A Study On The Separation Of Ethical Knowledge And Moral Action In Modern China

In recent years, moral crisis and the dilemma of moral construction have been the social focus in China. The main problem is the separation of ethical knowledge and moral action. In other words, the moral codes valued by the society cannot direct the moral behavior of the masses. The disjunction of what to know and what to do in moral field of China is not a new phenomenon. Many philosophers had discovered this disconnection and tried to explain it from different angles and give solutions in ail periods of the world. And many contemporary researchers also study the separation in depth. Their understandings of the separation and their countermeasures, however, have some limitations. Many of them have tended to attribute the separation to the individual cognitive limitation, to the wrong understanding the relationship of ethical knowledge and moral action, or to the moral education failure. And many of them have overlooked the other social factors. Furthermore, as for the way of unification of ethical knowledge and moral behavior, they lay their hope only on the desire-free and self-devotion of the public, and on the personal efforts such as individual resolve and wise discrimination, or on the vague and general moral education.In contrast, this article believes that the fundamental causes that the division of knowledge and action has been in vogue lie in the ethical regulations and methods of moral construction. On the one hand, our traditional codes of ethics have some faultiness. First and foremost, the traditional moral principles are family ethnics regulated the relationships within extended families. In modern market-oriented society, however, the modes of association among people have changed a lot and the traditional moral norms are not suitable for the universal association. Besides, the traditional passive ethics such as desire-free principles, unequal principles and duty-oriented principles have no appeal to the citizen and reduce their moral needs. Last but not least, elite-oriented morality leads to nationwide hypocrisy and the shortage of moral action. On the other hand, the traditional moral construction falls into wrong paths. For example, the4elite-centred politics in which governments and other official organizations make an entire monopoly of everything leads to that the common people prefer withdrawing from ail public affairs and conducting no moral action. At the same time, the everlasting moral control also results in that the masses lack of moral cognitive capacity and the stagnation of moral development. The moral level of many people has remained at the stage of obeying the ethical principles passively. In addition, that many system arrangements turn a blind eye to the moral results of the systems has given rise to the conflicts and tension between the ethnical consequences of regulations and the social ethnical aims.Our era has witnessed the continuous increase of individual independence, the recovery of subject consciousness, the popularisation of critical thinking, and the emergence of new ethnical principles. Under such a circumstance, both the transformation of ethnical principles and the improvement of moral construction methods are necessary for the unification of ethical cognition and moral action. On the one hand, in order to rebuild the authority of ethical criterion and lay a rational foundation for the unification, we should reform and innovate the ethical principles. For instance, we should prefer social morality to family ethics; prefer positive moralities to passive ethics; prefer relative multivariate ethics to absolute unified morality. We should also correctly understand the relationship between morality and economy, morality and individual desires, morality and self-love, and moral rights and moral duties. The common people should stick to the lowest moral requires, first and then pursue high-level moralities step by step. On the other hand, we should improve the methods of moral construction so that lay a real foundation for the unification. For example, we should...