The Ethics of Difference in the Zhuangzi

摘要

Most ethical systems that we are familiar with are, to a greater ornlesser extent, what I regard as ethics of commonality, as they assumenthat all human beings are similar, if not the same, in all morally rel-nevant senses. Thus what is the right thing to do to one person mustnbe the right thing to do to another, and what I would like to bendone unto me must be what others would like to be done untonthem. I argue in this essay that such an ethics, if it ever has beennappropriate, is no longer when we are living in an increasingly globalnvillage, where we have daily interactions with people who are veryndifferent from us in terms of ideas and ideals, interests and prefer-nences, habits and customs, and cultures and religions. While therenhave been strong criticisms of such an ethics of commonality, par-nticularly in contemporary philosophy, such criticisms have beenncharacteristically relativistic, which makes it almost impossible tonmake any moral judgments. In this essay, inspired by one of thenmost important Chinese Daoist classics, the Zhuangzi, I develop annethics of difference, which pays full attention to individual differencesnwithout falling into relativism (at least not any type of relativism thatnis problematic and that we are familiar with). According to such annethics of difference, whether an action is morally right or wrongnshould be ultimately determined by the recipient of this action.