Toward a Benign Moral Relativism From the Agent/Appraiser-Centered to the Patient-Centered ( in in Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics, edited by Yang

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Toward a Benign Moral Relativism

From the Agent/Appraiser-Centered to the Patient-Centered

Yong Huang

At the beginning of Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, David Wong states that “ ‘moral relativism’ is overwhelmingly a term of condemnation, frequently of scorn or derision, a term for putting one’s opponent immediately on the defensive” (Wong 2006, x1). For this rea-son, “moral relativism,” in most cases, is not used to characterize one’s own view but to criticize the views of others. For the same reason, most of those characterized as relativists by others are unwilling to accept such characterization. For example, Richard Rorty is perhaps the first person to come to one’s mind when one thinks of relativists in contemporary phi-losophy, but Rorty never considered himself a relativist.1 Wong acknowl-edges that he is one of the “very few people willing to” “accept the label of moral relativism.” It is thus clear that Wong is not only aware of the condemnation, scorn, and derision of relativism but must also have found a way to evade it. In order to show how Wong succeeds in doing that, I start with a critical analysis of problems with common versions of moral relativism that have often been condemned, scorned, and derided as an absurd theory, before I examine Wong’s alternative version of relativism, pluralist relativism or relativism with constraints, to show in what sense and to what degree it succeeds in avoiding problems afflicted by the common version of moral relativism. I conclude with a diagnosis of a remaining problem in Wong’s own version of moral relativism and an attempt at a solution to this problem by developing a novel version of

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moral relativism that is patient-centered in contrast to its familiar versions that are either agent-centered or appraiser-centered.

I. Problems with Relativism without Constraints

Because relativism is more frequently used to criticize other people’s views than to characterize one’s own position, to avoid a straw man argument, in this section, I focus on the view of Gilbert Harman. Other than Wong himself, Harman is the most prominent, persistent, and staunch advocate for moral relativism in contemporary philosophy. Because Wong character-izes his own relativism as one with constraints in contrast to other versions of relativism, including Harman’s, I characterize Harman’s relativism as one without constraints for the sake of convenience.

Harman provides two very different definitions of relativism, corre-sponding to David Lyons’ now almost classical classification of moral rela-tivism into appraiser and agent relativism. According to Lyons, appraiser relativism is a view that “a moral judgment is valid if, and only if, it accords with the norms of the appraiser’s social group” (Lyons 1982, 212). So an action can be judged as morally right or wrong only in relation to a particular moral framework. Because different appraisers may belong to different social groups with different norms, it is natural that one same action judged as moral in relation to one moral framework may be judged as immoral in relation to a different framework. In Lyons’ view, appraiser relativism often suffers the problem of incoherence, by which he means that the same action may thus be appraised as right and wrong at the same time (Lyons 1982, 212), because there are multiple appraisers of the same action holding different moral frameworks.

In contrast to moral realists, who insist that there are genuine moral disagreements just as there are genuine scientific disagreements, and moral skeptics, who think that moral disagreements are as faultless as aesthetical disagreements (see Lasersohn 2009), Harman’s strategy to avoid the problem of incoherence of appraiser relativism, which Harman himself also calls critic relativism (Harman 1996, 62) and moral judgment relativism (Har-man 2000, 22), is to show that there are only apparent, not real, moral disagreements. He provides the following definition of moral relativism: “for the purpose of assigning objective truth conditions, a judgment of the form, it would be morally wrong of P to D, has to be understood as elliptical for a judgment of the form, in relation to moral framework M, it would be morally wrong of P to D” (Harman 1996, 43). In other words, judgment

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of an action as morally right and wrong is always relative to the moral framework of the judge, the critic, the appraiser, or, simply, the speaker.2 What is unique about Harman’s definition is that, although we often simply say that it is morally right or wrong of someone to do something without making reference to any such framework, Harman’s definition reminds us that the form of our common moral judgment is faultlessly incomplete but has to be understood as elliptical for the complete formulation, which qualifies its truth to a particular moral framework.

The problem of incoherence that Lyons thinks appraiser relativism suffers appears precisely because of the mistaken conception of our com-mon moral judgments as complete. In Harman’s view, if relativism allows an action to be judged as both morally right and wrong by the same standard, it is indeed incoherent. However, his formulation of relativism avoids this by stating that an action can be judged as morally right relative to one moral framework and as wrong relative to a different framework. Here there is no incoherence. To show this, he uses the analogy of motion. To say that an object is both moving and stationary relative to the same spatiotemporal framework is indeed incoherent. However, “something that is moving in relation to one spatio-temporal framework can be at rest in relation to another” (Harman 1996a, 3). Because apparently conflicting judgments about a particular action’s moral rightness are made from dif-ferent moral frameworks, they are not really conflicting, just as apparently conflicting judgments about a particular object’s motion are not really con-flicting, because they are made from different spatiotemporal frameworks. Moreover, just as “no spatio-temporal framework can be singled out as the one and only framework that captures the truth about whether something is in motion” (Harman 1996a, 3), no moral framework can be singled out as the one and only framework that captures the truth about whether a moral judgment is true.

Harman’s version of appraiser relativism is often called indexical rela-tivism in the sense that “ordinary moral expressions are thus thought to be context-sensitive in much the same way as pure indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘now’ ” (Brogaard 2008, 386). Brogaard claims that there are three main problems with indexical moral relativism, which, however, I think Harman can well evade. The first is its failure to see the difference between moral expressions and genuine indexical expressions. If there are two persons, one saying “I am hungry” and another saying that “I disagree. I am not hungry at all,” we would think the second person is semantically incompetent; but it would not be the case if the first person says “female infibulation is wrong” and the second person says “I disagree. Female infibulation is not

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wrong.” This difference, however, would no longer exist if we follow Harman to regard the second case as elliptical, standing for “female infibulation is wrong according to my moral standard” and “I disagree. Female infibulation is not wrong according to my moral standard.” Here the second person is equally semantically incompetent. The second is its failure to appreciate the fact that “people tend to retract their earlier moral judgments when their moral beliefs change” (Brogaard 2008, 388); and when a person makes such a retraction, the person would normally say, when asked about his or her previous view, that “I was wrong before,” which would be impossible with indexical relativism. This, however, does not necessarily mean that indexi-cal relativism is wrong, as it may only indicate that our ordinary way of speaking is not precise. The third is related to propositional-attitude reports. Suppose person A, who believes that female infibulation is wrong, reports that person B believes that female infibulation is not wrong. According to Brogaard, this would become impossible if we accept indexical relativism, as person B is the author of the report about person A’s propositional attitude and so must use the word “wrong” in the sense of person B and not person A. This is not true. We can report another person’s belief according to that person’s framework, just as we can report that the building is to the left of someone, although it is to our right.3

To say this does not mean that Harman’s indexical relativism can indeed successfully avoid the problem of incoherence identified by David Lyons. Two persons making different judgments about an object’s motion, both true relative to their respective spatiotemporal frameworks, can clearly realize that they do not disagree on whether the given object is in motion or not. In contrast, two persons making different judgments about an action’s morality, again both true relative to their respective moral frameworks, do feel that they fundamentally disagree with each other, even after they are made aware that their judgments are based on two different moral frame-works. According to Harman’s theory, however, as Lyons points out, they must be “confused if they believe their judgments to be incompatible. In fact, the theory says, they are actually talking at cross purposes” (Lyons 1982, 222).4 Here Harman ignores an important difference between these two types of judgments, a difference even most of his critics fail to realize. When two persons make judgments about whether an object is in motion or at rest, they merely provide different descriptions of the object, which, if both are indeed true, can be mutually translated into each other. They do not intend to make any normative claim about the object: whether it should be in motion or at rest. Yet when two appraisers make moral judgments about an action’s being morally right or wrong, they do not

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merely describe the action in light of different coordinates. They make normative claims about the action: whether it should be performed or not. Thus, when two appraisers make conflicting moral judgments about an action, one saying that it is morally right and the other saying that it is morally wrong, the conflict is a practical one rather than a theoretical one: the potential agent receives two conflicting recommendations: one says that he or she should perform the action, whereas the other says that he or she should not perform the action. The person cannot simultaneously both perform the action and not perform the action to conform to these two opposite prescriptions. For this reason, Harman’s attempt to avoid the problem of incoherence by disclosing the elliptical nature of moral judgments is not successful.

Perhaps with this problem of incoherence in mind, Harman provides a different definition of relativism, according to which, “A moral demand D applies to a person only if that person either accepts D (i.e., intends to act in accordance with D) or fails to accept D only because of ignorance of relevant (nonmoral) facts, a failure to reason something through, or some sort of (nonmoral) mental defect like irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness” (Harman 2000, 30). This is what Lyons calls agent relativ-ism. To distinguish it from appraiser relativism, Harman sometimes also calls it normative moral relativism, according to which “people, as agents, can be subject to different ultimate moral standards” (Harman 2000, 21). In contrast to appraiser relativism that claims that an act is right or wrong relative to the moral framework of the appraiser, agent relativism holds that an act is right or wrong relative to the framework of the agent. Unlike appraiser relativism which is incoherent when there are more than one (as is in most cases) appraiser with different moral frameworks, agent relativ-ism does not have the problem of incoherence because there is only one standard, that of the agent, that is relevant to moral judgments. Lyons thus acknowledges that “such a theory seems not to validate conflicting moral judgments. If we wish to judge a given act . . . this theory tells us to apply the norms of her social group. It therefore seems to imply that any single item of conduct can correctly be judged in one and only one way” (Lyons 1982, 211).

Such an agent relativism, as pointed out by David Copp, is also a species of internalism of moral reasons, a view that “a person ought mor-ally to do something only if he has certain desires, intentions, or goals, or, more generally, certain motivational attitudes, which give him a reason to do it” (Copp 1982, 227). Implied in this internalism of moral reasons is what Moody-Adams calls the “inability thesis”: “sometimes one’s upbring-

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ing in a culture simply renders one unable to know that certain actions are wrong” (Moody-Adams 1994, 293), a view shared by a number of philosophers who are normally not regarded as moral relativists. Moody-Adams particularly mentions (1) Michael Slote, who thinks that the ancient Greek slave owners were “unable to see what virtue required in regard to slavery,” and this “was not due to personal limitations (alone) but requires some explanation by social and historical forces, by cultural limitations”; (2) Alan Donagan, who says that although “a graduate of Sandhurst or West Point who does not understand his duty to non-combatants as human beings is certainly culpable for his ignorance,” “an officer bred up from childhood in Hitler’s Jugend might not be”; and (3) Susan Wolf, who argues that the social circumstances of slaveowners in the 1850s, Nazis in the 1930s, and male chauvinists of “our fathers’ generation” made it inevitable for them to hold values we condemn today (see Moody-Adams 1994, 292–3). Dimitrijevic further argues that this inability thesis is a kind of cultural and psychological determinism: “the power of social and cultural context in a criminal regime excludes the perpetrators from the commu-nity of assumptively moral persons—in this sense, they do not differ from children or the mentally ill” (Dimitrijevic 2010, 145). For example, “the analysis of Nazi Germany or Serbia under Milosevic demonstrates that criminal ideology was so effectively implemented in the processes of social-ization, through different measures ranging from education and cultural propaganda to political manipulation, that we can infer a systematically created inability to think, judge, and act morally” (Dimitrijevic 2010, 11– 142).

However, if we accept such agent relativism based on moral reason internalism and cultural determinism, there will be a serious consequence. If moral nihilism, according to Harman’s own definition, “rejects morality altogether including any sort of relative morality” (Harman 1996, 5), then agent relativism accepts everything any agent does as moral, as long as it is not performed out of “ignorance of relevant (nonmoral) facts, a failure to reason something through, or some sort of (nonmoral) mental defect like irrationality, stupidity, confusion, or mental illness.” In other words, moral judgments of an action make sense only if the agent performs the action or fails to perform it due to such nonmoral reasons; for only in such cases does the agent have reason to perform or refrain from performing an action on the one hand and yet still fails to perform or refrain from performing it on the other. If an agent does not have reason to perform an action, then we cannot say that the person morally ought to perform the action in the

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sense that he or she should and could have performed the action; and if the agent does not have reason to refrain from performing an action, then we cannot say that the person morally ought not to perform it in the sense that he or she should and could have not performed it. For this reason, Harman claims that “the criminal is not irrational or unreasonable in rela-tion to criminal morality, but only in relation to a morality the criminal rejects. But the fact that it is irrational or unreasonable in relation to this other morality not to have concern and respect for others, does not give the criminal who rejects that morality any reason to avoid harming or injuring others” (Harman 2000, 90). In other words, according to agent relativism, the criminal’s action can be appropriately judged only in terms of “criminal morality” the criminal accepts and not the morality of having concern and respect for others that he rejects. When thus appropriately judged the criminal has done what he or she morally ought to do and has not done what he or she morally ought not to do. Thus, “the claim that Hitler ought morally not to have ordered the extermination of the Jews would not be true, if in fact Hitler did not have compelling reason to refrain and if the claim that Hitler ought morally not to have ordered the extermination of the Jews implies that Hitler had compelling reasons to refrain” (Harman 1996, 61).

Within the context of this agent relativism, when a critic holds a different moral framework from that of the agent, the critic cannot make the reason implying judgment in relation to the critic’s morality, such as “Hitler was doing morally wrong things for us to do,” although he can make the reason implying judgment in relation to the agent’s morality, such as “Hitler was doing the morally right thing for a Nazi to do” (Harman 1996a, 62). However, to alleviate our concern, Harman thinks that agent relativism does allow a critic to make a different type of moral judgment, the non-reason implying judgment, in relation to the critic’s morality, such as “Hitler was a great evil.” However, a further examination of what Har-man means makes it clear that such judgments or evaluations are anything but moral judgments or evaluations. In Harman’s view, the evaluation that “Hitler was a great evil” falls into the same category as the evaluation that “it is terrible that the tiger attacked the children at the zoo.”5 The former does not imply that Hitler should or ought not to be a great evil, just as the latter does not imply that it is morally wrong of the tiger to have attacked children. Here, Harman makes it clear that we are “no more able to judge that it was wrong of Hitler to have acted as he acted than to judge that it was wrong of the tiger to have attacked the children” (Harman 1996,

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60). The only function of such judgment or evaluation is to show that we do not like Hitler’s actions, but this is no different from our dislike for the harm a tiger or, for that matter, a hurricane or an earthquake, does to humans. As implausible as it sounds, what Harman says here is actually quite consistent with the view of Bernard Williams, whose “Internal and External Reasons” has become a classic of moral reason internalism (see Williams 1982). According to Williams, to a person who is not nice to his wife, we cannot say that the person ought to be nice to his wife, as he does not have the motivational attitude to be nice to his wife. For this reason we cannot blame the person, just as we cannot “blame the valve for the failure of the rockets” (Williams 1995, 40). We can blame the person for not being nice to his wife only if we can say that he ought to be nice to his wife, and we can say that only if he has reason to be nice to his wife and fails to be nice to his wife.6 Nevertheless, Williams does think that we can say many things to reproach the person: “he is ungrateful, inconsiderate, hard, sexist, nasty, selfish, brutal, and many other disadvantageous things” (Williams 1995, 39), just as Harman can reproach Hitler by saying that he is an evil. However, I think Streiffer is right when he says that we cannot reproach someone by saying that he is an evil unless we can also say that he ought not be an evil (Streiffer 2003, 35), and Harman’s agent relativism, as well as Williams’ moral reason internalism, clearly denies it, since Hitler cannot but be an evil, and “ought” implies “can.”

So both types of relativism have problems. Appraiser relativism cannot deal with the practical incoherence of moral judgments making references to different moral frameworks. Agent relativism avoids this incoherence only at the expense of the very purpose of morality, as it justifies any action, how-ever horrible, as moral. Perhaps realizing this, Harman himself acknowledges that neither the extremely agent-centered conception of morality nor the extremely critic-centered conception of morality should be adopted (Har-man 2000, 52). In their stead, Harman advocates a position of morality as politics, in which “the dispute can be resolved, if it is resolved, only by moral bargaining, not by objective inquiry” (Harman 1996a, 43). Just as the seller and buyer of a house bargain to reach an agreement on price and labor and management bargain to reach an agreement on wage rate, Harman argues that “political and moral disputes often involve bargaining. We argue with others, not only by showing how features of their moral frameworks should lead them in certain directions in the light of the facts; we also give them practical reasons to modify their moral understandings. ‘If you don’t do this, we won’t do that.’ Disadvantaged groups can threaten to withhold

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full participation in a moral framework unless their disadvantage is lessened or removed” (Harman 1996a, 22).

There are problems with moral bargaining, however, as a way to resolve moral conflict. Stephen Darwall has already pointed out two that deserve our attention. First, because any result of moral bargaining is necessarily a result of compromise, which is different from what each party involved in the bar-gaining process regards as really right, people may regard any rule resulting from moral bargaining “only as a modus vivendi without treating the rule as a norm they accept. . . . [A person] accepts the deal, and intends, consequently, to follow the rule so long as others do. But he does not accept the rule as a norm in the sense that would be sincerely expressed by his saying that refus-ing help is wrong” (Darwall 1998, 187–8). Second, in Harman’s view, one of the reasons behind the bargaining process is self-interest: “if you accept certain principles as governing your dealings with others, those others will tend to accept the principles as governing their dealings with you. I conclude that morality as politics provides the most reasonable substitute for the naïve conception” (Harman 1996, 56). However, as Darwall also points out, self-interest is the wrong kind of reason in moral reasoning (Darwall 1998, 188).

I argue that there are two additional problems with Harman’s moral bargaining. First, although Harman proposes moral bargaining as an alter-native to Rawls’ hypothetical condition of initial equality (Harman 2000, 66), it does not address the very problem of the likely unfairness of any result of moral bargaining that Rawls intends to avoid with his hypotheti-cal condition of initial equality. For example, when women fought for the right to vote, had the strategy of moral bargaining been adopted, the result might have been that men continued to have a full vote, while women had half a vote, which is obviously unfair and therefore immoral. Second, ironically, moral bargaining as a way to resolve moral disputes, if successful at all, eventually leads to moral universalism. Universalism is of course not necessarily a bad thing by itself, but it is contradictory to Harman’s central thesis of relativism that there is no single true morality, which aims to avoid problems that Harman perceives in moral universalism.

II. How Wong’s Pluralist Relativism Avoids these Problems

We have examined some problems with relativism without constraints, both appraiser relativism and agent relativism, as well as Harman’s moral

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bargaining. In this section, I examine Wong’s alternative version of rela-tivism, what he calls pluralistic relativism or relativism with constraints, and the extent to which it succeeds in avoiding the problems of relativism without constraints as discussed above. Wong’s pluralistic relativism can be regarded as a version of appraiser or speaker or critic relativism and therefore is different from agent relativism. According to agent relativism, we can make moral judgments of an action only according to the morality accepted by the agent. However, Wong makes it clear that his pluralistic relativism “does not imply that moral language users apply the moral norms adopted in a different moral tradition to judge the conduct of members of that tradition. Nor does pluralistic relativism imply that moral language users would refrain from judging what others ought to do if they become aware that these others have adopted moral norms very different from their own” (Wong 2006, 73–74). As a matter of fact, Wong claims, his pluralistic relativism, as a sophisticated rather than strawman relativism, is a position that we can judge what others ought to do even if we know that they adopt a morality very different from ours. In other words, we can apply our morality to judge the actions of those who do not share our morality. For Wong, “in the end, if we are making first-order judgments about the acceptability of another group’s morality, we are making these judgments on the basis of our own values” (Wong 2006, 88). Of course, such judgments of other moralities “can be completely accepting, completely rejecting, or considerably more nuanced than either, but in any case the judgments are based on our own moral values” (Wong 2006, 105).

However, appraiser relativism is charged with the problem of incoher-ence: It allows the same action to be judged as both moral and immoral at the same time. As we have seen, this incoherence is not a theoretical or descriptive one but a practical or normative one. Wong is clearly aware of the nature of such incoherence. In his view, people making incompatible moral judgments of the same action by appealing to different moral norms are not talking past each other, as there is an illocutionary and pragmatic dimension of these moral judgments: “All moralities guide action, specify what lives are worth living. All of them specify relevant sorts of reasons that pertain to social cooperation and the living of worthwhile lives, and all of them specify what correct balances of reasons are under this or that set of conditions” (Wong 2006, 72). So even if there are no theoretical conflicts among moral judgments making references to different moral frameworks, there is illocutionary and pragmatic conflict, which “can occur between pre-scriptions to do certain things or to become a certain kind of person in the sense that conforming to one prescription necessarily precludes conforming

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to the other, and this conflict can occur even when the prescriptions are both true” (Wong 2006, 77).

The reason moral judgments theoretically not incoherent can lead to practical incoherence is that they are made according to different moral frameworks. This indicates that the source of the practical incoherence between moral judgments is the theoretical conflict between the moral frameworks in reference to which these moral judgments are made. Accord-ing to the familiar appraiser relativism, a version of relativism without any constraints, all moral frameworks are equal and none can claim to have any privileged position in guiding our moral judgments. Thus its practical incoherence is unavoidable. Wong argues against such an entirely formalistic conception of morality, according to which, “a morality is simply the system of norms to which its members subscribe. . . . There are no restrictions on the content of the norms” (Wong 2006, 11). If a system of norms sub-scribed to by others, for example the one subscribed to by the Nazis, is so starkly and completely different from ours, Wong claims, it is unclear why we should call it a “moral code” (Wong 2006, 11).

Thus, although Wong’s pluralistic relativism agrees that there is no single true morality, “it recognizes significant limits on what can count as a true morality” in terms of its content (Wong 2006, xii). In Wong’s view, not all moral frameworks are equal: Some are true and adequate, whereas oth-ers are false and inadequate. Wong’s pluralist relativism, although a speaker relativism, does not imply that “people are simply saying what follows from their adopted moral norms when they make a moral statement” (Wong 2006, 74). In contrast, it means that people “can be aware that they might have mistakenly adopted the moral norms they happen to have, and they can be aware that others may be mistaken in adopting the moral norms these others have. Having a morality in a reflective and self-critical way means the readiness to be critical about established or accepted norms, whether they are one’s own or others” (Wong 2006, 74–75). Moreover, criteria to judge whether a particular moral framework is true or adequate are not entirely relativistic.7 According to Wong’s naturalist conception of the function of morality, “morality is partly a system of norms and reasons that human beings have developed in order to work and to live together. One of its functions is to regulate cooperation, conflicts of interests, and the division of labor and to specify the conditions under which some people have author-ity over others with respect to cooperative activities” (Wong 2006, 37). In order to perform this necessary function, every morality, in order to be true and adequate, has to meet some universal constraints, such as reciprocity, balancing self- and other-interest, justifiability to the governed, and so on.

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Thus, any morality that does not meet such constraints and therefore cannot perform its necessary functions has to be rejected as false and inadequate. It is here that Wong disagrees with Harman, who, in defending his agent relativism, argues that we cannot apply our morality to people who do not share our morality. In Wong’s view, “there is nothing in the logic or meaning of such judgments per se that implies that the people we judge share those conceptions. . . . On a deeper level, I disagree with Harman’s conception of morality as constituted by implicit agreements that properly govern only those who are parties to the agreements” (Wong 2006, 74).

To say some moralities or moral frameworks are not true is to say that those who adopt such moralities should reject them. They should make moral judgments and act, not according to the inadequate moralities they have, but according to some adequate and true morality they do not have. However, Harman seems to be right in pointing out that we cannot require people to do something or refrain from doing something for which they do not have reasons and motivations to do or refrain from doing. There have been some attempts to argue against moral reason internalism and cultural determinism, on which Harman’s agent relativism is based. Robert Streiffer, for example, develops what he calls “Reasons Internalism” (strictly speaking a moral reason externalist view): “If an agent believes that there is a reason for him to perform an action, and yet is in no way motivated to perform that action, then the agent is not fully rational” (Streiffer 2003, 40). In Streiffer’s view, it is impossible for an agent to be fully informed and therefore fully rational and yet have no desire to comply with the universal moral require-ment, for “on the most obvious understanding of ‘fully informed,’ according to which being informed means, among other things, being informed about reason for action, it can be shown that this description of Villain begs the question against the defender of Moral Universalism” (Streiffer 2003, 39). In his view, “if an agent (i) is fully informed, (ii) is morally required to perform some action, and yet (iii) has no desire that would be served by performing that action, then he is not fully rational” (Streiffer 2003, 40). The weakness of Streiffer’s argument lies in his confusion of justify-ing reason and motivating reasons. Despite some counterarguments (see, e.g., Tilley 2004, 390–1), the distinction between these two reasons has some empirical ground in moral psychology. A murderer may not be able to reject, rationally, a justifying reason that killing an innocent person is wrong but is still not motivated to refrain from killing the innocent person. This is a distinction similar to the one between knowledge of hearing and seeing (wenjian zhi zhi 聞見之知) and knowledge of virtue (dexing zhi zhi 德性之知) in neo-Confucianism. The former is merely intellectual, some-

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thing one can intellectually understand, acquired through reading books and listening to lectures, while the latter, something one can only experience through one’s heart, inclines one to act accordingly (see Huang 2007). Every rational person can of course have the knowledge of hearing and seeing, that is, understand the justifying reason, but not every rational person has the knowledge of virtue or motivating reason. Harman’s point is precisely that when a person does not have the knowledge of virtue or motivating reason to do an action, it is inappropriate for us to say that this person ought not do the action or that it is wrong for the person to do the action, even if the person has the knowledge of hearing and seeing or justifying reason for not doing the action, because the person is unable to do it, and “ought” implies “can.”

This relates to the inability thesis discussed in the previous sections. There have also been some important attempts to refute this thesis. Moody-Adams, for example, thinks that this inability thesis is wrong for two rea-sons: its questionable status as an empirical claim and its “tendency to base hypotheses about what some agent(s) could not do solely on the evidence of what the agent(s) did not do” (Moody-Adams 1994, 294). In regard to the empirical claim, Moody-Adams argues that it is difficult to prove that there is anyone who is indeed so culturally determined, although presumably it is also difficult to prove that there is not such a person. However, Moody-Adams argues that even if there are such culturally determined persons, this does not mean that they are not responsible for their actions. Her argu-ment is that culture is not an independent thing that externally determines persons living in it; rather all persons living in a culture are responsible for the culture: “we never see any entity properly called ‘culture as such’; what we see instead are ‘regularities in the behavior and artifacts of a group that has adhered to a common tradition.’ . . . A culture—independent of agents who perpetrate culture—cannot be an agent of anything. . . . Culture is created, and even transmitted, by people” (Moody-Adams 1994, 304). James Montamarquet makes a similar criticism of the inability thesis: “if one’s lack of awareness of any wrongness is itself culpable—that is, if due to such fac-tors as not bothering to ask oneself whether this is a wrongful state to be in—then one certainly can, and should, be ‘expected’ to be in some different state” (Montamarquet 1999, 845). Both Moody-Adams and Montamarquet try to argue that, although their immoral actions are indeed due to their ignorance, which results in their inability to do moral things, such people are responsible for their ignorance. In other words, their ignorance is self-affected. But I think Zimmerman, in his argument for cultural determinism, has a point when he says that if “one is culpable for ignorant behavior, then

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one is culpable for the ignorance to which this behavior may be traced,” which is difficult to determine and is certainly not universally true (Zim-merman 1997, 418). I tend to agree with Zimmermann that although many people are culpable for their moral ignorance, we cannot exclude the pos-sibility of cases of innocent moral ignorance, particularly those caused by brainwashing and indoctrination in a totalitarian society. However, even if Zimmermann is right about this and there are indeed people whose igno-rance is affected by others and who, therefore, are not responsible for the wrongdoing they did, this does not mean that we cannot make the moral judgment that it was wrong for them to do it and they ought not to have done it. The reason is that when we make moral judgments using “right/wrong” and “ought/ought not,” in addition to the retrospective meaning that people are responsible for what they did, which may not be true in the case of moral ignorance affected by others, it also has the prospective meaning that they should not do it anymore, which is true whether one’s ignorance is self-effected or other-effected. What is significant is that Wong provides a strong theoretical tool to explain this.

Wong does acknowledge that it is a commonly held intuition “that reasons attributed to an agent are pointless without the possibility of their motivating her” (Wong 2006, 183). However, Wong also points out another equally commonly held intuition: “a man has moral reason to stop beating his wife, regardless of what exists or fails to exist in his subjective [motiva-tional] set S” (Wong 2006, 183). To reflect these two apparently incompat-ible intuitions and bring them into harmony, Wong develops an intrigue hybrid between internalism and externalism of moral reasons. Wong claims that the opposition between internalism and externalism “reinforces the false dichotomy between thinking of the individual as a being upon whom reasons are imposed from the outside or as a being from whom reasons can arrive autonomously from the inside” (Wong 2006, 197). Wong’s hybrid position here is related to one of his universal constraints on morality, the one coming from human nature. This constraint has two parts, correspond-ing to Wong’s distinction between human motivation and individual moti-vation: Moral reasons must be internal with respect to human nature (so morality cannot require human beings to do things impossible for human beings to do) but are not necessarily internal with respect to the motiva-tion of individual agents (so that morality can require an individual to do things this individual is actually not motivated to do) (Wong 2006, 188).8

In other words, the fact that an individual does not have the motiva-tion to follow a moral norm does not mean that, as Harman thinks, we cannot apply the norm to the person, as long as the norm is what human

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beings are generally capable of being motivated to follow and this individual is a human being. This is the reason why we can say that it is morally wrong for a human being to cause harm to another person but cannot in the same sense say that it is morally wrong for a tiger to cause harm to a human being. Harman is right that the murderer has no reason to refrain from killing people, just as the tiger has no reason to refrain from eating human beings. In this sense, the norm of not causing harm to human beings is equally external to the murderer and the tiger. However, causing harm to human beings is something that human beings are generally capable of being motivated to refrain from, but it is not something that tigers are generally capable of being motivated to refrain from. In other words, the norm of not causing harm is internal to the murderer as a human being (although not to him as an individual agent at this particular moment) but not internal to tigers, either as an individual or as a species.

This difference makes a significant difference. It is pointless to say that the tiger should not cause harm to human beings, because it is beyond the nature of tigers (not merely beyond the ability of this or that individual tiger) to be motivated to not cause harm to human beings. In other words, a tiger cannot be made to have a motivation not to cause harm to human beings. In contrast, although an individual human agent may not have the motivation to act according to true and adequate morality, the person can be made to have such a motivation. Moreover, one way to give the person a motivation is precisely to apply the true and adequate morality to the person, even though the person does not have reason to accept such morality, which is nevertheless rooted in this person’s human nature. It is in this sense that Wong claims that “moralities play a crucial role in socializing and in shap-ing the characters and motivations of people who are not already members of any implicit agreement. Part of the point of such shaping is to ‘induct’ or ‘recruit’ new members into existing communities of shared norms. The prescriptive level of moral meaning makes such shaping possible” (Wong 2006, 74). The reason moralities can perform this function is that it is noth-ing but “to channel propensities rooted in this nature” (Wong 2006, 196).

As we have seen, a strong support for Harman’s agent relativism is the common slogan “ ‘ought’ implies ‘can.’ ” In light of Wong’s unique concep-tion of moral reasons in terms of their externality and internality to moral agents, there seems to be a reason to revise it into “ ‘ought’ implies ‘could’ ”: A person’s inability to be moral does not prohibit us from saying that the person ought to be moral, even if the person’s inability to be moral is not his or her own fault, as long as the person could be moral, that is, can be made moral, if not by him or herself, then by others in society, if not

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directly, then indirectly (through the change of the social and cultural envi-ronment, which is responsible for this person’s inability to be moral). It must be noted that Wong’s view is quite consistent with traditional Confucianism, on which he draws deeply. Confucians commonly regard immoral persons as no different from beasts. As a matter of fact, unlike Western philosophers who almost universally regard rationality as the distinguishing mark of being human, Confucians claim that it is morality that tells humans apart from beasts, and therefore immoral people are no different from beasts. However, Confucians are also careful to state that immoral people are no different from beasts only in terms of what they currently are, not in terms of what they could be or ought to be. Confucians believe that, while beasts cannot be made into moral beings, immoral persons, however benighted they are, can be made into moral persons. Thus, there is a famous passage in the Mencius, one of the most important Confucian classics, in which Mencius tells the king, who seeks his advice, that his failure to extend kindness to his people is not due to his inability but to his unwillingness (Mencius 1a7).9

Thus, with Wong’s relativism with constraints, many moral frameworks, such as those of Nazis, professional killers, and robber gangs, which Harman’s relativism allows as moral frameworks, have to be excluded as false and inad-equate. Because all true and adequate moralities have to satisfy these universal constraints, Wong claims, “much of what is moral will be the same for, say, Asian and Western societies, because of the common function of moralities, human nature, and similar conditions across human societies” (Wong 2006, 68). However, in Wong’s view, “such universally valid criteria do not begin to determine a morality with content sufficiently robust and determinate to guide action. As a consequence, some criterion for adequate moralities will be local to a given society. They neither follow from nor are ruled out by the universally valid criteria” (Wong 2006, xiii). Thus, even after those false and inadequate moralities are excluded, there are still multiple true and adequate moralities. This is related to Wong’s idea of moral ambivalence. The universal constraints exclude values that do not serve the function of morality and are inconsistent with human nature. However, after this exclusion, we are still left with a universe of values. Moreover, “we can envision no utopia in which the maximal realizations of these different sorts of value are made compat-ible with each other. Therefore, if a morality prescribes a set of values to be realized or observed in human life, it must specify priorities to govern cases of conflict between these values” (Wong 2006, 7). The difference between different moralities lies in their different prioritizations of these same values: their different decisions about which values should be realized and which have to be sacrificed in order to avoid the conflict among values.

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Thus, even among these equally true and adequate moralities, there can still be practical incoherence as discussed above. What one true and adequate morality regards as the right thing to do may be regarded by a different but equally true and adequate morality as the wrong thing to do, which leaves the agent in question with no answer about whether to do the thing or not. How to deal with such conflicts among these equally true and adequate moralities? Wong’s suggestion is that, instead of complete endorsement or rejection of other equally true and adequate moralities, “we might simply have to broaden our view of what other ways of life are acceptable” (Wong 2006, 82), although we do not accept such ways of life ourselves.10 This is what Wong regards as the value of accommodation. He views accommodation as possible for several reasons. First, because different but equally true and adequate moralities are merely different prioritizations of the same universe of values, which cannot be realized in a single system of norms, moralities subscribed to by others must share a lot of values endorsed by one’s own morality. Second, although some values endorsed by other moralities are rejected in one’s own morality, they are rejected not because they are disvalues but because they come into conflict with other values one wants to endorse. Thus, one can see “the values and moral themes accepted by other individuals and cultures as developments of choices that one . . . might have made in different circumstances” (Wong 2006, 248). Third, accommodation itself can be endorsed, not as a modus vivendi, but as an additional value in one’s morality: “Living with others in productive ways, despite our moral differences with them, can itself be morally valuable. It can be a particularly strong form of respect for persons, and being able to show this kind of respect is a sign of moral maturity” (Wong 2006, 251–2).

This value of accommodation as a way to deal with the practical con-flict among different true and adequate moralities, Wong claims, originates from the Zhuangzi. In Wong’s view, “moral values are human inventions that answer to compelling human needs and desires. . . . The Zhuangzist vision of our moral commitments . . . posits no uniquely best way to satisfy these needs. Instead, there are plural ways to satisfy those needs, none of them the best because each succeeds in honoring certain basic values at the cost of sacrificing others. Every coherent moral code cuts out something of genuine value. Every coherent code, in defining what is right, also requires what is wrong” (Wong 2006, 235). For Wong, the Zhuangzi contains two insights. One is that no one moral perspective is uniquely correct, and the other is that we should pay attention to the real values in other perspec-tives (Wong 2006, 234). On the one hand, because our own perspective is not uniquely correct, we should not reject other perspectives. On the other

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hand, the reason that our perspective is not uniquely correct is not that it is wrong but that it does not exhaust all values, which cannot be exhausted by any single perspective, so we can still be committed to our own values. In other words, the Zhuangzi teaches us how to adopt an attached attitude in terms of moral commitment to our own perspective and a detached view in terms of view of other perspectives.

III. Toward a Patient-Centered Moral Relativism

Our examination here has shown that to a great extent Wong’s pluralistic relativism has succeeded in avoiding some serious problems of relativism without constraints. To the agent-centered relativism that virtually allows any agent to claim his or her action as moral, however atrocious it is, as long as it is consistent with the “morality” this agent adopts, Wong devel-ops a unique view of moral reasons as internal to human nature but not necessarily internal to every human individual. To the problem of practical incoherence of appraiser relativism, he develops his central idea of accom-modation, as an additional value, of all true and adequate moralities. These are extraordinary accomplishments, which make moral relativism not only defensible but also convincing. In this section, I explore a potential prob-lem with Wong’s pluralist relativism and a possible way to avoid it, which I call patient relativism, in contrast to agent and appraiser relativisms, and which I claim is as Zhuangzian as Wong’s, if not even more genuinely so.

We can see the problem I sense in Wong’s moral relativism with regard to both intergroup actions and intragroup actions, where each group adopts a morality that satisfies the same universal constraints Wong stipulates and therefore is true and adequate. On the one hand, Wong’s pluralistic relativ-ism seems to assume that people live largely within their relatively clearly defined groups and interact largely with members of the same group, so that members of one group practicing one true and adequate morality should accommodate the different but equally true and adequate morality prac-ticed by members of another group. However, when we are concerned with intergroup actions, it seems that something other than accommodation is at least sometimes more desirable. First, suppose that a person from group A does something or deliberates doing something to a person from group B. The action is regarded as moral in light of the morality adopted by group A, the group of the agent, but morally wrong in light of the morality adopted by group B, the group of the patient. Should we moral apprais-ers, who belong to group C adopting yet another morality, accommodate

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the morality of group A and so recommend that the person perform the action or accommodate the morality of group B and so recommend that the person not perform the action? Wong’s pluralist relativism, combined with the value of accommodation, does not and perhaps cannot tell us what to do, although my intuition, which I hope is shared by some others, is that we moral appraisers should accept, and advise the agent to accept, the morality of group B to which his or her patient belongs: The action ought not to be performed.

Second, in relation to that, suppose two persons, one from group A and another from group B, perform or deliberate performing an action separately to a person of group C. This action is regarded as moral according to the morality of group A, the group of one of the agents, but immoral by the morality of group B, the group of another agent. Apparently, we as appraisers cannot accommodate both moralities, as otherwise we will have the strange situation in which we consider it moral for a person in group A to do something to someone in group C and immoral for a person in group B to do the same thing to the person in group C, so that we recom-mend the former to perform the action and the latter not to perform the action to the same person in the same situation (here we assume that, other than having different moralities, the person from group A does not have any special relation to the person in group C that the person from group B does not have to the same person from group C, as otherwise the situa-tion may be different). However, if we as appraisers can only accommodate one morality in such a case, which one should we accommodate? Again, Wong’s pluralistic relativism does not and perhaps cannot tell us what to do, although my intuition, which I also hope is shared by some others, is that, in this particular case, instead of the morality of group A or that of group B, the moralities of the two different agents, we should accommodate the morality of group C, the morality of their patient, whatever it is.

On the other hand, even in terms of intragroup actions, Wong’s plu-ralist relativism does not always seem to be able to provide us as moral appraisers with clear answers about how to make moral judgments. Let us use the example Wong uses repeatedly from the film A Great Wall. For the sake of convenience, let us use Wong’s own summary of the story:

A Chinese American takes his family to Beijing to visit his sister and her family. The two young people in this meeting of families, his son and her daughter, cross the culture divide most easily, and the young woman learns the American concept of privacy, which she applies with indignation to her mother’s opening and

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reading her mail before handing it to her. The mother reacts with incomprehension: why should she need permission to learn what is going on with her daughter? (Wong 2006, 24)

Wong uses this story as an example to show that there is a range of ade-quate moralities between which there can be a significant degree of cultural variability: “Traditional Chinese families . . . allow for a sort of parental involvement in a child’s affairs that would be widely considered unjustifi-ably intrusive in the United States . . . the mother does not see her act as an invasion of privacy but merely as a rightful expression of her interest in her daughter’s life” (Wong 2006, 154–5). In light of the value of accom-modation that Wong recommends, we moral appraisers should accept the mother’s action as morally right, but my intuition is that it is wrong of the mother to do so after her daughter adopts the Western conception of privacy, although not before that.

Because I suspect that this intuition of mine will not be as widely shared as my previous intuitions, let me expand the original story. Suppose that the mother has two daughters. After these two daughters are exposed to the Western idea of privacy brought to them by their visiting American cousin, one accepts it, whereas the other rejects it as too individualistic. Then suppose that after this encounter the mother continues to open let-ters to her daughters. The daughter who adopts the Western conception of privacy reacts with indignation, but the daughter who does not like the idea of privacy feels nothing but her mother’s loving guidance. The question here is whether the mother should act differently toward her two different daughters in this matter. My intuition is that the mother should.

If this intuition is still somewhat ambivalent, let me alter the story. Suppose that the Chinese woman comes to the United States to visit her brother. When she sees that her brother does not open his son’s mail, she reacts with incomprehension: “You do not care about the interest and welfare of your son!” Her brother explains the value of privacy, and she is convinced. She returns to China and stops opening her daughter’s letters, at which her daughter reacts with incomprehension: “My mother no longer cares about me!” My question is whether the mother should stop opening her daughter’s letter in this case. My intuition is that she should not.

To summarize and reflect on various intuitions above, I realize that, in discussions of moral relativism in particular and morality in general, the focus is often on the action, the agent, the critic, and the moral reasons the agent and/or the critic has regarding the action, but one element central to all moral relations is either entirely absent or relegated to the background:

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the patient. For Harman, an “ought” statement “relates an agent A, a type of act D, considerations C, and motivating attitudes M” (Harman 2000, 9), where he does not mention the patient at all. This seems also to be the case with Wong, as he states that “we may think of a moral reason as a three-place relation between an agent A, an action X, and a feature in the agent’s situation F that weighs in favor of A’s doing X” (Wong 2006, 68–69). Here the patient is also nowhere to be seen. We are advised by various moral relativists to make moral judgments of an action either in reference to the morality we as appraisers accept or to the morality the agent accepts, and it seems that the morality or values the patient accepts do not count. Even when a morality does ask us to pay attention to our moral patients, it often starts from what we, the agents, think about our moral patients and not what they, our moral patients think about themselves. This is indeed surprising, given that it is the patient who is affected by the action, the moral status of which we ought to be primarily concerned with here. I believe that the idea reflected in various intuitions of mine discussed above is very different from agent and appraiser relativism: what really counts in judging whether an action is moral or not is not what an appraiser or agent thinks about it in light of his or her own morality but what the patient thinks in light of his or her, the patient’s, own standard. Of course, we may disagree with the patient and may want to persuade him or her to accept our standard. However, unless and until we persuade him or her, his or her own standard should be our standard for our actions unto him or her, although not necessarily the standard for our actions unto others, including ourselves.11

So instead of agent and appraiser relativisms, I propose a patient relativism, a position that puts the patient at the central stage of both our moral actions and our moral deliberations.12 An action, or the lack thereof, is moral only if the patient, the person who receives it, approves it.13 As we have seen, such a patient relativism can avoid the potential problem that I see in Wong’s pluralist relativism. In addition, it can better handle the issue about “how to have confidence in one’s moral commitments while recognizing that different commitments are equally justified” (Wong 2006, 328). Wong’s pluralistic relativism claims that different moralities are simply different prioritizations of values shared by subscribers to these different moralities. So, on the one hand, if we think all these prioritizations are equal, there will be a question of why we should be committed to this instead of that prioritization. On the other hand, if we are committed to our prioritization because we think this prioritization is better, then it becomes difficult to think all prioritizations are equal. That is why to balance the

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commitment to one’s own morality and respect for others’ moralities as equal becomes a crucial issue for Wong’s pluralistic relativism and he must use an entire chapter (Wong 2006, chapter 9, 228–72) to deal with this issue. Although I think that Wong’s achievement in this regard is commendable, the very issue he deals with hardly arises in my patient relativism, which recognizes that what the patient regards as a value may be regarded as a disvalue by the agent and vice versa (this of course does not mean that the two do not share any values at all). For example, human beings’ recogni-tion that a damp place is the best place for eels to live will not affect their belief that a dry place is the best place for them to live, to anticipate my discussion of the congeniality between patient relativism and the Daoist Zhuangzi later in this section.

Although patient relativism can avoid the problems of Wong’s plu-ralist relativism, it can also avoid the problem of moral relativism without constraints that Wong’s pluralist relativism intends to address. On the one hand, since according to patient relativism there is only one standard that is relevant in our moral judgment, the standard of the patient, there is no problem of incoherence, theoretical or practical, plagued with appraiser relativism. On the other hand, because the standard of the patient is the only standard of our moral judgment of any action, then, unlike agent relativism, it does not license as moral such horrible actions as committed by people like Nazis, robbers, and thieves. Here, Hitler’s action would be moral only if Jews should be willing to be killed, a robber’s action would be moral only if his victims should like to be robbed, and the action of a thief would be moral only if people should prefer to have their proper-ties stolen. Moreover, it can also avoid the problem of moral universalism that various types of moral relativism, both with constraints and without constraints, intend to avoid. According to patient relativism, an action that is moral when done to one moral patient is not necessarily so when done to a different moral patient. So when we are deliberating or appraising an action, whether done by someone else or by ourselves, we have to consider the interests and values of its patient.

A unique feature of patient relativism is that, while it is an individual rather than group relativism, it can still perform the function of regulating and facilitating social cooperation among individuals, one of the universal constraints of any true and adequate morality according to Wong. Up to this point, when we talk about agent or appraiser relativism, although not explicitly, we are referring to agent–group or appraiser–group relativism. As a matter of fact, in his classical classification of moral relativism into the two types, David Lyons does explicitly emphasize their group nature and talks

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about “agent’s-group relativism,” a view that “an act is right if, and only if, it accords with the norms of the agent’s group,” and “appraiser’s-group relativism,” a view that “a moral judgment is valid if, and only if, it accords with the norms of the appraiser’s social group” (Lyons 1982, 211–2). David Wong’s pluralistic relativism is also a group relativism, and he explains why any plausible relativism has to be group rather than individual based: “no society would afford to make these matters entirely ‘option’ in the sense of leaving to individuals the choice of what priorities to impose on each of these possible conflicts of values. The function of morality to facilitate and regulate social cooperation depends on a substantial coordination of expectations as to how others will decide to behave when important values conflict” (Wong 2006, 81).14 In other words, because one of the functions of morality is to regulate and facilitate social cooperation within a group, the moral standard of right and wrong must be determined by the group itself and not by each of its individual members separately. So not only an appraiser should use the moral standard of his or her group, and not his or her own moral standard, unless it is identical to the standard of his or her group, to make moral judgment about actions of members of the same group; when accommodating a morality of another group which is different from one’s own group, a person should also accommodate the morality of that group and not that of an individual member of that group, if that individual’s morality is different from the morality of the group of which this individual is a member. This is why in the example of a mother open-ing letters to her daughter, who has accepted the Western value of privacy but still lives in a Confucian society in which this value is minimized if not sacrificed, Wong thinks that an appraiser outside of this Confucian society should accommodate the morality of the group that the mother follows and not the morality of the daughter, although this is a morality perhaps the appraiser him or herself, or the group the appraiser belongs to, endorses.

If individual relativism is problematic, however, then group relativism would have the same problem, as group relativism will inevitably revert to individual relativism. In his discussion of Wong’s group-based moral relativ-ism, Christopher Gowans points out two problems. First, “there are often disagreements within a group; in particular, there are frequently those who dissent from a group’s prevailing norms” (Gowans 2007; see also Gowans 2008, section 6); and Gowans argues that it is problematic to think that the dissenting views are mistakes. Second, many people “belong to more than one group, and the values of these groups conflict in some important ways” (Gowans 2007; see also Gowans 2008, section 6). Together, these two problems make it difficult for any individual to determine which value of

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a group or which group’s value one should adopt. So Gowans challenges Wong to “take the complexities just noted seriously without slipping into something that verges on a subjectivism in which the moral statements of each individual, having a somewhat different configuration of group identifications, have different truth conditions—something, I take it, Wong plainly wants to avoid. This account will also need to say something about the conditions under which a group’s values are established, promulgated and regulated” (Gowans 2007). So even Gowans himself also thinks that we have to adopt group instead of individual values, as he shares with Wong and other relativists that if we adopt individual relativism, then, as some critics of relativism have already pointed out, we will fall into the “every-thing goes” subjectivism,15 and if so morality cannot perform its function of promoting social cooperation. Yes, Gowans’ challenge for Wong to provide an account about how to determine the norm of a group is hard, if not impossible, to meet, unless we are talking about a homogeneous society, in which every member agrees on everything morally relevant.

However, individual relativism is problematic only if it is appraiser or agent relativism. Patient relativism will not have this problem. Although it can be thoroughly individualistic, it can perfectly perform the function of morality to promote social cooperation within a group: If an individual has a very idiosyncratic need or desire, as long as it is not a need or desire that itself violates patient relativism, then this person should be left free to satisfy the desire and meet the need, and if he or she cannot do so by himself or herself, other people should assist the person to do so. Of course, other people may think that it is not in the interest of the person to satisfy such desires and meet such needs and try to persuade the person to give up such desires and needs. However, at the end of the day, it is the person him or herself who is supposed to decide whether it is to his or her interest to satisfy such desires and meet such needs. The reason that patient relativism, although individual rather than group based, can perform its social function to regulate and promote cooperation among individuals is that, although it is individualistic, it is not subjectivistic. As a matter of fact, we can even claim that it is realistic in the sense that appraiser or agent moral relativism are not. As we have seen, both appraiser relativism and agent relativism start from different moral frameworks aiming to explain or deal with the so-called intractable disagreement among people with differ-ent frameworks. Wong does not discuss the intractable disagreement, but his pluralist relativism also tries to deal with different moral frameworks as different prioritizations of moral values, which cannot all be integrated into one single coherent moral framework. As moral relativists are generally

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not moral realists, the different moral frameworks their relativist theories try to deal with are considered to be human inventions to regulate human cooperation. In contrast, patient relativism does not start from different moral norms about ways of human life but from different ways of human life themselves, and in this sense it is a type of moral realism. For the same reason, patient relativism, unlike appraiser relativism and agent relativism, is entirely a normative ethical theory and not a meta-ethical theory, as what it tells us is the moral standard about what is a right or wrong thing to do, not the way to think about or deal with the conflict among different moral standards. In this sense, patient relativism, surprisingly, is a universalism: It requires everyone to respect his or her patient’s unique way of life, as long as this unique way of life itself respects other unique ways of life.16

Interestingly enough, although Wong gets most of the inspiration for his pluralist relativism from Zhuangzi, so do I for my patient relativism. Of course, we have very different readings of the Zhuangzi. As we have seen, in Wong’s reading, Zhuangzi assumes that there are common human needs and desires, which cannot all be satisfied. So there are different ways to satisfy them. Equally true and adequate moralities are simply plural ways to satisfy these needs and desires. In my reading, however, Zhuangzi emphasizes that different people have different needs and desires, and for each need and desire there are better ways and worse ways to satisfy them, if there is not a best way (in the sense that it cannot be made even better) to satisfy them. This is made most clear by a series of rhetorical questions raised in a passage in the chapter on the equality of things, the most central chapter in the Zhuangzi:17

If a human being sleeps in a damp place, the person will have a pain in loins and get paralysis. Is that true of eels? If a human being lives up in a tree, the person will be frightened and tremble. Is that true of monkeys? Which of the three knows the right place to live? Humans eat meat, deer eat tender grass, centipedes enjoy snakes, and owls and crows like mice. Which of the four knows the right taste? An ape mates with a gibbon, a buck seeks after a doe, and an eel enjoys company with fishes. Mao Qiang and Xi Shi were considered by men to be beauties, but at the sight of them, fish plunge deep down in the water, birds soar up in the air, and deer dash away. Which of the four knows the right kind of beauty? In my view, the principles of humanity and rightness and the standards of right and wrong are so complicated and confused. How can I make distinction among them? (Zhuangzi 2; 91–93)

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In this passage, Zhuangzi makes it clear that, for example, the dif-ference between humans, eels, and monkeys is not that they have different ways of satisfying the same needs and desires; it is rather that they have different desires and needs. Humans like to live in dry places, eels like to live in damp places, and monkeys like to live in trees. For each of these needs and desires, there are indeed multiple ways of satisfying them, but it is conceivable that they can be ranked according to how well they satisfy the needs or desires in question. What is important here is that, for Zhuangzi, when we try to determine the best place for eels to live, for example, we use the standard of eels, not our human standard. Here, respect for other people’s different ways of life, central to my universalistic and realistic patient relativism, just like accommodation for other people’s different prioritiza-tions of moral values, central to Wong’s pluralistic appraisal relativism, is itself a moral value. I even want to claim that it is a more positive value than accommodation, as the latter seems to lack the whole-hearted willing-ness entailed in the former. Moreover, the reason for respect in my patient relativism, unlike accommodation in Wong’s appraiser relativism, is not that we share many common things with our patients, even though we are otherwise different from them, or that we could have the desire or needs that our patients have. It may or may not be the case in either of the two respects. But the reason to respect others’ different ways of life in patient relativism is simply that our patients are different from us, and this very difference deserves our respect. This point, central to my patient relativism, is made most clear in a different story in the Zhuangzi:

Of old, when a seabird alighted outside the capital of Lu, the Marquis of Lu went out to receive it, gave it wine in the temple, and had the Jiushao music played to amuse it, and a bullock slaughtered to feed it. However, the bird was dazed and too timid to eat or drink anything. In three days it was dead. This was treating the bird as he would like to be treated, and not as the bird would like to be treated. Had he treated it as the bird would like to be treated, he would have put it to roost in a deep forest, allowed it to wander over the plain, swim in a river or lake, feed upon fish, and fly in formation with others. (Zhuangzi 18, 621)

In this story, Zhuangzi emphasizes the difference between agent and patient in terms of their desires and needs. So whether an action is morally right and wrong must be relative to the desires and needs of the patients

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and not those of agents or appraisers. Of course, to emphasize such dif-ferences among different people, patient relativism does not have to deny that there may be some desires and needs shared by agents, appraisers, and patients. What patient relativism requires is that when we are deliberating or appraising an action, we first need to know the particular needs and desires of our patients. If they are the same as those of us as moral agents or appraisers, then there is no distinction whether we use our standards or the patient’s standards. However, if they are different, as is often the case, then our decision about whether to perform the particular action and our evaluation of whether the action is moral must be made by making refer-ences to the standard of the patient.

Notes

1. For a discussion of Rorty’s various strategies to distance himself from relativism, see Huang 2010a, Section 1.

2. Presumably, when an agent makes a moral judgment of his or her own action, he or she also becomes an appraiser, whose judgment is relative to his or her own moral framework. However, unlike the agent relativism that we will discuss momentarily, the agent’s own moral framework is only one of many and cannot claim any superiority over and above any other moral framework in the context of appraiser relativism.

3. For similar criticisms of indexical relativism, see also Kölbel 2004, 303–4, Dreier 2009, 81, and Streiffer 2003, 7–12.

4. By the same token, according to Harman’s theory, when two appraisers make the same moral judgment about a given action from different moral frame-works, it may well be that they really disagree with each other, because this same moral judgment is made from two different frameworks and so does not mean the same (see Lyons, 222).

5. This analogy between Hitler and a tiger and even an earthquake can also help Harman respond to some critics who argue that a judgment of an agent and a judgment of an action are inseparable. For example, Anne M. Wiles states that “the judgment that ‘Hitler was evil’ can be made only because the actions he did, including those he had someone else do, are morally reprehensible; therefore there is no good reason to deny that cross-group moral judgments, such as ‘It was wrong of Hitler to do these actions,’ can also be made. There is an ontological connection between an agent and his acts” (Wiles 1989, 786–7). Similarly, David Copp asks, “suppose we judge that Hitler was evil because we know he did A, and because we think this act was evil. Might we not plausibly judge that it was evil of him to do A, and, a fortiori, that it was evil of Hitler to do A?” (Copp 1982, 239). For Harman, although we hate or dislike hurricanes or earthquakes or tigers

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that kill human beings, we do not say, and it makes no sense to say, that it was wrong for the hurricane, etc., to kill human beings; so our attitude toward Hitler should be the same.

6. To be fair to Williams, the internal reason that he has in mind is quite broad; it not only includes direct but also indirect reasons. For example, we can still blame persons for not being nice to their wives, even though they do not have direct reason to be nice to their wives, as long as they do have some indirect reason to be nice to their wives: “they may have a motivation to avoid the disapproval of other people—for instance, to avoid blame. When a motivation of this kind takes a deeper form than merely the desire to avoid hostility, it can be ethically important disposition that consists in a desire to be respected by people whom, in turn, one respects” (Williams 1995, 41).

7. Indeed, if they are, we would face the problem of infinite regress, as indicated by Blackburn: If one’s moral judgment is relative to the moral framework M that one accepts, which is relative to a further framework M*, which is in turn relative to a framework M**, and so on (see Blackburn 1998, 197).

8. Thus, Wong states that “while reasons are external with respect to the motivations of the individual agent, they are internal with respect to human nature” (Wong 2006, 188).

9. Zhu Xi, the greatest neo-Confucian, for example, states that “human nature can be either bright or obscured, the nature of non-human beings are all out of balance and blocked. The obscured human nature can be brightened, while the nature that is out of balance and blocked cannot be made clear” (Zhu 1997, 51). For an extended discussion of this Confucian view, see Huang 2011, section 6.

10. In addition to (or beyond) accommodation, Wong also talks about learn-ing from other morality and integrating it into one’s own: “If one opens up one’s mind to new sources of value, one should sometimes go beyond acceptance of the new toward incorporating it into one’s commitments. . . . In other words, our moral commitments must remain open-ended and flexible, to a certain degree inde-terminate with respect to what values it affirms and what the relationship of priority is among those values in case of conflict. We must remain ready to affirm values and priorities that are not presently encompassed by our current commitments” (Wong 2006, 237). This is perhaps what actually happens in our moral life, but it raises a question in the context of Wong’s pluralist relativism. Supposing that these pluralist moralities are equally true and adequate, does the integration of one such morality by another result in a morality better than either of the two? If so, can it be a reason that subscribers to the original moralities should now all subscribe to the new one? If not, and the integration of existing true and adequate moralities can result in nothing but another equally true and adequate morality, then what is the point of the integration?

11. Here even “for the sake of the goodness of the patient” cannot be a reason for us to impose our values upon the patient. John Dewey makes a good point in this regard: Although it is good for a person to obtain his completest development,

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“it is also true . . . that he must find this place and assume this work in the main for himself ” (Dewey 1997, 198).

12. I have previously discussed the similar idea under the name ethics of dif-ference (see Huang 2010) and moral copper rule: Do (or do not do) unto others as they would (or would not) have us do unto them (see Huang 2005).

13. One of Wong’s universal constraints on true and adequate moralities, the constraint of justifiability to the governed, is akin in spirit to my patient relativism, as this constraint requires that the interests of the subordinated be satisfactorily addressed. In other words, the subordinator’s action of subordination has to be justifiable to the subordinated (Wong 2006, 58–62). However, Wong is primarily not concerned with the relationship between agent and patient but that between the dominating group and the dominated group, with each group including both agents and patients. Patient relativism requires that the patient standard be used to judge not only actions affecting the patient negatively (action subordinates the patient) but also actions that an agent thinks are beneficial to the patient.

14. James Dreier is one of the very few who prefer relativism with an indi-vidual rather than group basis in his defense of speaker relativism. While acknowl-edging that an individual’s moral standard has to be understood in a social context, he is still in favor of speaker relativism rather than speaker’s group relativism, as he thinks that “speaker relativism is the more general case of which speaker’s group relativism is a species. One way for something to be relative to a person is for it to be relative to that person’s society. If, as speaker’s group relativism would have it, the content of a sentence containing a moral term is fixed relative to a social group then that content is fixed relative to any member of the group. By using the speaker rather than the group we do not lose any relevant information—but we do lose information that might be relevant if we take the group as the relevant feature of the context and drop the individual. So by endorsing speaker relativism we hedge our bets” (Dreier 1990, 21).

15. For example, in his classic criticism of moral relativism, Water T. Stace starts with the difficulty of identifying the moral standard of a social group because members of any group have “wide differences of opinion as to what is right, what wrong” (Stace 1962, 57). We cannot take the opinion of the majority as the stan-dard of the group, as the majority may be wrong; nor can we take the opinion of a minority as the standard of the group, for “there is no principle by which we could select the right minority. And therefore we should have to consider every minority as good as every other. . . . It means in the end that every individual is to be bound by no standard save his own” (Stace 1962, 57).

16. I am aware that many objections may be raised to the patient relativism briefly presented here, which is more fully developed under the name of moral copper rule: do (or do not do) unto others as they would (or would not) like to be done unto (see Huang 2005) and ethics of difference (see Huang 2010, 2010b). Such objections can be roughly classified into the following three categories. The first is related to a third party: what are we supposed to do if person A asks me

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to help him or her cause harm to person B? Should I try to satisfy the desire of A, who seems to be my patient (the object of my action “help”) or the desire of B, who also seems to be my patient (the object of my action “cause harm”)? The second is related to the agent: what if my patient wants me to be his slaves? Should I satisfy this desire of his or her by being his or her slave? The third is related to the patient himself or herself: what if the patient asks me to help him or her gamble, use drug, get drunk, or commit suicide? Should I also try to help him satisfy such desires? I have made detailed responses to each of these objections, arguing that they don’t cause any real threat to the patient more relativism I have been developing (see Huang 2005: 410–6).

17. The Zhuangzi often uses stories involving different animals to illustrate his point. I suggest that these stories are not to be read literally as if Zhuangzi is only interested in inter-species relationship. In contrast, I believe, and I think Wong agrees, that he uses such stories to talk about appropriate human relationships.

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Part II

David Wong’s Responses to Critics

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Toward a Benign Moral Relativism From the Agent/Appraiser-Centered to the Patient-Centered ( in in Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics, edited by Yang

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