Research Interests for David Wong

David Wong (Ph.D. Princeton, 1977) is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy. Before he came to Duke, he was the Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University and the John M. Findlay Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. His works include Moral Relativity (University of California Press, 1984) and Natural Moralities (Oxford University Press, 2006, translation in Korean by Chulhak-kwa-Hyunsil forthcoming, and translation in Chinese from Renmin University Press is in the works), "On Flourishing and Finding One's Identity in Community" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1988),"Universalism versus Love with Distinctions: An Ancient Debate Revived" (Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 1989), "Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity," (Ethics, 1992), "Xunzi on Moral Motivation" (Chinese Language, Thought, and Culture: Nivison and his Critics, 1996), "Reasons and Analogical Reasoning in Mencius" (Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, 2002), "Relational and Autonomous Selves" (Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2004), "Zhuangzi and the Obsession with Being Right" (History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2004), and "Moral Reasons: Internal and External," (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2006). He has written articles on moral relativism for A Companion to Ethics, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Ethics, and Dictionnaire de philosophie morale. He was interviewed on the subjects of cultural and moral relativism for the Public Television Series, "The Examined Life." He has written on comparative ethics for The Encyclopedia of Ethics and on comparative philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. He is co-editor with Kwong-loi Shun of an anthology of comparative essays on Confucianism and Western philosophy: Confucian Ethics: a Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The main subjects of his research include 1) the nature and extent of moral differences and similarities across and within societies and how these differences and similarities bear on questions about the objectivity and universality of morality; 2) the attempt to understand morality naturalistically as arising from the attempt of human beings to structure their cooperation and to convey to each other what kinds of lives they have found to be worth living; 3) the nature of conflicts between basic moral values and how these give rise to moral differences across and within societies; 4) how we attempt to deal with such conflicts in moral deliberation; 5) the relevance of comparative philosophy, especially Chinese-Western (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) comparative philosophy, to the above subjects; 6) Whether our reasons to feel and act are based solely on what we already desire or whether reasons transcend what we desire and are used to critically evaluate and shape our desires; 7) the extent to which a person's recognizing that she has reasons to feel and act in certain ways can enter into the constitution of her emotions and change those emotions.

Current projects:

A book on the classical Chinese thinkers Mencius, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi. Work on the relation between practical reason, desire, and emotion

Areas of Interest:

Ethical Theory, 
Moral Psychology, 
Comparative Ethics, 
Chinese Philosophy

Recent Publications

1. D. Wong, "Growing Virtue: The Theory and Science of Developing Compassion from a Mencian Perspective", in The Philosophical Challenge from China, edited by Brian Bruya (Accepted, 2014?), MIT Press [abs]
2. D. Wong, Response to Blum, Response to Geisz and Sadler, Response to Hansen, Response to Gowans, Response to Bloomfield and Massey, Response to Huang, in Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and his Critics, edited by Yang Xiao and Yong Huang (Accepted, 2013), SUNY Press [abs]
3. D. Wong, "Cultivating the Self with Others", in Dao Companion to the Analects, edited by Amy Oberding (Accepted, 2013), Blackwell (This chapter is on the moral psychology of the Analects..)
4. N. Hassoun & D. Wong, Sustaining Cultures in the Face of Globalization, Culture and Dialogue, vol. 2 no. 2 (2013), pp. 73-98 (Journal date is 2012, but it has come out in 2013.) [abs]
5. D. Wong, "Integrating Philosophy with Anthropology in an Approach to Morality", Anthropological Theory (Accepted, 2013) [abs]