Philosophy East and West

David B. Wong’s 2006 monograph, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism,¹ presents and defends a sophisticated and nuanced form of moral relativism that has been in development since his 1984 work, Moral Relativity (Xiao and Huang 2014, p. 1). The present volume, Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy, is a collection of six critical essays focused on Natural Moralities, which are followed by Wong’s responses to each of his critics. I see the greater contribution of this volume, when we consider the title’s conjuncts, to be the discussion of moral relativism, so in this review I will leave aside the debates over how best to interpret various Chinese philosophers.

In Natural Moralities, Wong draws from “a broad set of empirical studies in the natural and social sciences and the humanities such as psychology, psychotherapy, evolutionary theory, game theory, anthropology, sociology, history, and literature” to better identify a defensible form of relativism (Xiao and Huang 2014, p. 2). This review, in following many of Wong’s critics, will focus on four of his theses. First, there is the relativistic thesis, which “holds that there is no single true morality” (Wong 2006, p. xv). Second, there is the pluralistic thesis, which “recognizes limits on what can count as a true morality” (ibid.). Third, there is the accommodation thesis, which holds that any adequate morality will have to include the value of accommodation of moral disagreement, which is to say the commitment to “supporting noncoercive and constructive relations with others although they have ethical beliefs that conflict with one’s own” (ibid., p. 64). Here Wong puts forward “the idea that the function of moral relativism is to promote open-mindedness, accommodation, and the enrichment of our values”; other ways of life should be seen as “real, competing rival[s] to our own way of life” (Xiao and Huang 2014, p. 8). Finally, there is the functions thesis, which holds that an adequate morality will promote and regulate cooperative social activity and beneficially transform the natural propensities of human beings (Wong 2006, p. 40). I will now turn to the six critical exchanges in Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy before offering my own remarks on the volume.

Lawrence Blum argues that Wong is missing an important universal criterion for true and adequate moralities, namely that they “must be for human beings as human beings” (p. 37). In other words, adequate moralities “must operate not only within a particular group but must address every human being; and [they] must have something to say about how we are to treat other human beings as such, not as members of our particular group” (p. 37). [End Page 1381]

Wong allows for this criterion at a local level but does not include it with the universal requirements of adequate moralities. He claims that in this way he “does not pretend that we can dismiss [those without the human qua human criterion] on the grounds of a definition, or alternatively, on the grounds that our view is somehow rooted in the nature of things” (p. 187). Instead of these options, when one faces someone who has a circumscribed scope of moral concern, “one might try to encourage interaction with them that promotes emotional responsiveness to the needs and interests of those outside their circles of present moral concern” (p. 188). This response is part of the overarching theme in Wong’s original project that meta-ethical theory must account for the complexity of a shared future for our global community.

Steven F. Geisz and Brook J. Sadler argue that naturalistic constraints of the sort Wong defends “cannot serve legitimately to delimit the set of adequate moralities from all contenders” (p. 48). In other words, “moralities can only be ruled out as inadequate on the basis of considerations that involve specifically ethical norms, something that...