Ethics from a daocentric perspective: Normativity, virtue, and self-cultivation in early Daoist thought

This dissertation examines the moral dimensions of early Daoist thought in dialogue with contemporary moral philosophy and comparative religious ethics. I begin by considering some of the barriers, both academic and cultural, which have impeded a full appreciation of early Daoism as a moral tradition. I suggest that the lingering legacy of Orientalist assumptions in contemporary Western understandings of Daoism in concert with our inherited conception of “morality” as a special system of obligations have conspired to obscure the ethical significance of early Daoist texts. I attempt to remedy this situation by first defining morality in terms of the question “How should one live?” rather than exclusively in terms of obligations and duties. By expanding the domain of the moral, it is my contention that we will possess a more inclusive comparative apparatus for the study of non-Western ethical traditions, particularly those which emphasize the virtues and ways of life. I then suggest that the most perspicuous way of seeing how a tradition asks and answers the question “How should one live?” is to examine its sources of normativity, or what justifies the claims that ethics makes on moral agents, and how they are realized within its larger practices and forms of life. Employing this methodological framework, I argue that we can view early Daoism as a form of virtue ethics which commends its practitioners to cultivate certain virtues of the Dao (“the Way”), its source of normativity. In essence, what early Daoists seemed to have been doing is actually cultivating specific virtues of the Dao through their specifc “techniques of the Way.” Particular attributes of the Dao such as “tranquility” ( jing), “emptiness” (xu), “responsiveness” (ying), and “selflessness” (wu-si), when acquired in inner cultivation practices and exercised in intelligent awarenss, can all be characterized as stable psycho-physiological states or dispositions which seem to enable the early Daoist to achieve those goods and excellences indicative of the well-lived life and integral to the general project of human flourishing. It is through such cultivation, according to early Daoist texts, that one fully realizes the Good.