The Stone Reader

Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer.

. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.

he takes it to be evidence of both our intellectual laziness and our fallibility—the ever-present possibility that our beliefs might be wrong

For it’s not at all clear why the influence of culture on our moral beliefs should be taken as evidence that cultures influence the moral truth itself

For instance, in his recent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt argues that, far from being a way of holding our moral beliefs up to critical scrutiny, moral reasoning is generally something we use merely to convince others of long-held beliefs that we are unwilling to abandon.

For one, however obvious it may be that culture plays an important role in our moral education, it is nevertheless very hard to prove that our moral beliefs are entirely determined by our culture, or to rule out the possibility that cultures themselves take some direction from objective moral facts.

Second, moral relativism, for its part, seems like an odd and unwarranted response to ethnocentrism.

When the nineteenth-century sociologist William Graham Sumner later named this tendency “ethnocentrism,” the term, and the allegation, became a mantra of twentieth-century cultural anthropology.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct.

During the Song and Ming dynasties in China, the term kung fu was widely used by the neo-Confucians, the Daoists and Buddhists alike for the art of living one’s life in general, and they all unequivocally spoke of their teachings as different schools of kung fu.