Month: April 2013

• April 4, 2013

  The Daoist ethic without principles

  ‘Now the Taoist ideal,’ writes the ever-quarky Raymond Smullyan in his best Lewis Carroll The Tao is Silent, ‘is not so much to feel that he shouldn’t be moral (which is, of course, a morality all its own), but rather to be independent, free, unentangled from moral “principles”‘ (112). The poem from the first chapter of the…
• April 2, 2013

  A moral particularist’s friends

  A moral particularist thinks we can get on well enough, in a moral sense, without a ready supply of principles. What is right to do in one context may not be right to do in some other, but what is right to do in this context is determined by what is revealed in this context.…