The universality of virtue ethics — III — Daoism
Aspects of virtue ethics are found in all major Eastern philosophical traditions
Is virtue ethics an approach limited to the Greco-Roman-Christian tradition, or has it been explored also by other philosophies, for instance those that developed around the same time in India and China, and later on in Japan? This is the question we have been exploring in the first two essays of this series, on Buddhism and Confucianismrespectively. We conclude with a look at Daoism, on the basis of a provocative paper published by Yong Huang in the Journal of Asian Studies and entitled “Respecting Different Ways of Life: A Daoist Ethics of Virtue in the ‘Zhuangzi.’”
The author’s goal is to make the case for a Daoist virtue ethics based on the Zhuangzi, one of the fundamental Daoist texts. Huang points out that a major difference among accounts of virtue ethics lies in their specific conceptions of virtue. Aristotelian virtue ethics, for instance, belongs to the eudaimonist account common in ancient Greece and Rome, while David Hume developed an intuitionist account of virtue. It is this latter approach that Huang attempts to apply to Daoism.
Intuitionism is particularly appropriate here because the Zhuangzi doesn’t work by producing arguments, as an Aristotelian text would…
