Yong Huang

I was initially attracted to the unique type of ethics in the Zhuangzi 莊子 through a number of stories, which I later call difference stories in contrast to familiar knack stories. At my first attempt to characterize the unique moral idea conveyed by these stories, I call it the moral Copper Rule: Do (don’t do) unto others as they would (wouldn’t) like to be done unto, in contrast to the familiar moral Golden Rule: Do (don’t do) unto others as you would (wouldn’t like to be done unto) (Huang 2005). As I went through the text more carefully and extensively, I realize that this is not an isolated idea in the Zhuangzi, but a general idea going throughout the text, including all three divisions of chapters, the inner, the outer, and the miscellaneous. So I expanded my discussions of this Zhuangzian ethics by drawing on the much broader text and characterized it as the ethics of difference (Huang 2010a), the virtue ethics of respect (Huang 2010b, 2015, 2023a), and patient moral relativism (Huang 2018), to capture the basically same idea as conveyed by “copper rule.” As this is not only a distinctive interpretation of the Zhuangzi but also a novel ethical idea, while it receives warm reception from some scholars, there are also objections to it both in terms of its interpretation of the Zhuangzi and as a normative ethical theory (see Moeller 2023; Fraser 2014), to some of which I’ve made responses (Huang 2022a, b, 2023b). Waldemar Brys’ chapter belongs to the former; moreover, instead of trying to find counterexamples in the Zhuangzi, he focuses on my interpretation of the three difference stories that I’ve been highlighting in my previous publications on this topic, claiming that the ethical idea I find in these stories is actually absent in them, to which I’m happy to make the following response.

In a Chinese paper published in 2017, entitled: “Learning for the Sake of Oneself and Learning for the Sake of Others: A Reexamination from a Post-Modern Point of View,” Vincent Challenges the traditional and standard interpretation of the Analects passage: “Ancient Learners are for the sake of themselves, and present learners are for the sake of others” (Analects 14.24). According to the traditional interpretation, Confucius is praising the ancient learners who are learning for the sake of themselves and criticizing the learners of his time who are learning for the sake of others. To explain why it is wrong to learn for the sake of others and why Confucius is against it, as it appears perfectly right to learn for the sake of others, Confucian scholars, historical and contemporary, have provided many ingenuous explanations. The most widely accepted one is provided by the neo-Confucian philosopher in the Song dynasty, Cheng Yi, according to which the ancient learner learn for the sake of cultivating their own virtues, while learners at Confucius’s time learn in order to show off their scholarship. While agreeing that to learn for the sake of oneself is to learn to cultivate one’s own virtue, Vincent argues that to learn for others is to learn to be concerned about others’ wellbeing, thus showing that these two types of learning are equally important (Shen 2017). In this paper, I shall argue, in the spirit of Vincent Shen, that corresponding to two different types of hermeneutics: the hermeneutics as we are familiar with is a hermeneutics for the sake of the interpreter oneself, while the hermeneutics that I’m going to highlight is one for the sake of others.

Moral realism as we know it has been primarily if not exclusively arguing for the objectivity of the moral properties of rightness and wrongness of action. This is understandable because the normative ethics, upon which moral realism as a metaethical theory reflects, has been dominated by consequentialism and deontology, both of which are primarily if not exclusively concerned about the rightness and wrongness of actions. In the last few decades, however, virtue ethics, which is primarily concerned with the goodness and badness of human persons, has become a strong rival to consequentialism and deontology but has so far not received its deserved attention from metaethicists. In this paper, as a metaethical reflection on one of the most fundamental issues of virtue ethics as a normative theory, I shall develop an agent-focused moral realism, arguing for the objectivity of the moral properties of the goodness and badness of human persons. In the process, I shall also argue how such a moral realism can relatively easily respond to a number of representative criticisms that moral anti-realists have lodged to the action-focused moral realism.

By creating a two-way dialogue between philosophers specializing in Chinese philosophy and Michael Slote, a central thinker from the Anglo-American tradition, this volume brings cross-cultural philosophy to life. From his early contributions in ethics, metaethics, philosophy of mind, moral psychology and epistemology to his recent investigations into the relationship between Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, an international team of scholars of Chinese philosophy cover Slote's sentimentalism, his understanding of Chinese concepts Yin and Yang and explores the role Early Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism can play in his work.

This book delves into a broad range of hitherto unresolved issues related to Zhuangzi’s ethics, which include, but are not limited to, the fundamental question of whether Zhuangzi should be regarded as a moralist in the ordinary sense and what Zhuangzi’s views on topics such as equality, moral relativism, good life, intersubjective relations, and social harmony really are. The twelve contributors to this book deliberate on these issues in six debates centering on recent influential publications in the field. In each debate, the relevant publications will be first challenged by their critic and then defended by their author, through which different and competing interpretations of Zhuangzi’s ethical themes will directly confront each other. These author-meets-critic debates will not only reflect what is currently at stake in discussing Zhuangzi’s ethics but also engage and enrich the state of the field today. This volume serves as a good companion to scholars, as well as graduate-level students, who are interested in gaining philosophical and ethical insights from Zhuangzi and Chinese philosophy in general.

Explores the resources for contemporary ethics found in the work of the Cheng brothers, canonical neo-Confucian philosophers. Yong Huang presents a new way of doing comparative philosophy as he demonstrates the resources for contemporary ethics offered by the Cheng brothers, Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), canonical neo-Confucian philosophers. Huang departs from the standard method of Chinese/Western comparison, which tends to interest those already interested in Chinese philosophy. While Western-oriented scholars may be excited to learn about Chinese philosophers who have said things similar to what they or their favored philosophers have to say, they hardly find anything philosophically new from such comparative work. Instead of comparing and contrasting philosophers, each chapter of this book discusses a significant topic in Western moral philosophy, examines the representative views on this topic in the Western tradition, identifies their respective difficulties, and discusses how the Cheng brothers have better things to say on the subject. Topics discussed include why one should be moral, how weakness of will is not possible, whether virtue ethics is self-centered, in what sense the political is also personal, how a moral theory can be of an antitheoretical nature, and whether moral metaphysics is still possible in this postmodern and postmetaphysical age. “This book presents the philosophical ideas of the Cheng brothers intelligently, convincingly, and powerfully. It is among the best books ever written on the Cheng brothers, including works in the Chinese language.” — Kam-por Yu, coeditor of Taking Confucian Ethics Seriously: Contemporary Theories and Applications.

It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy.

The development of Confucianism has most frequently been divided into three periods: the classical period from Pre‐Qin to Han dynasty, the neo‐Confucian period in (Tang) Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and contemporary new Confucianism in the 20th and 21st centuries. This chapter is devoted to the third period. If neo‐Confucianism can be seen as a Confucian response to challenges posed by Buddhism, contemporary new Confucianism is a Confucian response to the challenge posed by modern Western ideology. If what is unique about the neo‐Confucian response is to provide a metaphysical foundation for or explanation of classical Confucian values, what is unique about the contemporary Confucian response is its attempt to show that traditional Confucian values and such modern Western values as rationality, modernity, science, and democracy, among others are not only compatible but can also significantly enrich each other.