Difference Stories and Patient Moral Relativism in the Zhuangzi: A Response to Waldemar Brys

I was initially attracted to the unique type of ethics in the Zhuangzi 莊子 through a number of stories, which I later call difference stories in contrast to familiar knack stories. At my first attempt to characterize the unique moral idea conveyed by these stories, I call it the moral Copper Rule: Do (don’t do) unto others as they would (wouldn’t) like to be done unto, in contrast to the familiar moral Golden Rule: Do (don’t do) unto others as you would (wouldn’t like to be done unto) (Huang 2005). As I went through the text more carefully and extensively, I realize that this is not an isolated idea in the Zhuangzi, but a general idea going throughout the text, including all three divisions of chapters, the inner, the outer, and the miscellaneous. So I expanded my discussions of this Zhuangzian ethics by drawing on the much broader text and characterized it as the ethics of difference (Huang 2010a), the virtue ethics of respect (Huang 2010b, 2015, 2023a), and patient moral relativism (Huang 2018), to capture the basically same idea as conveyed by “copper rule.” As this is not only a distinctive interpretation of the Zhuangzi but also a novel ethical idea, while it receives warm reception from some scholars, there are also objections to it both in terms of its interpretation of the Zhuangzi and as a normative ethical theory (see Moeller 2023; Fraser 2014), to some of which I’ve made responses (Huang 2022a, b, 2023b). Waldemar Brys’ chapter belongs to the former; moreover, instead of trying to find counterexamples in the Zhuangzi, he focuses on my interpretation of the three difference stories that I’ve been highlighting in my previous publications on this topic, claiming that the ethical idea I find in these stories is actually absent in them, to which I’m happy to make the following response.