Chris Fraser

In this essay, I inquire into the attitudes and conduct toward other agents that go hand in hand with the admirable individual life, as depicted in the Zhuāngzǐ. How do agents adept in a Zhuangist approach to dào handle interpersonal relations? I suggest that on a broadly Zhuangist understanding, interpersonal ethics is simply a special case of competence or adroitness in applying dé (power, agency) and following dào (ways). The general ideal of exemplary activity is to employ our dé to find a fitting, free-flowing dào by which to navigate through contingent, changing circumstances. Interpersonal ethics is an application of this ideal to cases in which other agents and our relations with them are prominent features of our circumstances. The ethics of interacting with others is thus not a distinct subject area in Zhuangist discourse but one application of more general views about dào, dé, and exemplary activity. Instead of wandering the way on our own, interactions with others present us with situations in which we must find our way together. An important consequence of the Zhuangist approach is that discussions of our conduct toward others are not framed in terms of doing what is morally right or permissible. Instead, judgments as to whether some course of action is morally right or wrong are supplanted by judgments about the quality of our activity as a performance of dào—whether it is adept or clumsy, free-flowing or obstructed, in accordance with the situation or at odds with it. This signal feature of Zhuangist ethical discourse makes it challenging to situate it with respect to more familiar ethical views. Although I will suggest the Zhuangist approach overlaps in certain respects with recent moral particularism, I argue that most likely it is distinct from, and amounts to a rejection of, nearly all familiar normative ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and contractualism.

Chris Fraser presents a rich and broad-ranging study of the culminating period of classical Chinese philosophy, the third century BC. He offers novel and informative perspectives on Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism, and other movements in early Chinese thought while also delving into neglected texts such as the Guanzi, Lu's Annals, and the Zhuangzi 'outer' chapters, restoring them to their prominent place in the history of philosophy. Fraser organizes the history of Chinese thought topically, devoting separate chapters to metaphysics and metaethics, political philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of language and logic. Focused specifically on the last century of the Warring States era, arguably the most vibrant, diverse period of philosophical discourse in Chinese history, the discussion covers the shared concerns, rival doctrines, and competing criticisms presented in third-century BC sources. Fraser explicates the distinctive issues, conceptual frameworks, and background assumptions of classical Chinese thought. He aims to introduce the philosophical discourse of early China to a broad audience, including readers with no prior familiarity with the material. At the same time, the thematic treatment and incisive interpretations of individual texts will be of interest to students and specialists in the field.

This essay argues that the third-century BC Ruist “masters” text Xúnzǐ presents a sophisticated approach to semantics and epistemology in which a concern with truth is at best secondary, not central. Xúnzǐ’s primary concern is with identifying and applying the apt dào (way), which for him is a more fundamental concept that underwrites and explains truth claims. Dào refers to a way or path of personal and social conduct, covering prudential, esthetic, ethical, and political concerns. Xúnzǐ is primarily concerned with whether utterances, along with actions, policies, and social practices, are correct in conforming to dào—specifically, the dào of “good order” (zhì)—rather than whether they are correct in being true. Insofar as he is concerned with truth, he regards the status of assertions as true or not as derivative from their status as following dào or not. A consequence is that for Xúnzǐ questions of value and culture are more basic than questions of truth.

The Zhuangzi rejects the use of invariant general norms to guide action, instead stressing the importance of contextual factors in determining the apt course to take in particular situations. This stance might seem to present a variety of moral particularism, the view that general norms play no fundamental role in moral thought and judgment. I argue against interpreting the Zhuangzi as committed to particularism and thus denying that dao rests on, is shaped by, or comprises general patterns or norms. Instead, I contend, the text presents a combination of contextualism about the factors that determine appropriate responses to particular situations and pluralism about defeasible general norms or standards. The target of criticism is not generalism, the view that general patterns and relations play a role in determining and explaining appropriate courses of action. It is the monolithic application of fixed norms without regard for context.

How does skill relate to dào 道, the ethically apt path and its performance? Two early Chinese ‘masters’ anthologies that make prominent use of craft metaphors imply profoundly contrasting answers to this question. For the Mòzǐ 墨子, a key to following dào is to set forth explicit models or standards for guiding and checking performance. By learning to consistently apply the right standards, we can develop the skill needed to follow the dào of the sage-kings reliably, just as a carpenter uses a set square to produce square corners or a wheelwright uses a wing compass to fashion round wheels. Following dào—and thus the ethical life—is strongly analogous to the performance of skills. Like an artisan’s craft, dào has a fixed end that can be explicitly articulated. A sharply contrasting stance is implied by the renowned skill exemplar Páo Dīng the butcher in the Zhuāngzǐ 莊子. Praised for how his every movement in carving up cattle is perfectly attuned, yielding a display of skill matching that of an exquisite dance or musical performance, the butcher responds that what he actually cares about is dào, which is ‘advanced beyond skill’. Intriguingly, most of what Páo Dīng says in explaining this point pertains to how he developed his craft, performs his work, and overcomes new challenges. The implication is that the process of acquiring, performing, and extending skills exemplifies dào, yet there is something more to dào than skill. What is this something more? A skill is the ability to competently perform a task with a specified end. In the Zhuāngzǐ, a key difference between skill and dào, I will suggest, is that dào is unlike skill in having no fixed, predetermined ends. Dào is a general, open-ended process, one that is continually shifting and transforming. We can never fully master dào, nor even know exactly where it will lead, as the nature of dào is such that we must regularly find creative ways of extending it as we proceed along it.

Knowledge is an achievement manifesting a type of competence, akin in important respects to a skill. Accordingly, epistemic judgment is an exercise of agency. Ernest Sosa’s work has elaborated these and related insights into a meticulous, persuasive version of a virtue epistemology. Given the framing assumptions of mid-twentieth century Anglo-American epistemology, developing a competence-centered explanation of judgment, knowledge, and justification required brilliant critical and creative thought. So it is intriguing and perhaps instructive to consider how some of Sosa’s views relate to the outlook of early Chinese thinkers, for whom the idea of knowledge as a competent performance required no argument, being implicitly taken as an obvious, shared starting point. Here I will focus on Xúnzǐ 荀子, whose epistemological concerns in some respects dovetail with and in others complement Sosa’s. I will draw on concepts from Sosa’s framework to elucidate features of Xúnzǐ’s epistemology and in turn suggest how Xúnzǐ’s theoretical orientation might cast light on Sosa’s project. In particular, I will suggest that Sosa’s conception of full aptness helps to elucidate the significance of Xúnzǐ’s discussion of epistemic pitfalls, while Xúnzǐ’s treatment of the epistemic agent’s awareness of and commitment to norms of judgment helps to enrich Sosa’s view of epistemic agency.

In the Western philosophical tradition, the earliest recognized paradoxes are attributed to Zeno of Elea (ca. 490–430 B.C.E.) and to Eubulides of Miletus (fl. 4th century B.C.E.). In the Chinese tradition, the earliest and most well-known paradoxes are ascribed to figures associated with the “School of Names” (ming jia 名家), a diverse group of Warring States (479–221 B.C.E.) thinkers who shared an interest in language, logic, and metaphysics. Their investigations led some of these thinkers to propound puzzling, paradoxical statements such as “Today go to Yue but arrive yesterday,” “White horses are not horses,” and “Mountains and gorges are level.” Such paradoxes seem to have been intended to highlight fundamental features of reality or subtleties in semantic relations between words and things. Why were thinkers who advanced paradoxes categorized as a school of “names”? In ancient China, philosophical inquiry concerning language and logic focused on the use of “names” (ming 名, also terms, labels, or reputation) and their semantic relations to “stuff” (shi 實, also objects, features, events, or situations). Hence for classificatory purposes, second-century B.C.E. Han-dynasty archivists grouped together assorted pre-Han figures whose most prominent ideas seemed to concern the relation between names and stuff—or at least strange, unorthodox uses of names—and dubbed them a school or lineage (jia 家) devoted to the study of names. Unfortunately, both the label and the grouping are misleading. Historically, the school was a retrospective, taxonomical fiction. The figures classified under the “School of Names” never formed a distinct circle, movement, tradition, or line of influence devoted to any particular doctrine, theme, method, or way of life. Their intellectual interests overlapped at most only partly, while also overlapping extensively with those of texts associated with other schools or traditions, such as the Mohist “Dialectics” 墨辯, the Zhuangzi 莊子, the Xunzi 荀子, and the Annals of Lü Buwei 呂氏春秋. What perhaps does set the School of Names apart is that some (though not all) of the figures associated with it apparently delighted in propounding paradoxical or preposterous sayings, while the other texts just mentioned generally (though not exclusively) seek to explain and debunk such utterances.

The Mòzǐ is among the founding texts of the Chinese philosophical tradition, presenting China's earliest ethical, political, and logical theories. The collected works introduce concepts, assumptions, and issues that had a profound, lasting influence throughout the classical and early imperial eras. Mòzǐ and his followers developed the world's first ethical theory, and presented China's first account of the origin of political authority from a state of nature. They were prominent social activists whose moral and political reform movement sought to improve the welfare of the common people and eliminate elite extravagance and misuse of power. In this new translation, Chris Fraser focuses on the philosophical aspects of the writing and allows readers to truly enter the Mohists' world of thought. This abridged edition includes the essential political and social topics of concern to this vital movement. Informed by traditional and recent scholarship, the translation presents the Mohists' ideas and arguments clearly, precisely, and coherently, while accurately reflecting the meaning, terminology, and style of the original.

Mohism was an ancient Chinese philosophical movement founded in the fifth century B.C.E. by the charismatic artisan Mozi, or "Master Mo." The Mohists advanced a consequentialist ethics that anticipated Western utilitarianism by more than two thousand years and developed fascinating logical, epistemological, and political theories that set the terms of philosophical debate in China for generations. They were the earliest thinkers to outline a just war doctrine and to explain the origin of government from a state of nature. Their epistemology and psychology provide intriguing alternatives to contemporary Western mentalism. The Philosophy of the Mozi is an extensive study of Mohism that immerses readers in the Mohist worldview, situates the movement's rise and decline within Chinese history, and highlights its relevance to modern thought.

This essay applies John Searle’s account of weakness of will to explore the classical Chinese problem of weak-willed action. Searle’s discussion focuses on the shortcomings of the Western classical model of rationality in explaining weakness of will, so he naturally says little about the practical ethical problem of overcoming weak-willed action, the focus of the relevant Chinese texts. Yet his theory of action, specifically his notion of the Background, suggests a compelling approach to the practical issue, one that converges with a plausible account of the classical Chinese conception of agency. On this approach, the practical problem is due to weaknesses of the self in carrying out intentions. The key to overcoming the problem lies not in restructuring the agent’s affective states, as suggested by prominent interpreters of Chinese thought such as David Nivison, but in strengthening the agent’s Background capacities, much as we do when mastering new skills.

The ethics of the Zhuāngzi is distinctive for its valorization of psychological qualities such as open-mindedness, adaptability, and tolerance. The paper discusses how these qualities and their consequences for morality and politics relate to the text’s views onskepticism and value. Chad Hansen has argued that Zhuangist ethical views are motivated by skepticism about our ability to know a privileged scheme of action-guiding distinctions, which in turn is grounded in a form of relativism about such distinctions. Against this, Icontend that the Zhuāngzi’s skepticism and its ethical stance jointly rest on a metaethical view of value as inherently plural, perspectival, heterogeneous, and contingent. This view provides grounds for moral consideration toward others and for political liberalism. It also explains how the psychological qualities valorized in the Zhuāngzi contribute to the value of our individual lives, by showing what their absence costs us.

This essay examines the theory of ritual propriety presented in the Xúnzǐ and criticisms of Xunzi-like views found in the classical Daoist anthology Zhuāngzǐ. To highlight the respects in which the Zhuāngzǐ can be read as posing a critical response to a Xunzian view of ritual propriety, the essay juxtaposes the two texts' views of language, since Xunzi's theory of ritual propriety is intertwined with his theory of language. I argue that a Zhuangist critique of the presuppositions of Xunzi's stance on language also undermines his stance on ritual propriety. Xunzi contends that state promulgation of anelaborate code of ritual propriety is a key to good social order (zhi) and that state regulation of language is a key to smooth communication and thus also good order. The Zhuāngzǐ provides grounds for doubting both contentions. Claiming that ritual propriety causally produces social order is analogous to claiming that grammar causally produces smooth linguistic communication, when in fact it is more likely our ability to communicate that allows us to develop shared rules of grammar. Humans have fundamental social and communicative capacities that undergird our abilities to speak a language or engage in shared ritual performances. It is these more fundamental capacities, not their manifestation in a particular system of grammar or ritual norms, that provide the root explanation of our ability to communicate or to live together harmoniously. The Xunzi-Zhuangzi dialectic suggests that ritual is indispensable, but normatively justified rituals will be less rigid, less comprehensive, less fastidious, and more spontaneous than a Xunzian theorist would allow

This provocative work is the most ambitious general study of pre-Qin thought to appear in more than a decade. It deals with what is increasingly recognized as one of the period's key themes, the ethical ideal of perfected action and the processes of cultivation, or uncultivation, by which it might be achieved. The book has two specific aims, one substantive, one methodological (p. vii). The substantive aim is to show that the notion of wu-wei, which Slingerland renders as "effortless action," functioned as a shared ideal and problematic for both Daoists and Confucians and that internal tensions in this ideal motivated much of the development of Warring States thought (p. 5). The methodological aim is to illustrate the fruitfulness of conceptual-metaphor theory, familiar from the work of Lakoff and Johnson, by employing it to articulate and support the book's substantive theses (p. vii). For Slingerland, wu-wei is "a state of personal harmony in which actions flow freely and instantly from one's spontaneous inclinations... and yet nonetheless accord perfectly with the dictates of the situation at hand, display an almost supernatural efficacy, and (in the Confucian context at least) harmonize with the demands of conventional morality" (p. 7). Slingerland expands on this characterization in various ways, without making it entirely clear how all the features he identifies fit together….

This essay applies John Searle’s account of weakness of will to explore the classical Chinese problem of weak-willed action. Searle’s discussion focuses on the shortcomings of the Western classical model of rationality in explaining weakness of will, so he naturally says little about the practical ethical problem of overcoming weak-willed action, the focus of the relevant Chinese texts. Yet his theory of action, specifically his notion of the Background, suggests a compelling approach to the practical issue, one that converges with a plausible account of the classical Chinese conception of agency. On this approach, the practical problem is due to weaknesses of the self in carrying out intentions. The key to overcoming the problem lies not in restructuring the agent’s affective states, as suggested by prominent interpreters of Chinese thought such as David Nivison, but in strengthening the agent’s Background capacities, much as we do when mastering new skills.

The aim of this article is to clarify the role of self-interest in Moist thought and by doing so to refute the Self-Interest Thesis. Toward these ends, I will examine passages from the Mozi bearing on the role of self-interest in Moist ethics and psychology and show that, in each case, an alternative interpretation explains them better than the Self-Interest Thesis does. I will argue that the Moists recognize the obvious truth that self-interest figures among people’s basic motives, but they believe people also have other important sources of motivation.