Ethics in Early China by Chris Fraser

Author:Chris Fraser [Fraser, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two

New Departures

8 Moral Tradition Respect

Philip J. Ivanhoe*

In “The Normative Impact of Comparative Ethics: Human Rights,” Chad Hansen develops and employs the notion of moral tradition respect (hereafter MTR) to argue for a particular view about the role of comparative ethics in moral philosophy (Hansen 2004). His immediate aim in developing a conception of MTR is to describe criteria for respecting other moral traditions, by which he means “taking seriously” a moral tradition, foreign or domestic, outside the mainstream of a broadly liberal view of rights.1 Such “respect” is based upon three conditions concerning the distinctiveness, structural complexity, and ethical success of a moral tradition, and these are presented as a way to make clear the proper aims and approach for comparative ethics.

Upon first glance, the phrase “moral tradition respect” easily lends the impression that Hansen is concerned with a particular kind of respect: the kind owed to moral traditions. His account of MTR, though, shows that his goal is to describe the conditions for offering respect to a moral tradition; to be more precise, his goal is to describe the conditions that warrant moral respect for (purportedly) moral traditions.2 He further claims that when we understand the proper conditions for according moral respect to a tradition we will be able to see how such respect functions in the project of comparative ethics. While the project of analyzing the concept of MTR is both original and potentially insightful, there are good reasons to question Hansen’s account of MTR and his related claims about its role in comparative ethics. In order to facilitate an exploration of these questions, I shall consider some things one might mean by MTR and use these possibilities to illuminate the nature and function of Hansen’s distinctive account.

Among the first questions one might ask about MTR is what exactly do we mean by respect? There are quite a few issues to sort out here. For example, we might understand MTR on the model of respect for persons. As such, MTR would be an initial stance from which we view other traditions, one that commands us to recognize that they are entitled to and people can claim for them certain rights, and we must treat them with some as yet unspecified level of dignity. The challenge for such a view would be to describe what it is about the nature of moral traditions that could possibly warrant such respect.3 In the case of persons, religious justifications for fundamental respect provided the earliest answers to this question. In more modern, secular moral theory, Kantian ideas about the nature of moral agents serve as the basis for such respect. One might argue that such a view about what we owe each other’s traditions entails not only some minimal level of respect for the tradition but also provides a warrant to ask other traditions to justify their moral claims, the idea being that at least part of what it is to respect a given moral tradition is to hold it to the same standards we expect from any viable moral system.

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