The Pluralist

Interview by Richard Marshall.

'I think that all moralities adequately serving the function of fostering social cooperation must contain a norm of reciprocity—a norm of returning good for good received. Such a norm is a necessity, I argue, because it helps relieve the strains on motivation of contributing to social cooperation when it comes into conflict with self-interest. I also identify a constraint I called “justifiability to the governed,” which implies that justifications for subordinating people’s interests must not rely on falsehoods such as the natural inferiority of racial or ethnic groups or the natural incapacities of women.'

'My version of relativism is pluralistic and attributes functions to morality that in combination with human nature place limits on what could count as a true morality. Unlike many other relativists, I do not hold that people are subject to a morality because they all belong to a certain group. That is, I don’t hold that being a member of a group makes one’s subject to some set of generally accepted norms. What is true is that others around us teach us morality and moral language, so they inevitably influence us. That is why there are moral traditions that share important values, shared interpretations of those values, and certain shared ways of prioritizing them. But even within those moral traditions there are disagreements that don’t bottom out in facts that decide the issues.'

'Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn’t know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.'

'The Chinese concept of rights arose, then, in a context of power. Western nations had become powerful enough, and imposed their will in nakedly aggressive fashion, so that they had to be addressed in their terms. Eventually rights in Chinese thought are attributed not just to nation states but also to individual people.'

'The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one’s relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this. I know it will be greeted with skepticism by those who think that these ideas will only work in a more homogeneous society, but China, even ancient China, is and was more pluralistic than we suppose, and it was Confucius who said that harmony is not the same as agreement.'

David Wongis the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

The main subjects of his research include 1) the nature and extent of moral differences and similarities across and within societies and how these differences and similarities bear on questions about the objectivity and universality of morality; 2) the attempt to understand morality naturalistically as arising from the attempt of human beings to structure their cooperation and to convey to each other what kinds of lives they have found to be worth living; 3) the nature of conflicts between basic moral values and how these give rise to moral differences across and within societies; 4) how we attempt to deal with such conflicts in moral deliberation; 5) the relevance of comparative philosophy, especially Chinese-Western(Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) comparative philosophy, to the above subjects; 6) Whether our reasons to feel and act are based solely on what we already desire or whether reasons transcend what we desireand are used to critically evaluate and shape our desires; 7) the extent to which a person's recognizing that she has reasons to feel and act in certain ways can enter into the constitution of her emotions and change those emotions. Here he discusses his understanding of a pluralistic approach to morality, the relationship between philosophy and anthropology in the matter of understanding morality, the hermeneutical requirement of similarity and difference, Confucianism and Western philosophy and the possibility of a synthesis, why it's better to talk of sustaining cultures rather than preserving them, the issue of diversity and increasing homogeneity, Aristotle and Daoist approaches to how we should live, the role of Rawls' Aristotelian Principle in approaching the complexity of understanding the good life, the Daoist's 'less is more' principle, the different faces of love in the good life, relational ethical approaches to the environmental crisis, how the notion of a relational self helps overcome conflicts between individuals and their communities, and how Mencius helps overcome the perceived division between desire and reason.

3:AM:What made you become a philosopher?

David Wong:Someone once asked me what I do. When I said I was a philosopher, he paused for a moment and said, “But what do you do for a living?” I agree with the premise of that question. It’s a bonus to get paid for something I would do anyway. Being the son of immigrants and growing up in a place (Minneapolis, Minnesota) where there weren’t very many Chinese or Chinese Americans gave me the acute sense of living between two (or more) worlds. I had an urgent sense of needing to come to terms with being in that liminal state, leading me to seek answers to questions about where people get their ideas of how to live, and how to deal with the conflict between those ideas.

3:AM:You’ve defended a