Patient Moral Relativism in the Zhuangzi

Moral relativism familiar in the Western philosophical tradition, according to David Lyons, is either agent relativism (moral judgments are relative to the standards of the agent or the agent group) or appraiser relativism (moral judgments are relative to the standards of the appraiser(s) or appraiser group(s)). As Lyons has convincingly argued, they are both problematic. However, in the ancient Chinese Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, we can find a different type of moral relativism, which I call patient relativism (moral judgments are relative to the patients’ standards). In the essay, I aim to argue in what sense Zhuangzi is a patient relativist and how patient relativism can avoid the problem of agent relativism and appraiser relativism.