Confucianism, Democracy, and the Virtue of Deference

Some democratic theorists have argued that contemporary people should practice only a civility that recognizes others as equal persons, and eschew any form of deference to authority as a feudalistic cultural holdover that ought to be abandoned in the modern era. Against such views, this essay engages early Confucian views of ethics and society, including their analyses of different sorts of authority and status, in order to argue that, properly understood, deference is indeed a virtue of considerable importance for contemporary democratic societies and the citizens who constitute them.     

Against The Bifurcation Of Virtue

It has become customary in the virtue epistemological literature to distinguish between responsibilist and reliabilist virtue theories. More recently, certain problems affecting the former have prompted epistemologists to suggest that this distinction in virtue theory maps on to a distinction in virtue, specifically between character and faculty virtue. I argue that we lack good reason to bifurcate virtue in this manner, and that this moreover counts in favor of the virtue reliabilist.     

略论董仲舒的"以德为国"思想

在汉代,如果说,汉武帝时期确立的"德主刑辅"是一种积极的统治政策的话,那么,董仲舒的"以德为国"(<春秋繁露·立元神>)则从治国理念上对这种统治政策提供了系统的理论支持.本文认为,"以德为国"的德治思想既是代黄老之学而兴的一种积极的治国理念,同时也是对武帝时期刑法酷烈在理论上的补偏救弊,其实质和落脚点在于以德正君.     

Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession.     

从个人德性到社会和谐

"德性"是指人的品质和品性,德性的诉求体现了人类建设一种理想的社会状态的努力.人类社会之所以需要德性,其根本的原因就在于现实的个人相对于自己的关系的非自足性.这种非自足性通过人与自然、人与人和人与自己的精神的关系等方面表现出来.     

Deference and Uniqueness

Philosophical Studies - Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue...     

社会生活共同体建构的德性之维

社会生活共同体所指涉的是人们自由、平等、和睦、友爱的和谐生活的样态.德国社会学家滕尼斯划分了共同体与社会这两个概念并以其指涉人们的两种生活样态的对立.共同体生活是自然而然的,社会是人工制品.对现代社会人为共同体是否可能的争论也因此而展开.站在历史唯物主义的地平线,以社会建设的视角分析人为共同体的可能路径就成为当代的问题域.     

情绪的社会建构理论

情绪的社会建构理论认为,尽管情绪活动的产生基础于一个或多个行为生物系统之上,但是情绪的功能性意义主要是在社会文化系统中获得的;情绪存在于社会所创设、人们所扮演的角色之中;情绪是社会建构的产物,其本质只有在社会水平上加以分析才能得以完全充分的理解     

第二次认知革命与社会建构论的产生

第二次认知革命是后现代主义的革命。它的直接结果是促进了社会建构论的产生。社会建构论主张(1)知识是建构的,建构是社会的建构,而不是个体的建构。(2)人格、态度、情绪等心理现象并不存在于人的的内部,而是存在于人与人之间,是文化历史的产物。(3)语言并非是具有确定意义的透明的媒介,语言是先在的,规定了思维的方式。(4)没有超越历史和文化的普遍性知识,我们对于心理现象的理解是受时间、地域、历史、文化和社会风俗等制约的。(5)心理学家应该关注话语的作用,话语分析是心理学的基本研究方法。     

Deference as a normative power

Much of the literature on practical authority concerns the authority of the state over its subjects—authority to which we are, as G. E. M. Anscombe says, subject “willy nilly”. Yet many of our “willy” (or voluntary) relationships also seem to involve the exercise of practical authority, and this species of authority is in some ways even more puzzling than authority willy nilly. In this paper I argue that voluntary authority relies on a form of voluntary obligation that is akin (in some respects) to the kind of obligation one undertakes in making a promise. Voluntary authority depends, that is, on the possibility of taking on certain obligations more or less at will. It is generated through an interpersonal transaction that involves a directed act of deference, on one side, paired with appropriate uptake of that deference, on the other. Deference, in the relevant sense, should be understood as a normative power that is exercised when agents transfer deliberative discretion to others, undertaking directed obligations to treat others’ directives as content-independent and peremptory reasons. Voluntary authority, thus understood, is both grounded in and constrained by the equal moral authority or autonomy of the participants, since only autonomous agents have the standing to defer in a normatively significant way.     

Deference,respect and intensionality

This paper is about the standard Reflection Principle (van Fraassen in J Philos 81(5):235–256, 1984) and the Group Reflection Principle (Elga in Nous 41(3):478–502, 2007; Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8(3):281–300, 2011; Titelbaum in Quitting certainties: a Bayesian framework modeling degrees of belief, OUP, Oxford, 2012; Hedden in Mind 124(494):449–491, 2015). I argue that these principles are incomplete as they stand. The key point is that deference is an intensional relation, and so whether you are rationally required to defer to a person at a time can depend on how that person and that time are designated. In this paper I suggest a way of completing the Reflection Principle and Group Reflection Principle, and I argue that so completed these principles are plausible. In particular, they do not fall foul of the Sleeping Beauty case (Elga in Analysis 60(2):143–147, 2000), the Cable Guy Paradox (Hajek in Analysis 65(286):112–119, 2005), Arntzenius’ prisoner cases (Arntzenius in J Philos, 100(7):356–370, 2003), or the Puzzle of the Hats (Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8(3):281–300, 2011).     

"正义是社会制度的首要美德"之学理根据

个人能具备美德是人们都能理解的,但制度能具备美德却是需要加以严密论证的.在当代社会中,制度具备美德是一种普遍的诉求,正义是社会制度的美德,而且是首要美德.在一个具备了正义秩序和正义美德的社会制度中,社会才能获得发展的前提,个人才能合理追求自己的幸福,同时其他美德也能得以塑造成型.     

社会公德维护需要建立社会公平机制——从"见义不为"说起

每个社会的道德建设都需要在维护和创新两个基本层面展开,社会公德维护是其建设的中心任务.目前中国社会维护公德面临的突出问题是遵守和践行社会公德往往会使人陷入道德悖论现象的"怪圈"而难以自拔,进而导致"道德冷漠症"屡见不鲜.维护社会公德的当代课题就是要走出这种"怪圈",这就需要在历史唯物主义方法论原理的指导下,正确认识产生"怪圈"的社会历史原因,构建维护社会公德的社会公平机制.     

The Virtue of Gossip

abstract

The moral status of gossip is generally defmed negatively from a Western perspective and, I argue, is or should be accorded a more positive role in African accounts of ethics. In a broadly communitarian vein, I argue that a characteristically Western approach to gossip is problematic - in that it casts a fundamental aspect of human life as moral wrongdoing, does not provide an adequate fit between wrongness and censure, and excludes significant morally positive values realised through gossip - and argue for a more nuanced account. Examining and responding to five arguments for the viciousness of gossip, and proposing four candidate virtues, I develop an account that distinguishes vicious from virtuous forms of gossip.