Dr. Yong Huang: "Taoist Moral Relativism in the Zhuangzi"

The Confucius Institude presents:

Dr. Yong Huang, Professor of Philosophy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Moral relativism familiar in the Western philosophical tradition is either agent relativism (moral judgments are relative to the standards of the agent) or appraiser relativism (moral judgments are relative to the standards of the appraiser). As David Lyons has convincingly argued, they are both problematic. However, the ancient Chinese Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, features a different type of moral relativism, which Huang calls patient relativism (moral judgments are relative to the patients’ standards). According to this version of moral relativism, an action toward someone is morally right only if its recipient endorses it. Thus what action is morally right to one person may not be so to another person.