to believe there could be a successful generalization concerning what sort of things can pass through this door. This constraint model is different from the constitutional model where moralities that are true, adequate, and functional have some substantial similarity because they all consist of the same set of elements even though these elements are differently combined and modified in different moral systems. It is not, therefore, accurate to say that, in Wong’s pluralistic relativism, different moralities are different manifestations or combinations of common moral values. Nor is it right, as Bloomfield and Massey contend, to say that Wong with his universal constraints can “restrict the content of moralities in a way that forecloses on radical differences” (139). Different moral systems, of course, can share similar moral values and norms because they satisfy the same set of constraints, but they can be deeply incompatible with each other because they are not constituted out of the same set of foundational moral elements. Perhaps an analogy from science may help us to understand how two moral systems, even though they are constrained by the same set of conditions, can at the same time be radically incompatible with each other. According to chaos theory (non-linear dynamics), changes of complex natural events are hard to predict, not because they are random or uncaused, but because their contextsensitive causal complexity does not allow one to calculate their future paths accurately and promptly. That is, two similar physical systems following the same deterministic laws of nature can evolve into entirely different systems if they develop chaos-prone complexity that is sensitive to whatever differences they have or have to deal with. It is, therefore, often stated that even the flapping of a small butterfly’s wing in Hong Kong can create a major hurricane in the United States. What this type of sensitivity and unpredictability demonstrates is that a concrete process of development and environmental contingencies can seriously affect the resulting conditions of a physical system. Likewise, moral systems can behave like chaos systems. Even though two moralities are constrained by the same set of principles, they can form entirely different and

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deeply incompatible moralities due to whatever differences they have in their continuous processes of construction and development. Additionally, self-replicating or self-organizing processes of a chaos system where a result of its action affects its own structure can be another helpful analogy in understanding the dynamic self-transformative and diversifying changes of moral systems. I think that Wong’s pluralistic relativism can be understood clearly from the perspective of chaos theory. Like seemingly random processes of a chaos system, constructive and diversifying processes of a moral system are greatly dependent upon and sensitive to concrete historical and social environments. Even though two moral systems share or satisfy a common set constraints or principles, they can grow into very different or even incompatible systems. Therefore, the existence of irresolvable differences among moral systems is entirely compatible with their common moral constraints. As Zhuangzi’s story of an emperor named Hundun (渾沌, “chaos”) shows (Zhuangzi, ch. 7), it is impossible to eliminate completely the unpredictable, nontransparent, and diversifying nature of things. Hundun died when two other emperors tried to change him by boring holes in his body (i.e., to make him a fully identifiable being, an ordinary person with openings in the body). But, because they could not restrict the nature of Hundun, Hundun simply died. Likewise, even though universally valid criteria limit the possible scope of true moralities, they do not completely rule out the possibility of radical incompatibility or diversifying tendencies among different moralities. To conclude, Moral Relativism and Chinese philosophy: David Wong and His Critics is a wonderful book about Wong’s moral relativism. It is also an excellent book about the many things Chinese philosophy can offer to current debates about moral relativism and naturalistic pluralism. As Mencius, Zhuangzi, and other Chinese philosophers enlighten us and Wong articulates nicely, true moralities come out of non-arbitrary conditions of human being yet allow multiple paths of human flourishing. Extension of one’s moral horizon, accommodation of foreign moral systems and openness to incompatible moralities, therefore, are important characteristics of a true and actively evolving moral system.

Bongrae Seok ( ) Alvernia University E-mail: [email protected]