The 1973 archeological discovery of important documents of classical thought known as the Huang-Lao Boshu coupled with advancements in contemporary jurisprudence make possible a reassessment of the philosophies of pre-Qin and early Han China. This study attempts to elucidate the importance of the Huang-Lao school within the intellectual tradition of China through a comparison of the Boshu's philosophical position, particularly its understanding of the relation between law and morality, with the respective views of major thinkers of the period--Confucius, Han Fei, (...) Lao Zi, Zhuang Zi, and to a lesser extent, Shen Dao, Shen Buhai and the authors of the Guan Zi and He Guan Zi. So doing reveals Huang-Lao to be a unique and sophisticated social and political philosophy which, until its expulsion from court by Emperor Wu and subsequent adoption by Daoist religion, served as the ideological foundation for the post-Qin reforms of the early Han. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the traditional reading of Daoism as naturalism and the interpretation of wu wei as “acting naturally.” I argue that such an interpretation is problematic and unhelpful to the would-be Daoist environmental ethicist. I then lay the groundwork for a philosophically viable environmental ethic by elucidating the pragmatic aspects of Daoist thought. While Daoism so interpreted is no panacea for all of our environmental ills, it does provide a methodology that may prove effective in alleviating some (...) of our discomfort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use Angle's book as a platform for consideration of a (...) number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Human Rights and the Limits of Conversation:A Reply to Stephen AngleRandall PeerenboomSteve Angle correctly notes that I do not believe that he provides a satisfactory answer to the questions of how to determine whether we are dealing with a single rights concept or discourse or multiple concepts or discourses. He also correctly notes that I believe that philosophical discussions of how to understand concepts [End Page (...) 324] (and usually even discussion of the concepts themselves) tend to divert attention from the real human-rights issues that affect people's lives.One response to my first claim is to suggest that I locate the problem in the tension between what looks like a community-based definition of concepts and his endorsement of a holistic approach to meaning according to which our individual webs of commitments always vary to some extent from one to another.1 There is a tension between a conventional view of concepts that looks to community practices and holistic approaches to meaning that focus on the webs of beliefs of individuals. But that issue, which I agree is not overly troublesome for the present purposes, is not related to the main objection I raise to his adoption of Brandom's theory of concepts. The basic point is that the switch to the more practice-oriented commitments approach to concepts (from the shared-meanings view of concepts) does not provide meaningful criteria for determining when commitments are sufficiently similar or different to decide claims that people are using the same concept or different concepts. Accordingly, it does not solve the philosophical issues that arise in assessing claims such as "Li Buyun and Joseph Raz are using the same concept of rights" or "China has a distinctive rights discourse and thus rights are contingent rather than universal" or "China has a rights discourse similar to that in the West, which supports the view that rights are universal."Angle's second response to my first criticism is to agree that there will be problems drawing lines, and that where we draw the lines will be arbitrary to some extent, in part because of the generality of concepts and in part because where we draw the lines will be affected by our normative views and our purposes for using the concepts. But he suggests that this is not problematic. However, the commitments approach is not very useful philosophically if two people can score commitments in very different ways, or include some commitments and not others in the calculus, and thus reach different conclusions on whether they are using the same concept of right. At least this failing is more than a little problematic for a philosophical account of concepts that purports to promote cross-cultural dialogue by allowing us to sort out claims about whether we are using the same concept or different concepts, whether we mean the same thing by "rights," and whether China's rights discourse is distinctive.But perhaps Angle means that the inability to state clearly whether people are using the same concept, or whether China has a distinctive rights discourse or one similar to Western rights discourse, is not problematic in the practical sense that it does not matter very much to the real human-rights issues that affect people's lives. If so, then we are in basic agreement on the second issue.Support for this view is found in the following passage from his response: "Chinese rights discourse has been, by and large, distinctive (that is, different in various ways from much of Western rights discourse), but this distinctiveness does not stand in the way of communication, dialogue, and constructive engagement. Identifying conceptual differences only leads to angry stares if one wants to manufacture an excuse for ending the conversation. Even then, anyone familiar with my argument should be able to see that the obstacle to conversation is not the conceptual difference [End Page 325] but the desire not to cooperate." This claim suggests that differences in concepts are not as important to resolving rights disputes as the desire to continue the conversation.First, neither I nor Angle claim that differences in concepts are never important to resolving... (shrink)

In _The Limits of Irony: Rorty and the China Challenge, I argued that while Rorty's ironic liberalism offered certain advantages over its more foundational Enlightenment ancestors as a possible starting point for political reforms in China, in the end the commitment to substantive liberal values was not likely to find much support in China. In his response, Rorty suggested that as an empirical matter Chinese would be better off if they endorsed Western liberal democracy. I replied that the empirical record (...) is more ambiguous with respect to the merits of democracy. Moreover, any claim about the applicability and desirability and human rights is both an empirical and a normative claim; Chinese may find a communitarian alternative to liberalism more desirable. (shrink)

The PRC has often criticized Western human rights policies based in part on the claim that liberal democracy and human rights are nothing more than the culturally contingent by-product of Enlightenment Europe incompatible with China's cultural and political traditions and out of step with contemporary circumstances in the PRC. Recently, Richard Rorty has offered a pragmatic alternative to liberal democracy and human rights founded on the universal claims and metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment. At the same time, Rorty remains unabashedly (...) ethnocentric, asserting the superiority of ironic liberalism and "our" culture of rights. Whether his liberalism and rights culture stripped of its foundational and universal baggage will prove any more congenial to the development of liberal democracy and individual rights in China than its Enlightenment parent is examined here. (shrink)

In Law's Empire, Ronald Dworkin advances two incompatible versions of law as integrity. On the strong thesis, political integrity understood as coherence in fundamental moral principles constitutes an overriding constraint on justice, fairness and due process. On the weak thesis, political integrity, while a value, is not to be privileged over justice, fairness, and due process, but to be weighed along with them. I argue that the weak thesis is superior on both of Dworkin's criteria: fit and justifiability. However, the (...) weak thesis must be amended to allow for coherence in policies as well as in principles: the social consequences of legal decisions must be taken into account. (shrink)