David B. Wong

The meaning of detachment in Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism

Ki-duk, illustrates the issues about detachment addressed in this essay. Virtually the whole film takes place in a tiny Buddhist monastery floating on a tree-lined lake. As the film begins in summer, a monk is shown raising a young boy, his protege. The lessons the monk teaches the boy about his relationship to others concern childish cruelty to a fish, a snake, and a frog. No other people enter the picture until the boy grows into a teen-ager and a young woman comes to the monastery to recover from illness. He discovers his sensuality and passion for her, but when his master discovers their relationship, she is sent away and he is warned about forming attachments. The boy leaves the monastery to pursue the girl, and, unable to control his passion in the face of disappointment, kills her. Years later, the boy, now a sobered and repentant man, returns to the monastery, his master dead, but now ready to take the place his Master had intended for him. The movie ends in spring again, the monk taking on the raising of a young boy. Many will see the film as embodying universal themes about the cycle of tragic desire and the possibility of redemption. Buddhists might take it as con-firmation of the suffering wrought by desire. However, the film also can evoke skeptical questions about Buddhist advocacy of detachment. The fact that the young man was overwhelmed by passion is no surprise, given his isolation, ex-cept for the monk, from other human beings. Nor is it a surprise that his ac-tions in the outside world led to disaster. Raised as he was, the boy lacked any ability to navigate in the human world of relationships, any ability to recover from romantic disappointment or to moderate his rage. Buddhism, or one ex-

Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity

A complete ethic should address the question of how people are to act toward one another when they are in serious moral disagreement. 1 Some recent attempts to address the question have endorsed the idea of accommodating moral differences. I shall argue that their conceptions of accommodation are inadequate or incomplete, and that a more adequate conception must discuss the problem of how people in moral conflict are to live with one another. I shall explain how accommodation is a moral value rooted in the fact that serious conflict is a regular feature of our ethical lives, involving people with whom continuing relationships are both necessary and desirable. We already have in practice strategies of accommodation that constitute our practical commitment to this value. What we have lacked is the philosophical commitment to articulating and defending it.

Tradition and Community in the Formation of Character and Self

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making.” … There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. John Keats (1970, pp. 249–50), from a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in Kentucky, 1819 This chapter will explore the role of tradition and community in the process in which a human being becomes “personally itself.” The argument will be (1) that tradition and community are constitutive as well as causal factors, so that they will contribute to elements of the soul or self that is formed, (2) that how they do this has a great deal to do with the excellence of the result, and (3) that Confucius gives an exceptionally good account of this in the stages corresponding to advanced education. Our exploration will begin with the early stages and the development in childhood of the foundation of self. Then we will examine the development in teenage and early adult years, and how someone becomes a really good person. Finally, we need to pay some attention to general issues concerning the unity of the self and also creativity. To become personally oneself is an exceptionally important activity and, if done well, can be a creative achievement; we will need to examine the role of tradition and community in creativity generally.

Leibniz's Theory of Relations

D ISCUSSION of Leibnizs theory of relations has focused on the question of whether he thought that propositions about relations between substances are reducible to propositions containing nonrelational predicates only. Russell and Rescher have interpreted his doctrine that relations between substances are ideal mental entities as entailing the reducibility of relational propositions to nonrelational ones. Hintikka and Ishiguro have argued that the doctrine should not be interpreted as yielding such a strong result. I agree with Hintikka and Ishiguro on the question of reducibility. I will argue, however, that there is an important connection between relational and nonrelational propositions in Leibnizs theory which has been overlooked. The connection is not quite one of reducibility, and it has been overlooked because commentators have been preoccupied with the question of reducibility. I will explain how Leibnizs assertion of the connection is consistent with his distinction between possibility and compossibility. I will also explain how his assertion sheds new light on Leibnizs doctrine of expression. I conclude by applying the theory of relations to the relations between simple substances or monads and explaining how the world of monads makes up the world of everyday experience. If my interpretation is correct, Leibnizs theory of relations is the key to understanding some of his most central and notoriously obscure doctrines.

Cultivating the Self in Concert with Others

The Analects is a series of glimpses into how Confucius and his students engaged in their projects of moral self-cultivation. This chapter seeks to describe the way in which the outlines of a moral psychology arises from the text and how the text poses issues that came to be central to the Chinese philosophical tradition. It will be argued that the text provides exemplars of moral self-cultivation, that it makes emotion central to virtue and therefore makes emotional self-cultivation a central focus of moral development, that it highlights the relational nature of moral cultivation as a process that is conducted with others, that it raises difficult and crucial issues about the relation between intuitive and affective styles of action on the one hand and on the other hand action based on deliberation and reflection, and that it has some useful approaches to the problem of situationism that has recently been raised for virtue ethics.

Integrating philosophy with anthropology in an approach to morality

Philosophy and anthropology need to integrate their accounts of what a morality is. I identify three desiderata that an account of morality should satisfy: (1) it should recognize significant diversity and variation in the major kinds of value, (2) it should specify a set of criteria for what counts as a morality, and (3) it should indicate the basis for distinguishing between more or less justifiable moralities, or true and false moralities. I will discuss why these three desiderata are hard to satisfy at the same time, and why they are controversial. Anthropologists and philosophers will differ on which ones they are inclined to reject. I argue that all three should be accepted and can be satisfied.

CONSTRUCTING NORMATIVE OBJECTIVITY IN ETHICS

A prominent problem for all naturalistic theories of morality has been to account for the apparent normative force of a moral demand. By “normative force,” I mean the scope of proper application of that demand, along with the conditions for its proper application. To characterize the normative force of a moral demand is to characterize to whom it properly applies and what conditions must be fulfilled for it to be properly applied. In this essay, the crucial issues about normative force are whether and in what manner a moral demand can properly apply to an agent regardless of whether that agent has inclinations or desires that would be served by conforming to the demand. In ordinary moral discourse, it seems that moral demands can apply regardless of the agent’s possessing the relevant inclinations. To judge that U.S. officials have violated a moral duty by imprisoning foreign nationals without charges is not necessarily to refer to any inclination those officials have that would be satisfied by doing their duty. Indeed, one may judge so while assuming they have no such inclination. We talk as if the duty applies regardless of the existence of such a motivation. That moral demands are generally regarded as inescapable or nonhypothetical in this sense has generally dictated two opposing responses: on the one side, attempts to validate the apparent inescapability of moral demands; on the other side, attempts to show that the appearance corresponds to a deep and pervasive error on the part of moral-language users. My response generally falls into the first category and is based on recognition of the role of morality and, more generally, the role of substantive practical reason in shaping basic human motivations. By “substantive practical reason,” I mean to suggest that the apparatus for reasoning about what to do includes not simply rules of inference for passing from premises to practical conclusions about what to do, but also an array of reasons for agents to act in certain ways, where these reasons are situational features that weigh in favor of agents’ acting in certain ways. My conception of practical reason contrasts with the instrumentalist construal that has been dominant within naturalistic approaches to morality: the conception of practical reason as incapable of dictating ultimate ends but rather a formal faculty for guiding the transitions from basic, exogenous (relative to reason) motivations to nonbasic motivations and ultimately to

Xunzi’s Metaethics

One of the most contested issues in the interpretation of Xunzi is how his theory of morality answers metaethical questions. What is the nature and origin of morality? Do human beings construct it, or does it exist independently of them? What is the relation of morality to the natural world and whatever might have created or imparted order to that world? Is there a single true or correct morality or a plurality of such moralities? It will be argued that interpretations attributing apparently different metaethical positions to Xunzi can in fact agree on some important elements that should go into any plausible interpretation of Xunzi. Furthermore, this essay defends the possibility that, contrary to what some interpreters have thought, Xunzi could simultaneously be both a constructivist and an absolutist in his metaethics. Nevertheless, the conclusion here is that the Xunzi yields no unambiguous metaethical theory. There are at least three reasons for this inconclusiveness. First, Xunzi’s main concerns were not to answer metaethical questions. Second, the synthetic and original nature of his theorizing makes it difficult to pin him down. And third, there is significant looseness and variability in the meaning of the terms with which we ourselves formulate the metaethical questions, terms such as ‘constructivism,’ ‘realism,’ ‘relativism,’ and ‘absolutism.’

Institutional Structures and Idealism of Character

Joseph Chan proposes democratic institutions as a bridge between the Confucian ideal of care and mutual trust between ruler and ruled on the one hand and our present flawed reality on the other. However, the reality of our democratic institutions is itself deeply flawed. I propose friendly amendments to Chan’s proposal to focus on the moral education of citizens. Such a focus is compatible with working with those institutions and their accompanying rituals that still hold promise for getting us closer to our ideals.

Responses to Commentators

It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been at it, I imagine I’ll always feel like the kid who is sure he got the invite by mistake, and who expects some grown-up to escort him politely out the door. It’s probably just a knee-jerk reaction, but I’m inclined to fall back on Mr. Zimmerman’s retort: “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”1 And I have been lucky, in my teachers, my colleagues, and my friends, a fair sample of whom have taken the time to comment on Believing and Acting. Rather than respond seriatim, I’ve divided my comments into three sections: what I did; what they wish I’d done; and why it should make any difference to ethics.