HUMA Research Seminar - Toleration or Respect?: The Zhuangizan Attitude toward Different Ways of Life

Abstract:

Toleration has been almost universally regarded as an indispensable virtue one ought to have when encountering people of races, religions, languages, cultures, gender, sexual orientations different from one’s own. This is unfortunate, however, because toleration includes objection as one of its necessary components: to tolerate an object means to have objection to it though without interfering with it. However, it is wrong to think we have, and it is wrong for us to have, objection to people simply because of their races, religions, languages, cultures, genders, and sextual orientations different from us. The proper virtue we ought to cultivate in this context is respect as advocated in the Zhuangzi, which is fundamentally different from respect that has sometimes been associated with the very conception of toleration. 

Biography:

Yong HUANG, Ph.D in Philosophy (Fudan University) and Th.D in Religious Studies (Harvard University), is a professor of philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The editor-in-chief of Dao: A Journal of Comparative philosophy and Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, He is the author of Religious Goodness and Political Rightness: Beyond the Liberal-Communitarian Debate, Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed, and Why Be Moral: Learning from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers, as well as five books in Chinese. In addition, he has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters each in Chinese and English.