Ethics without principles in Lao-Zhuang Daoism

Abstract

This study illustrates how ethics is possible without any appeal to antecedent "ethical principles" by drawing on Lao-Zhuang Daoism. What makes Lao-Zhuang Daoist ethics so different from prevailing accounts of the ethical life is that it provides an account of why persons should be apprehensive of being "principled" if they wanted to become morally sensitive human beings. These insights are in turn grounded in the Daoist's naturalistic account of mind and experience, and this, as I detail, is vastly different from much of western philosophy. For the Daoist, the practical takes precedence to the theoretical. Their account of the ethical life illustrates how certain forms of abstract knowledge ("knowing-that") can potentially end up inhibiting the ability to respond to situations ("knowing-how"). Daoist ethics is first and foremost centered around the cultivation of perceptual and non-cognitive capacities such that conceptual and theoretical experience do not obstruct the ability to understand and respond to problematic situations. iv Chapter Summary -"Anarchical Ethical Naturalism"This dissertation clarifies and defends the ability to do "ethics without principles" from the Daoist perspective. It is not simply that ethics is "without principles" for the Daoist. From the Daoist perspective or what this study will call "anarchical ethical naturalism", "principled conduct" obstructs the capacity to properly understand and respond to situations. Being "principled" (that is, being merely rationally or purposively guided) is both epistemologically and morally suspect. It both involves misinterpreting situations (epistemology) and misguidedly acting from that ignorant set of dispositions (ethics). "Principled Conduct", i.e., "willed" or "purposive" conduct (有為), is a smaller subset of other epistemologically and morally suspect dispositions. For the Daoist, disclosing the world such that attention is merely brought to the products of cognition obstructs the ability to understand and perceive situations. The Daoist identifies (the ironically named) "knowledge" (zhi, 知), or what can be considered a particular, perceptually limiting form of "knowing that" and the concepts formed in experience, as having the capacity to obstruct and obscure our relationship to the natural world. It is when "knowledge" becomes reified and ungrounded in non-cognitive experience that problems emerge ("knowingthat", then, does not always obscure perception. It is only when it is ungrounded in experience as a whole that there are problems). It is for this reason that the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi often claim that one ought to be "without knowledge" (無知), that the sage "does not know" (不知), they practice "sitting and forgetting" (坐忘), and other similarly described practices. When we mistakenly think that the names of "things" (ming, 名) and the concepts we form accurately and exhaustively correspond to the natural world, this predisposes us to coercive, "purposive" conduct and involves having desire for "objectified things" (有欲). As useful as rati...