Hu Yilin vs. ChatGPT5.6SolPro
The previous dialogue felt pretty good to me, so I seized the momentum and did another round; once again I’m just posting the full flow of the conversation. If you want the final article, you can jump to the end.
1. Framing the Question: Motive, Outcome, and Moral Praise
Hu Yilin:
Let’s talk about another philosophical question, following the same process as before.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro：
Okay, following the previous process:
I’ll first pose a philosophical question and give two common, everyday ways of understanding it; you give your intuitive judgment in 1–2 sentences. Then I’ll raise a less common follow-up point for you to support or refute. If we come to anything especially interesting, we’ll pause to summarize the insights and the implicit assumptions.
Today’s question
If a person does the right thing, but entirely from selfish motives, does his action still have moral value?
Imagine a wealthy businessman donating a huge sum of money. He does in fact help many people, but he does it only to win fame, improve his company’s image, or even get tax benefits.
One common view is: the outcome matters most. No matter what he thinks inside, the people who were helped received real benefits, so this is still a good deed and deserves approval.
Another common view is: motive determines moral value. If a person treats helping others merely as a means of profit, then although his action produces a good result, it cannot count as genuine goodness; at most it is a successful transaction.
What is your intuition: does this wealthy businessman deserve moral praise? Why?
Hu Yilin:
In ethics I may lean more toward virtue ethics, and I would question the very way the ethical issue is being discussed. For instance, I think several of your concepts here are ambiguous: “right,” “moral value,” and “moral praise.”
First of all, what is moral “rightness”? That is precisely what we ought to be trying to discuss, yet you presuppose the conclusion in the very first sentence of the question—doesn’t that amount to begging the question?
Perhaps here you are smuggling in a “God’s-eye view” again: you want to say that objectively (in God’s eyes) what he did was right, but subjectively (in terms of motive) he did not want to do good. But the problem is that when we are discussing a question, we should not presuppose the conclusion, nor should we presuppose a detached viewpoint. And besides, you seem to know his subjective motive as if you could read minds. Who, other than God, could do such a thing?
From the standpoint of a real public, at most we can say, “This wealthy businessman claims that his only motive was to avoid taxes,” but perhaps he is even nobler than that: he does good without seeking recognition, he is very modest, or he hopes to attract other wealthy businessmen to donate as well, and so intentionally emphasizes the benefits of donating. How on earth are you and I supposed to know his true motive?
Perhaps you’ll say that this is only a hypothesis, merely setting up a definite situation to make discussion easier. But the problem is that this hypothesis strips away the complexity of the real world and the finitude of human beings, and designs an absurdly simple scene together with an infinitely omniscient viewpoint. Such a presupposition is precisely illegitimate in ethical discussion—because ethical problems exist exactly because of human finitude and the complexity of reality. If our world were that simple and could be seen in panoramic view, then the “human beings” living in it might not be animals that talk about “ethics” at all. It is precisely because of finitude that we have to weigh “value”; it is precisely because of complexity that there are all kinds of hesitation and entanglement.
So we need to reconsider this case while giving up the God’s-eye view, and we find that the case should have two different versions:
First, the wealthy businessman is me, because only I can clearly know my own motives. This kind of ethics is a first-person discussion of sorts, meant to convince one’s own conscience rather than to provide an argument that persuades the public. From this angle I may lean toward some kind of non-strict deontology, or perhaps a morality of conscience: if my conscience is clear, that is enough.
Second, we look at the question from the standpoint of an omnisciently limited public. We must admit that our knowledge is incomplete; we cannot know the wealthy businessman’s true motive, nor can we exhaust the calculation of the “consequences” of an action. In this respect I may lean toward virtue ethics: one has to judge good and evil by taking into account a person’s whole long-term conduct and speech, making it hard to give an accurate assessment of any single deed.
From either angle, the calculation of “consequences” is also limited. I sponsor a student so that he has money to go to school; that seems like a good thing. But if this person does not go to school, he can only work hard to make a living, and perhaps he can also find a good job and be beneficial to society. Yet after going to school, on the one hand he develops the habit of relying on others, and on the other hand, after graduating four years later, he may fail to find a good job and instead become idle and unemployed. So how exactly are we supposed to count this result? Stories like “The Farmer and the Snake” happen often in real life as well: the farmer saves the snake, but in the end the snake harms more people. How is that to be calculated?
Of course, under an ideal setup, you can forcibly stipulate a definite result, but even a definite future may look good or bad to different people. For example, which is better: assembling screws in a factory or mooching off your parents at home? Or, for a dying person, is prolonging life by a few days of suffering good or bad? Different people will evaluate these things differently.
I know utilitarians use concepts like the greatest happiness of the greatest number as their standard of measurement, but as I said in the previous round of dialogue about truth and happiness, I do not accept some God’s-eye view of happiness.
Fundamentally, I do not think the point of ethics is to “calculate” some precise answer. The theme of ethics is indeed to “weigh good and evil,” but this weighing should not be a kind of “calculation,” because it simply cannot, like science, control variables and carry out precise experiments. The weighing of good and evil is more like my weighing “whether to have a burger or noodles for dinner”: I am indeed weighing them, and I even sometimes think things through and calculate calories and the like, but by and large my way of weighing is to recall and imagine the two flavors, and then appeal to intuition.
For my own part, the process of becoming good is one of continual self-examination and clarification: questions like “what kind of person should I be” and “what kind of things should I do,” and then reflecting on my actual behavior in light of these ideas, giving rise to emotions like pride and remorse, and safeguarding those emotions so as to provide intuition for the next action.
2. Finitude, Conscience, and the Second Person
ChatGPT5.6SolPro：
Your criticism of the original question is basically valid. It does in fact compress several judgments that ought to be kept separate into a single question:
1. Whether the action may or should be done—this is the question of “rightness.”
2. What value the action embodies—for example, goodwill, justice, generosity, or prudence.
3. Whether the actor deserves praise—this concerns motive, ability, cognitive conditions, and responsibility.
4. Whether the public ought to praise him—this is still a public practice and will produce effects of encouragement, exemplarity, and power.
A single donation can perfectly well satisfy descriptions like these at the same time: it solves an urgent difficulty; it does not display the virtue of generosity; it is insufficient to prove that the donor is a good person; yet the public, considering the need to encourage donations, still chooses to affirm it in a limited way. There is no contradiction here; only the answers to different questions are different.
So the original question’s “did the right thing, but from selfish motives” does not necessarily beg the question in a logical sense—it can simply be fixing some normative property of the action in advance so as to examine whether motive affects praiseworthiness—but I did not explain what “right” actually means, nor did I distinguish evaluation of action from evaluation of character. Your criticism of it is accurate.
Are thought experiments necessarily illegitimate?
Here I only want to retain one limited reservation.
I agree: if a thought experiment simply takes conclusions reached from an omniscient viewpoint and directly imports them back into reality to adjudicate real people, then it does indeed obscure the most important conditions of ethical life—uncertainty, value conflict, the opacity of others, and the openness of consequences.
But thought experiments can also have a weaker use: they are not there to pass judgment on reality, but merely to check the relations between concepts. For example:
Suppose that in some case we know the motive; does motive change “praiseworthiness” without changing “whether the action is permissible”?
What it answers is not “what exactly is this wealthy businessman like in reality,” but rather “what role does motive play in our moral language.” Such idealization is more like a microscope than a courtroom. A microscope cannot replace understanding the entire life-world, but it is not useless either.
Therefore, I would narrow your claim slightly to this:
Temporarily bracketing finitude can be useful for conceptual analysis; but whenever we are judging real people, finitude is not noise, but part of the ethical problem itself.
In your first-person scheme, it seems there is still hidden an “inner God”
You say that when the rich businessman is “I,” only I can clearly know my own motives. Here there is precisely a point worth pursuing further.
We are not only unable to exhaust the consequences; we may also be unable to exhaust our own motives. Human motives are seldom single, transparent, or separable from one another. A person who says, “I donated only to avoid taxes,” may indeed be pursuing self-interest; but he may also at the same time feel compassion, only unwilling to admit it; or he may use a cynical self-description to protect himself and avoid facing the fact that “what I really want is to be seen as a good person.”
In other words, after driving God off the public tribunal, we cannot then set up a completely transparent interrogation room inside the soul.
This also makes “as long as my conscience is clear” seem insufficient. Having a clear conscience can prove that a person is in harmony with his present conscience, but it cannot prove that conscience itself has not been shaped by prejudice, habit, environment, or self-justification. A cruel person who is certain he is righteous may also have a clear conscience.
Therefore, first-person ethics is not just “listening to conscience”; it must also include:
subjecting conscience itself to examination.
The process of moral growth you ultimately describe—posing the question “What kind of person do I want to become?” and adjusting the next action through pride and regret—looks very much like a long-term training of moral sensibility. This picture is powerful. But it can also form a closed loop:
- I judge actions by my existing intuitions;
- actions produce pride or regret;
- those emotions then reinforce the original intuitions;
- and then I take the more stable intuitions as evidence of virtue.
If the initial sensibility is already distorted, this loop may not be self-improvement but self-reinforcement. Moral intuition is very much like taste, but “a taste that becomes ever more stable” does not mean “a taste that becomes ever more good.”
So rather than saying we should “protect” moral emotions, it may be more accurate to say: care for them, while also letting them be rubbed against reality.
You have proposed the first person and the third person, but the second person is still missing
Besides “how I face my own conscience” and “how the public evaluates a person,” there is another ethical perspective that cannot be reduced to the first two:
What demands can those affected by my actions directly make upon me?
The first person asks:
Am I willing to become such a person?
The third person asks:
What sort of person is he? How should the public evaluate him?
The second person asks:
What right do you have to treat me like this? Are you willing to hear my objections? When I say I have been hurt, do you need to respond?
For example, a rich businessman supports poor students, while at the same time requiring them to publicly recount their most humiliating experiences for the company to make promotional videos. We do not know his full motives, nor do we know how much money this publicity will ultimately raise. The rich businessman may even sincerely think: “Public stories can attract more people to donate, so this is for the good of more students.”
But the students who receive his aid can still say:
“Your support has helped me, but that does not mean you can turn my suffering into your brand asset.”
This demand does not depend on our knowing the rich businessman’s soul, nor on our calculating the total amount of happiness in society over the next fifty years. It comes from a more local, more limited, yet also more concrete ethical relation: one party must explain its actions to another and acknowledge that the other has the standing to refuse, question, and demand revision.
This means that finitude does not necessarily force us to suspend judgment. We can still make some provisional, local, revisable judgments:
- I do not know whether you are a bad person;
- I do not know how much good this will ultimately bring;
- but I do know that at this moment you are not taking the voices of those affected seriously.
Such judgments are not a God-like total verdict, but they are enough to support ethical action.
The “rather uncommon view” I want to put forward
Perhaps the core of virtue is not possessing pure motives, not even having a clear conscience, but being “correctable.”
A virtuous person is not someone who can always see himself clearly and always foresee consequences; that is still the image of an omniscient being. A virtuous person is more likely someone who:
when others point out “you did not see me,” “you misunderstood me,” or “your good intentions are hurting me,” can look again, retell his own motives again, and genuinely change his actions.
In this way, humility is no longer merely one virtue among many, but more like the condition that allows other virtues to avoid self-corruption. Good intentions, if not correctable, become paternalism; a sense of justice, if not correctable, becomes fanaticism; conscience, if not correctable, becomes self-enclosure.
So my next question to you is:
Does the authority of conscience come from “it is my most sincere inner voice”, or from “it is willing to be corrected in the face of the claims of those affected”?
If a person reflects on himself for a long time, has sincere motives, a consistent character, and is indeed clear of conscience; but those he helps keep telling him, “Your way of doing things is hurting me.” Who, in your view, has the stronger moral claim over whom?
Hu Yilin:
You are right; “I know my own motives” is also limited, and sometimes one is not as clear as an observer. So reflecting on one’s own words and deeds, thinking through and clarifying one’s desires and emotions, is itself a kind of practice of continually coming to know oneself better; the fundamental aim of philosophy is precisely “Know thyself.” “A clear conscience” is the goal of practice, not an unconditional starting point. And the process of knowing oneself cannot be wholly a matter of inward introspection; the world and other people are all one’s “mirrors,” and relying on these “mirrors” to reflect on oneself is an important philosophical method of practice. So I agree with you: one must let one’s body and mind be rubbed against reality.
The second-person dialogical perspective you mention is indeed a form of friction. However, I do not quite think your “correctable” is an additional discovery. What I have stressed as “unceasing self-reflection” already includes “unceasing correction”; I simply did not make it clear enough before that such correction is not only through self-centered inward contemplation, but also simultaneously includes “By taking history as a mirror, one can know the rise and fall; by taking people as a mirror, one can discern gains and losses” — we can read books (history) to understand the diversity and developmental nature of values, and thus break out of the limits of our own era; through observing others and others’ reactions to me, we can more clearly understand our own words and deeds.
To know an object clearly, we need to examine it from different perspectives and in different ways; we also cannot always be too close to it. I, for one, cannot clearly see the glasses perpetually perched on my own nose bridge; sometimes I must take them off and look at them from a little distance. I cannot take my own inner world and set it at a distance, but I can look back on myself through others as mirrors, thereby gaining richer perspectives. First-person introspection, second-person dialogue, and third-person public judgment are all different angles on “knowing the self”; they do not contradict one another, but must be integrated. The so-called “I” is not, in the Cartesian sense, an abstract spatially nonextended point hiding behind the pineal gland; “I” is, in Heidegger’s sense, “Dasein,” which has always been a “being-in-the-world” and a “being-with.” If I try, in the name of self-knowledge, to shut myself off and ignore my social situation, that in itself is dishonest.
So I still maintain that the answer to the question “who has the stronger moral claim over whom” is always “oneself over oneself”; I think the task of ethics or moral philosophy is to guide people toward self-reflection and self-discipline. This does not exclude the fact that on other levels of theory we may value public demands more—for example, at the levels of cultural custom and legal institutions. However, the reason these public issues can become public is that each participant is honest with and respectful of his own conscience.
As Kant said: there are two things that fill me with awe—“the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” We believe that everyone can see the starry sky; this is the basis of science, and the shared nature of the starry sky guarantees that science is a public language. And we believe that everyone can listen to the moral voice within their own heart; this conviction is the basis of ethics. Although, because individual differences make it far more diverse than the starry sky in our eyes, we believe that since we coexist in the same historical situation, the moral sense within us can more or less communicate and learn from one another; thus ethics, too, can become, relatively speaking, a language with public character.
Other people’s accusations are important not because accusations from the second person are more important than those from the third person, but because whether they come from the second person or the third person, whether they come from the real world or from stories in books, these demands and accusations move me myself and help me more fully reflect on myself, and that is why they matter.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro：
Your clarification this time made me realize that I was indeed not being fair when I described “correctable” in my previous round as an additional discovery. What you call “unceasing self-reflection” already includes correction; what really needs to be supplemented is only that reflection does not mean sealing consciousness off and staring at oneself, but rather letting oneself acquire distance in history, in others, and in public life. Your image of “taking the glasses off the bridge of the nose” illustrates this very well.
And your understanding of the “self” is no longer the atomistic subject, either. The first person, second person, and third person are not three courts vying for sovereignty with one another, but different channels through which a situated person comes to know himself. In this sense, “one’s strongest moral demands are those one makes on oneself” does not necessarily mean subjective arbitrariness; it may mean: No matter how others evaluate me, I must ultimately bear judgment and action myself; I cannot outsource my conscience to the public, tradition, or authority. On this point I agree. No one can repent for me, and no system can become a good person in my stead. However, one finer—and more fundamental—disagreement still remains between us. “I bear it” does not mean “I confer its validity” “The criticism of others moved me, and that is why it matters” can be interpreted in two ways. The first is psychological: Only when a demand truly enters my experience and changes my understanding can it actually influence my action. This is certainly true. A demand I have never heard, never understood, cannot directly become a motive for my action. Ethical action must ultimately pass through the subject’s apprehension. But the second interpretation is stronger: The reason another’s demand has moral force is that my conscience recognizes it. On this point I still have reservations. For this mixes together two questions:- whether a moral demand is valid;
- whether I already have the capacity to feel that it is valid.
From this angle, what is called “oneself to oneself” already structurally contains an internalized second person. Conscience resembles a courtroom because in it there are already accusers, defenders, witnesses, and judges. Even when I reflect alone, I am not an indivisible point muttering to myself; I am continuing a dialogue jointly shaped by others and by history.
So our two positions may take the following relation:
You emphasize that any ethical demand must ultimately be grasped and borne by the subject personally;
I emphasize that the very fact that a subject can make such a demand of itself presupposes a preexisting world of relations.
The former prevents us from outsourcing responsibility; the latter prevents us from turning conscience into a sovereign.
The next question
So I want to narrow the problem to a very specific fork:
If a wronged person’s accusation never, even once, touches the perpetrator’s conscience, does it still hold against the perpetrator?
Suppose the perpetrator is extremely sincere and keeps reflecting, not deliberately evading anything; but because of his upbringing, temperament, and capacity for understanding, he goes through his whole life without ever seeing what he did wrong. The victim’s accusation is clearly expressed and the facts are basically credible, yet it never enters his conscience.
At this point there are two ways of putting it:
First: the accusation certainly holds; it is just that the perpetrator lacks the ability to recognize it. The force of the moral demand is independent of his acknowledgment.
Second: only when the demand can be honestly grasped by the subject does it truly become “a moral demand upon him”; otherwise it may be a public judgment, a legal demand, or the victim’s standpoint, but it has not yet become his own ethical obligation.
Which one do you incline toward? This probably gives the real test of whether “one has the strongest moral demands on oneself” is really a claim about the way responsibility is borne, or rather a claim about the source of moral validity.
III. Clarifying the Perspective: Why Moral Philosophy Begins from the “I”
Hu Yilin:
From what perspective are you discussing the issue? For example, when you say [we still seem able to ask: has my conscience really discovered the facts, or has it merely succeeded in persuading itself?], who is this “we”? Is it “I”? If what you mean is that “I” need to ask myself such questions often, that even things I once thought I could put my conscience at ease about sometimes need to be reexamined, especially when I receive new outside stimulation, then it is worth continuing to ask about issues I had previously let go. — This is still within the scope of what I call “self-reflection.” If by “we” you mean a third person outside the two sides in the dispute, meaning the public, then what should be asked is “is he deceiving himself.” And this kind of third-person questioning, if heard by the person at the time, may in fact touch off his own reflection; but if it is not heard by the person concerned, then it is nothing but idle talk. Unless we appeal to law, or to some kind of arbitral institution, and force the parties involved to come and hear our questioning, then that becomes another level of problem outside what I mean by moral philosophy. You always like to mix some kind of God’s-eye view into the discussion, and that creates confusion in the standpoint.
The mirror analogy is the structure of egocentrism; I am not keeping this quiet, but stating it openly: moral philosophy, and indeed “philosophy” in general, is an egocentric inquiry. The theme of philosophy is “know thyself”; the object of moral philosophy is “my conscience,” that is, to “know myself” specifically from the moral angle, of course by examining history and exchanging with others in order to know myself better. Anything that goes beyond this goal is not within the scope of philosophy. I do not advocate treating others as mere instruments; respecting the autonomy of others’ personhood is of course part of virtue. But philosophy is originally something that “takes off after dusk,” a perspective of “after-the-fact reflection,” not to say that when I am dealing with people in ordinary life I am already carrying out moral-philosophical thought. Moral philosophy is, in the first place, an activity of reflection at some later moment after actual interactions have taken place. So as you said, “the other person is first himself, and only then can become my mirror.” But it is precisely at that “then” that I enter the inquiry of moral philosophy.
So of course it is not what you called “I listen to your pain in order to perfect my own character,” because when “I listen to your pain,” I have not entered the domain of moral-philosophical research at all. The reason I listen to your pain may be because we are friends, may be because I have supported you financially, may be because I have hurt you—but certainly not because “I am conducting research in moral philosophy.” So when I listen, I should of course respect your personhood. Only when I “reflect on my past act of listening” does my “reflection” become “in order to perfect my own character,” and it is not as though every moment of my reflection is only for myself; I certainly need to put myself in the other person’s place, regard him as an independent person, and try to see myself from within his inner world in order for this to become a “mirror.” If I do not acknowledge the other person’s independent mind, how could I possibly take him as a mirror, and try to “see myself through his eyes and think of myself in his heart”? And these acts of empathy and reflection can produce many results: reflection may strengthen my sympathy, strengthen our friendship, or provoke my anger and lead to the breaking of the relationship, and so on. Among all these possible outcomes, only a small part belongs to the domain of moral philosophy, whose ultimate purpose is my own self-growth—I am merely emphasizing that the aspect of reflection that belongs to moral philosophy has self-knowledge and self-growth as its aim, rather than wielding a moral cudgel to judge others. Moral philosophy is not the whole of life, after all.
People do not acquire the first person from birth; the capacity for self-reflection is not something newborns possess, and I do not think newborns can hear the so-called voice of conscience either. Self-consciousness, reflective capacity, and moral feeling all arise in the course of living and interacting within some real world, and this process of course includes, as you say, “being called, questioned, promised to, praised, and forgiven by others.” But the point is that children do not study moral philosophy. What I am stressing is that moral philosophy is grounded in conscience. I am not saying that conscience appears out of nowhere for no reason; I am saying that only after we have gone through sufficiently rich life and relationships, and thereby formed the capacity for self-reflection and a sense of conscience, does moral philosophy become possible.
As for your final question, it has fallen completely into a state of subject confusion. The key question is: from what standpoint are you judging “whether the accusation holds”? If you take the standpoint of the perpetrator, then of course the accusation does not hold. If you take the standpoint of the judge, then the domain should be jurisprudence rather than moral philosophy. And from the standpoint of an ordinary bystander, what judgment can I arrive at? I may judge that “the victim’s accusation holds,” but this judgment of mine, like his accusation, is nothing but idle talk. My moral judgment has meaning only because it can touch me myself (and not the perpetrator or the victim) — it is precisely because I take the situations of perpetrator and victim as mirrors for reflecting on myself that my judgments about them can belong to the domain of moral philosophy. Otherwise, if I am neither judge nor party to the case, why should I make moral judgments about two people who have nothing to do with me? It is because everyone judges others in light of his own conscience that these judgments can constitute the public language of moral philosophy. If each person were a God or an alien standing outside everything, we would not, and should not, gather together Zhang San’s comments about Li Si, Wang Wu’s comments about Ma Liu, and all sorts of unrelated idle talk as though they were one and the same topic for discussion — precisely because each of us is fundamentally discussing “ourselves,” our moral judgments about different people become a public issue.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro:
You are right to press this. In the previous round I actually did not remain stably within a single perspective.
The most accurate self-diagnosis is this: I first stood in a third-person normative-theoretical or metaethical perspective, assuming that “whether some moral demand holds” can be independent of whether the person concerned acknowledges it; then I used first-person language such as “is my conscience deceiving itself” to explain it; and finally I used “we” to quietly elevate you and me, the participants in this discussion, into a kind of shared judge who could seemingly overlook both sides of the dispute. This “we” originally referred to you and me who are discussing, but I endowed it with a power of judgment beyond the actual conditions of knowledge available to you and me, so your saying that it mixed in a God’s-eye view is accurate.
Within your framework, that sentence can only be written in separate parts:
- First person: “Am I merely succeeding in persuading myself?”
- Third person: “Based on the words and deeds I can observe, is he possibly deceiving himself?”
- Second person: “Are you avoiding the facts and feelings I am expressing to you?”
- Institutional perspective: “Is the available evidence sufficient to establish some kind of responsibility?”
These four sentences belong to different practices; they cannot be mixed together by a floating “we can still ask.”
Likewise, “does the victim’s accusation hold?” is also an incomplete question that does not specify the domain. More strictly speaking, one should ask separately:
Does it express the victim’s genuine experience?
Has it already become a demand of conscience in the perpetrator’s first person?
Does it suffice to support a legal or institutional judgment?
Can it serve as material for a bystander’s reflection on himself?
There is no free-floating “holds” that belongs to no one.
How I now understand your position
What you advocate is not moral egoism in the usual sense, but something that can be called a methodological first-personism, or more precisely:
A reflexive ethics of self-cultivation.
Its “egocentrism” does not mean that the interests of others have only instrumental value, but that philosophical activity has an ineliminable first-person index: philosophy is ultimately asking “Who am I?” “How should I live?” “What kind of person am I becoming?”
Here we need to distinguish two moments.
In actual interaction, the other person is first of all an independent person. When a friend confides his pain to me, what I face is his pain, not a piece of moral material available for study. I should listen to him because there is some real relation between us, not because I am doing philosophy.
When the moment of after-the-fact reflection arrives, that interaction becomes a mirror through which I understand myself. I ask again: why did I respond that way at the time? Did I truly hear him? What do my sympathy, irritation, fear, or anger reveal? At that point, the aim of reflection is indeed self-knowledge and self-formation.
So “the other person is first himself, and only then becomes my mirror” not only does not refute your position; it in fact captures exactly the two orders you distinguish:
Ethical life is first-order coexistence; moral philosophy is second-order reflection.
One of my mistakes in the previous round was to conflate the “how should I respond to others” in first-order relations with the “how do I know myself through this” in second-order reflection. And then I went on to accuse the “mirror” metaphor of possibly instrumentalizing others, while in fact overlooking that you had already separated the two by means of time and by type of activity.
Our real disagreement may lie mainly in the boundary of “moral philosophy”
You think that self-knowledge and self-cultivation beyond the first person no longer belong to moral philosophy, but may instead belong to other domains such as law, institutions, custom, or public governance.
I now think this is a fairly complete philosophical program, but I will not fully accept your division of the boundaries of “philosophy.” I would still regard questions like “how should public institutions be arranged,” “what reasons can people demand of one another,” and “what rules can receive common justification” as part of practical philosophy, and not merely as legal technique.
But this is already a disagreement over disciplinary boundaries, rather than a premise I can quietly presuppose. A clearer way to put it would be:
You are doing first-person, self-cultivating moral philosophy;
What I kept introducing in the previous round, by contrast, was a third-person or intersubjective philosophy of public norms.
The latter is not necessarily illegitimate, but it cannot pretend to be merely the natural extension of the former. If I want to shift to a discussion of public norms, I must explicitly announce: we are no longer asking only “how do I know myself,” but beginning to ask “how do different subjects form rules that can be jointly justified.” You are perfectly free to refuse to enter this new domain.
Your final paragraph made me see a stronger kind of publicity
The public language you speak of is not formed by a neutral judge summing up the verdicts of countless people, but by countless first-person reflections illuminating one another.
This can be stated as follows:
The publicity of moral philosophy is not the objectivity of a God’s-eye view, but the reflexivity of moral judgment.
When I say, “Zhang San’s betrayal of his friend is wrong,” the reason this sentence can have philosophical significance is not that I have acquired the authority to judge Zhang San, but that this judgment must be able to return to myself:
Have I betrayed others in a more concealed form?
Am I willing to let the same standard judge me as well?
If I were Zhang San, what reasons would I use to defend myself?
Is my anger at Zhang San now driven by a sense of justice, or by schadenfreude?
If a third-person moral judgment refuses to return to the speaker, it is very likely to be nothing more than gossip, identity performance, group attack, or power rhetoric.
In this sense, moral judgment has a boomerang-like structure:
Whatever judgment I hurl at others must be allowed to return and strike myself.
And the reason the case of strangers is worth discussing is not that we have the right to judge strangers, but that those cases present life forms that I, too, might become. Zhang San and Li Si are not abstract specimens; they are my possibilities. They enable me to temporarily take off the glasses I have been wearing constantly on the bridge of my nose.
This also explains one of your key claims:
Superficially, each person is discussing different people, but in fact each is discussing themselves in different materials; precisely because these different materials can be reclaimed in the first person, they constitute the same public topic.
This is not the subjectivist “everyone talks past everyone else,” but rather a reflexive common language.
Then the new question is no longer “whose accusation is objectively valid”
A more suitable question is: At what point does a moral judgment actually become moral philosophy?
Imagine a thoroughly hypocritical person. He accurately points out:
“It is wrong to betray a friend.”
His argument is clear, and the reasons he offers can move many listeners; but he himself keeps betraying friends, and never allows this judgment to return to himself. The moment others evaluate him by the same standard, he immediately makes excuses, changes the subject, or claims that his case is exceptional.
In ordinary normative theory, we might say: his character is hypocritical, but “It is wrong to betray a friend” may still be a correct judgment. The speaker’s character does not determine the truth or falsity of the proposition.
But in the moral philosophy you describe, there seems to be another possible answer:
He may well have uttered a sentence with moral content, yet he has not truly engaged in moral philosophy; because this sentence has not become the mirror by which he knows and constrains himself.
In this way, moral philosophy does not primarily reside in propositions, but in a reflexive activity. The same sentence, spoken by someone willing to accept its return, may be philosophy; spoken by someone who only wants to manipulate others and never examine himself, it may be nothing more than moral rhetoric.
So what I really want to ask now is:
What is the smallest unit of moral philosophy: a “moral proposition”, or a “reflective activity” that is willing to let the proposition return to itself?
Put more concretely: does that hypocrite’s “It is wrong to betray a friend” actually count as moral philosophy? Or does moral philosophy truly begin only when the listener turns that sentence into a question addressed to oneself?
IV. “I” as the Smallest Unit of Moral Philosophy
Hu Yilin:
I agree that questions like “how should public institutions be arranged,” “what reasons can people demand of one another,” and “what rules can receive common justification” should be regarded as part of practical philosophy. But the reason these questions are still philosophical questions is still based on an egocentric perspective. First I need to recognize: “What kind of public institutions am I willing to accept,” “What kind of reasons am I entitled to demand,” “What kind of rules will I defend” — these are the true foundations of these practical philosophies. Further, I should recognize that other people are also each their own “self”; the reasons I use to defend myself should apply to others in the same context, while my personal preferences and aversions may well differ from those of others — just as at different moments in my own life, my personality has not necessarily been the same. Respecting one’s own independent personality and historical circumstances, and then “extending oneself to others” (推己及人), is the way philosophy opens up publicity. The important thing is that publicity needs to begin from the “I,” extending oneself to others, rather than beginning from a posited “God,” deducing everything from an absolute fictive standpoint with no one there, and from there reaching all people.
The smallest unit of moral philosophy is neither some “proposition” nor some concrete “activity,” but the “I.” The “I” is a natural “unit,” an indivisible “one.” Once the “I” is broken apart, it cannot be pieced back together. When I think and reflect, I naturally take the “I” as an indivisible minimal unit to examine — as mentioned earlier, this capacity is not innate; newborns do not yet have this concept of “I.” The unity, temporal continuity, and spatial boundedness of the “I” are all ultimately formed through long-term adjustment with the world and with others, and are still continually growing. But once complete self-awareness and reflective capacity have formed — that is to say, once the capacity for “philosophy” has formed — then the “I” is already a minimal unit.
The object of philosophy has always been the “I,” and “moral philosophy” distinguishes a specific direction of self-reflection, namely reflecting on the self from the standpoint of moral good and evil, right and wrong. What moral philosophy speaks of is not propositions like “It is wrong to betray a friend,” but “I (who betrayed a friend) am in the wrong.” So if a person merely utters a proposition without a subject, then of course that does not count as moral philosophy. Only when the proposition itself contains the person’s self (and thereby can be extended to others) does it belong to the domain of moral philosophy.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro：
I now understand your position more clearly: you are not trying to reduce publicity to private likes and dislikes, but rather reconstructing the order of emergence of publicity.
Not first fabricating a universal rational subject with no body, no history, and no location, and then letting it legislate for everyone; rather, first starting from an situated “I,” and asking:
What am I willing to accept?
By what right do I defend myself?
When positions are exchanged, do I still acknowledge the same reason?
Then I realize that others, like me, are also an “I” with their own history, feelings, and judgments. Therefore, I cannot on the one hand demand that my own uniqueness be respected, while on the other hand treating the uniqueness of others as noise that can be ignored.
In this sense, what you want is not a “disembodied universality,” but a transferable universality. Publicity is not the elimination of all first persons, but the enabling of different first persons to exchange positions with one another and return to one another.
“I” is the smallest unit of accountability, not the smallest unit of constitution
As for “the smallest unit of moral philosophy is the I,” I now basically accept it, but I would place a limitation on “indivisible”:
“I” is the smallest unit of responsibility in moral philosophy, yet not necessarily the smallest constitutive unit in a psychological or metaphysical sense.
Of course I can distinguish among my own desires, emotions, memories, habits, bodily sensations, and social roles; I can also distinguish the past me, the present me, and the me I want to become. Reflection itself even requires this internal differentiation: the present me must temporarily take the past me as an object of inquiry; otherwise I cannot say, “I was wrong then.”
But these distinctions cannot be used to shift responsibility onto one particular part. If I betray a friend out of jealousy, I may say:
“Jealousy influenced me.”
But I cannot ultimately say:
“It was my jealousy that betrayed my friend, not me.”
Desire can be analyzed, history can be explained, emotion can be traced back, but in the end, the one who says “I did that” can only still be the whole self.
So the indivisibility of “I” does not mean that there are no differences within it; it means that these differences are ultimately taken up by an irreducible first person. It can be summed up in three sentences:
I can be analyzed, but I cannot be replaced.
My actions can be explained, but that does not automatically absolve me.
There can be conflict within me, but the task of bearing responsibility cannot be assigned to some local fragment.
Understood this way, “I” is not imagined as a metaphysical atom without internal structure. It is more like a totalizing relation of belonging: these desires, memories, and actions that conflict with one another are nevertheless all “mine.”
“I was wrong” is not just adding a subject to a proposition
You say that what moral philosophy talks about is not:
“Betraying a friend is wrong.”
But rather:
“I, who betrayed my friend, was wrong.”
This is not merely adding “I” as the grammatical subject of the original proposition; it changes the nature of the entire act of speaking.
“Betraying a friend is wrong” can be nothing more than a piece of knowledge, an opinion, or even a weapon used against others. A person can use this sentence skillfully and still always count himself as the exception.
“I was wrong,” by contrast, is a form of self-appropriation and self-restraint. It not only describes something; it also places the speaker himself inside it. At the very least, it means:
This thing was done by me;
I am no longer merely standing outside it and judging it;
I am willing to let this judgment return to myself and constrain me;
I acknowledge that I need to understand the past anew, and may need to change my future behavior.
Therefore, when a hypocrite says, “Betraying a friend is wrong,” he may be carrying out a moral discussion, but he has not yet carried out what you call moral philosophy. He has uttered a sentence directed at others, while refusing to let it become “my problem.”
The sign that moral philosophy has taken place is not merely that the word “I” appears in the sentence, but that this “I” truly becomes the bearer of the sentence.
Still, I would like to preserve one further point of supplementation: “I was wrong” cannot be left at the level of a contentless self-blame. A person may repeatedly feel guilty, yet be unable to say clearly whom he hurt, what promise he violated, or why what he did was wrong. That may be nothing more than vague shame, or even just fear of the social gaze.
So moral propositions, though not the smallest unit, are still necessary expressive tools. They help me clarify “I was wrong” into:
Where exactly was I wrong?
On what basis do I think this is wrong?
Can this reason also be used to constrain the present and future me?
When others are in the same position, do I also acknowledge this reason?
A moral proposition without an “I” easily becomes external sermonizing; an “I was wrong” without reasons and content easily becomes blind self-punishment. What moral philosophy needs is first-person responsibility that can account for itself.
I want to reverse one order in your argument
You say that only after a complete self-consciousness has formed does philosophical capacity become possible. On this point I agree. A newborn infant does not yet have sufficiently stable temporal continuity, a sense of ownership over actions, or reflective capacity, and thus still cannot carry out philosophical thought like “how I once was, and how I want to become.”
But I would add a counter-direction:
Philosophy not only presupposes a “I” that has already formed; it also continuously maintains and re-forms this “I”.
“I” is not a unit that, once formed, is forever complete.
When I say:
“That thing twenty years ago was also done by me; I was wrong then.”
I am not merely reporting a fact that already existed. At the same time, I am sewing together the present me and the past agent anew. I refuse, because my values have changed, to exile my former self as a stranger unrelated to me.
Likewise, when I say:
“I promise you, I will still take responsibility for this next year.”
I am linking the present me with the future me, who may have changed in preferences, moods, and circumstances. The ethical significance of a promise lies precisely in the fact that the present me cannot simply treat the future self as another unrelated person.
From this perspective, the unity of “I” is not only a psychological fact, but also an ethical achievement:
Repentance connects the present me to the past;
Promise connects the present me to the future;
Responsibility prevents me from casually declaring some stretch of history “no longer mine.”
So I would slightly rewrite your proposition as follows:
“I” is the smallest unit of ethical responsibility; but the integrity of this unit is not something permanently possessed once it forms, but something continuously maintained through reflection, appropriation, promise, and correction.
This is not to break “I” apart again, but to explain: its “oneness” is not stone-like simplicity, but a continuity that remains willing to acknowledge one another across difference.
Here a genuine difficulty arises
Suppose that twenty years ago I betrayed a friend. Twenty years later, I have changed enormously: my character, values, and way of life are all different from what they were then. I can understand that the other person was hurt, and I am willing to make amends, but I sincerely feel:
“The person back then was so different from the present me that I can hardly understand his desires and choices as my own. Strictly speaking, it was he who was wrong, not the present me.”
Here I am not asking how a judge, the public, or some omniscient observer should judge; I am only asking how the present me ought to understand myself.
If the basic formula of moral philosophy is “I was wrong,” then what exactly makes that person from twenty years ago, who has already become so unfamiliar, still “me”? Is it the continuity of body and name, memory, the fact that others have always taken me to be the same person, or is it because the present me actively says:
“Even if I no longer identify with him, his conduct still belongs to my history, and therefore I am willing to bear it.”
In other words, is the unity of “I” a fact that reflection must discover in advance, or a thing that reflection continually completes through bearing responsibility?
V. The self in time and the generation of “we”
Hu Yilin:
【A person may repeatedly feel guilty, yet be unable to say clearly whom he has hurt, what promise he has violated, or why what he did was wrong. That may be nothing more than vague shame, or even just fear of the social gaze.】 — Exactly; excavating and clarifying one’s own feelings is precisely the task I have been calling “moral philosophy.”
[“Philosophy not only presupposes the already-formed ‘I,’ but also continually maintains and reshapes this ‘I.’”] Exactly. That is why I have already emphasized that I am “ultimately formed and still continually growing”; all experiences will further change the self, including the philosophical meaning that lies in further self-cultivation after the “I” has already taken shape.
The unity of the “I” is both a fact that reflection must discover in advance and a task that reflection continually completes through undertaking it, because the “I” grows as a unified whole, and there is no contradiction there. The United States expanded from 13 states to 50 states—can you say that the United States of 13 states was not a unified country?
As for how I see my own self from 20 years ago, my previous answer has already hinted at it: [And my likes and dislikes of character may not be entirely the same as other people’s—just as at different moments in my life, my character may not necessarily be the same.] — By understanding that I myself may be different, I am able to respect and sympathize with the possibility that others are different from me; conversely, since I can put myself in others’ shoes, taking others as “myself” and feeling from within their situation, then I can also extend the self into the past and the future, taking my past and future selves as “myself” and feeling from within their situation. This past self is always easier to inhabit than a stranger, but sometimes the reverse is also possible: by looking at others, I may recall my past self. For instance, seeing someone else’s behavior, I may suddenly realize that I was wrong in the past; or looking at someone else’s behavior, I may suddenly be able to forgive my own past immaturity. The mirror relation is relative: through my own changes I can understand others’ differences, and through others’ differences I can understand my own changes. This exchangeable condition between self and other also drives the “I” to expand into “we” — I can regard my past self as part of me, and likewise I can regard others as part of “us” and put myself in their place, and the boundaries of “we” are of course also growing and changing along with each participant’s consciousness and public activity.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro：
You have in fact dissolved the false either-or I artificially set up in the previous round: the unity of the “I” is not either pre-existing or created by reflection. It can be both the structural presupposition of reflection and the historical result of reflection at the same time.
Your analogy of the United States expanding from thirteen states to fifty captures the key point: unity does not mean changeless content, nor does it mean internal homogeneity. A whole can absorb new experiences, relations, roles, and value judgments, even change its understanding of its own history, and still remain continuous as “this same self in growth.” Change does not necessarily destroy unity; in many cases, change is precisely the way unity is able to persist.
Therefore, the “I” you speak of is not a hard atom already complete from birth, but a whole that gradually takes shape and thereafter is able to attribute change to itself. Once the first-person capacity for reflection has formed, I can no longer bypass this center:
It is I who remember, it is I who regret, it is I who promise, it is I who change, and it is I who call the past and present, so very different from each other, “my life.”
Here, the “natural unit” does not mean something innately complete, but rather: for someone who is already capable of reflection, first-person undertaking can no longer be reduced away.
The self in time and the other in space
You have connected two kinds of interpretive activity that are usually kept apart:
- I understand the difference between others and myself through the differences within myself at different periods of time;
- and I, in turn, re-understand my past or future self by observing the lives of others.
The past self can become an “internal other,” and others can become “another me” on the outside. Between the two there forms a back-and-forth mirror relation.
When I see a young person make a mistake, I may suddenly remember that I was once equally naive, and then become a little more forgiving toward him; when I see someone being hurt, I may suddenly realize that what I once thought trivial actually hurt others; when I see another person work their way out of error, I may also re-understand my own past and no longer turn regret into permanent self-punishment.
Therefore, “using oneself as a measure for others” and “using others to observe oneself” are not two separate steps, but one and the same cycle:
I begin from myself to understand others;
others’ differences then force me to revise my understanding of myself;
and the revised me, in turn, understands more people in a different way.
The self-centeredness of philosophy is thus not a closed circle, but rather a spiral that continually expands and continually returns.
But when the “I” expands into “we,” a structural change takes place
I think an important asymmetry needs to be preserved here:
I can say “that was my past self” without obtaining the past self’s consent;
but I cannot, merely on the basis of my own goodwill, unilaterally declare “you are part of us.”
Even if the past self has become very alien to the present self, it is still linked by the same life history, bodily continuity, traces of memory, and the consequences of action. To claim one’s past is mainly an internal integration of the self.
Another person, however, still possesses an independent first person. He may refuse me the right to describe his feelings for him, refuse me the right to incorporate him into some community, and even refuse the “we” that I utter.
So we can distinguish it this way:
The “I”’s unity mainly depends on self-claiming;
the “we”’s unity, by contrast, requires mutual recognition.
“We” cannot just be a bloated giant self, as though once I enlarge the boundary of my own self, others become organs inside me. A more appropriate understanding is this: multiple irreducible “I”s form shared responsibility in certain experiences, commitments, memories, or actions.
Therefore, a genuine “we” must preserve each member’s capacity to say the following two sentences:
“This is something we bear together.”
“This matter cannot be decided on our behalf for me.”
A community that cannot allow its members to say “I disagree” or “do not speak in our name” may merely be using the first-person plural to cover up the first-person singular of one person or one group.
In your terms, publicness is more like a federation composed of many first persons, rather than a super-subject that has annexed everyone.
“Putting oneself in another’s place” must include letting the other correct my projection
The “putting oneself in another’s place” you speak of is no longer the crude “if I were him, what would I do?” Because the latter easily degenerates into “measuring others by oneself”: I merely take my own character, desires, and values and move them into the other’s position, then mistakenly think that I have already understood him.
The fuller process should be:
I first use my own experience to try to approach him;
then I allow his own account to break through my imagination;
and finally I bring that difference back, revising my understanding of myself and the world.
The first step is indispensable, because I cannot understand anyone from a completely nobody’s abstract position. The second step is equally indispensable, because the other is not my copy. The third step makes this encounter truly philosophical reflection, rather than merely a fleeting emotional reaction.
So the other is a mirror, but not a passive, flat mirror that merely returns my original image. He is a mirror that can speak, can refuse, and can point out: “what you are seeing is not me.”
This also makes your scheme of publicness stricter than simple subjectivism. It at least includes several kinds of tests:
- Can my principle return to constrain myself?
- When I exchange positions with others, do I still acknowledge this reason?
- Do others have the opportunity to correct my imagination of them?
- When the community says “we,” does each member still retain the right to speak in the first person?
Therefore, your moral philosophy can be summarized as:
It begins with “I,” passes through “you,” returns to “I,” and in the back-and-forth forms “we.”
It neither deduces publicness from a God’s-eye view, nor seals the first person off into private taste. Publicness is not the cancellation of the self, but the self’s expansion through acknowledging other selves.
The expansion of “we” also brings with it the problem of responsibility
Following your line of thought, a very natural—and sharper—question arises: when “I” identify myself as part of a trans-temporal “we,” do I also take on a stretch of history not caused by my own hand?
For example, I belong to a nation, family, school, or organization that has continued through many generations. Before I joined it, it had already harmed others, and I today did not take part in those actions; yet I still inherit its identity, institutions, property, reputation, or actual benefits.
At this point I can sincerely say:
“That was not done by me.”
But can I also say at the same time:
“That is our history, so repairing it also concerns me.”
Here one can put forward a view worth testing:
A person may not inherit another’s guilt, but may inherit an unfinished responsibility of a “we.”
Guilt requires “I did that”; responsibility, by contrast, sometimes comes from “I am still participating in and extending this community now, and I am capable of responding to the consequences it has left behind.”
This is precisely a test of the boundary of “we”: when I say today “we were once wrong,” is that an honest first-person-plural claim, or am I fictionalizing something not done by me into my own moral homework? In other words, can a person, without declaring “I am guilty”, still sincerely say “this is history that we need to bear and repair”?
6. Publicness and Historical Responsibility in Conflict
Hu Yilin:
The asymmetry you are talking about is in fact also a symmetry; just as the forty-year-old me can, without the consent of the twenty-year-old me, say “I have always been this way,” I can also, without your consent, say “we are in agreement.” If one really went back into the past and let the twenty-year-old me encounter someone like the forty-year-old me, the twenty-year-old me might not identify with many of that person’s views, and would more likely regard him as some old geezer and cut him off. Just as, in the same era, the twenty-year-old me might not regard people similar to the forty-year-old me as “we,” the forty-year-old me would instead regard people similar to the twenty-year-old me as “we”—this asymmetry occurs simultaneously across both space and time.
So the unity of “we” also depends mainly on self-claiming. But we should note that when I claim “we,” that is only my affair; it does not mean anything else. “I” am not God, not a judge, and “my” unilateral claim usually does not trouble others.
When my one-sided wishfulness finally encounters resistance, I run into some pressure, some conflict of inconsistency. But this sort of thing often happens when I face myself as well; my own consciousness and feelings often fight each other—I decide to study seriously, but after a while I start scrolling on my phone; I think I should lose weight properly, but after a few days I cannot resist overeating and drinking…… I myself often resist my own “identifications”; different desires and different thoughts often clash. I also often correct myself.
Sometimes I am more committed to reason, sometimes I am more inclined toward the body; sometimes I side with one line of reasoning, sometimes I invoke another; sometimes I give priority to this bodily feeling, sometimes I respond more to that one…… How do I balance these contradictions?
To recognize the self already includes recognizing the unity of the self, and also recognizing the complexity of the self. Rather, precisely because of this complexity does it prove that I am an organic unity—if all of my aspects had no tangled complications, if they could all be cleanly broken down, then I would instead be more like a machine that can be further disassembled. It is precisely because I am myself intricately interwoven, because my various aspects are often at odds with one another, impossible to untangle and endlessly tangled, that I have become an indivisible whole.
To acknowledge unity does not mean denying internal conflict; this is true of myself, and likewise of the expanded “we.” Who I recognize as “we” is indeed unilateral; I must soberly recognize that the “we” I am talking about and the “we” you are talking about are not the same thing, that we have our own standpoints and boundaries. This publicness constituted by “we” does not appeal to the existence of a determinate entity with unanimously recognized boundaries shared by all its members. Publicness unfolds in every concrete dispute.
Take, for instance, the existence of the “market.” The market is public, but in essence it is made up of one transaction after another; each transaction takes place because it contains a kind of “conflict”—I think one yuan is worth more than one egg, while you think one egg is worth more than one yuan, and only then can I possibly sell you one egg. And the countless “conflicts” (relative differences in valuation), countless “disputes” (bargaining), countless “consensuses” (actual transaction prices), countless public exchanges (learning other people’s transaction prices), and countless interventions and supervision involved in Zhang San and Li Si trading eggs, Li Si and Wang Wu trading eggs, Wang Wu and Ma Liu trading duck eggs…… all overlie one another to constitute a relatively unified and public “market.” The public space of moral philosophy proceeds in a similar way; it does not depend on some transcendent, a priori unanimity. On the contrary, it is rooted in countless individual “conflicts.”
Since “we” has never been a determinate entity, it is not a subject that can bear responsibility at all. “The state” has no possibility of “doing something wrong”; the state has no hands or feet, and even less self-consciousness or moral conscience. It simply does not act—so where would guilt come from? By contrast, “another’s guilt” can indeed be inherited—if my father, through crime, was able to provide me with a comfortable environment, then I certainly ought to feel indebted because of his crimes—but this does not mean that I must be responsible for my father’s free will; rather, it means that I must be responsible for this wealth of dubious provenance. Yet even this responsibility has two dimensions, one moral and one legal. The law should provide channels for pursuing or readjusting ill-gotten gains or unjust status; morally, I should actively cooperate, explain matters as candidly as possible, and in the end determine, through negotiation and judgment, how they should be disposed of. One thing to note: once a fair disposition has been completed, the wealth and status I still retain should no longer be regarded as proceeds of crime; they are clean now, and if my descendants later benefit from them, they need not bear any moral indebtedness, nor should they bear any.
As for “our sins” from several hundred years ago, in my view they are entirely fantastical and unbound; legally, the statute of limitations has long since passed, and morally they are even farther removed from “me.” There simply does not exist some unified “we”; the overlap of “we” in the present is already often ambiguous, let alone when projected several hundred years into the past. What you may want to say is something Western leftists often emphasize: white people have a historical debt to black people. But I think this sense of debt is hypocritical, because it is itself built upon a racist notion: they presuppose that “white people” and “black people” are distinct, presuppose that “white people” are a continuous unit stretching over several centuries. But that is simply not the case: genetically speaking, there is no absolute boundary between black and white genes; skin color is a continuous spectrum, and white people are not a biological concept. Historically speaking, large numbers of enslaved Africans were sold by kingdoms within Africa itself; black people have always enslaved black people, and white people too have suffered persecution and oppression by white people. Each person several hundred years ago may have had hundreds of thousands of ancestors living then, and among those hundreds of thousands there were always both good and evil. Even if it so happened that, during a certain period, most of someone’s ancestors did evil, what if we push farther back in time? Go back 400 years, and Europeans were doing plenty of evil; go back 800 years, and Mongols were doing plenty of evil; go back several thousand years, and perhaps the Bantu ancestors of today’s African blacks were driving and hunting pygmies and San people…… Whose ancestors have never done evil? To feel guilty for some fictional “we” that did evil in the remote past is a hypocritical illusion.
Of course, if it is today—for example, if lighter-skinned people today enjoy structural advantages—then we certainly should correct that. But that is not because their ancestors committed wrongdoing eighteen generations back; it is because the present system has problems. If you insist on saying that much of the wealth inherited by people today is guilty, then we can initiate a trial, pursue and negotiate, and hand down a judgment—how exactly I dispose of the property would settle the guilt. If the court cannot calculate it, then it should be wiped out according to the principle of presumed innocence; if it can calculate it, then there should be a disposition plan. It is absolutely unacceptable never to provide a plan for reckoning, yet require people of a certain skin color to bear guilt generation after generation; that is absurd. Moreover, that is the real discrimination—why should you be able to proclaim that your generations are different from others’? Discrimination is not only “thinking oneself noble”; why is “thinking oneself guilty” not also a kind of self-righteousness? And in the context of Western Christianity, “original sin” is in fact a kind of glory, isn’t it?
Of course, issues of racial discrimination and coexistence involve many things, and we can discuss them later. What I want to emphasize here is simply that “we” cannot be regarded as a determinate entity; “we” is always an extension of “I,” still centered on each individual I.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro:
This time you have corrected the “asymmetry” I mentioned in the previous round more accurately: asymmetry does not exist only between “I—others”; it also exists between “the present me—my past self”. The forty-year-old me can unilaterally claim the twenty-year-old me, while the twenty-year-old me may not be willing to claim the forty-year-old me; likewise, I can unilaterally include you in “we,” while you may very well refuse that “we.”
Therefore, one can no longer simply say:
“I” rely on self-claiming, while “we” rely on mutual claiming.
The more accurate formulation should be:
Whether “I” or “we”, both begin first from the first-person act of claiming in the present; only after the claim encounters resistance from memory, the body, others, and reality does it continuously revise itself.
This is consistent with the structure you have been emphasizing all along: it is not that a community already recognized by all its members exists first, and only then does public discussion take place; rather, various overlapping and conflicting “we”s emerge in dispute, and publicness is generated in precisely such conflict.
But we need to distinguish “claiming we” from “representing we”
I still want to preserve one distinction, but it is no longer the distinction between “self-claiming” and “mutual claiming”; rather, it is three different uses of “we.”
The first is:
“In my understanding, you and I belong to the same ‘we.’”
This is entirely my self-positioning. Even if you do not agree, this claim still truly expresses how I understand myself. Whether it is wise, whether it is accurate, can be debated further, but it does not require your permission in order to occur in my mind.
The second is:
“Our views on this issue are consistent.”
This is no longer merely describing myself; it is also describing your position. If you explicitly object, it may well be a factual misrecognition. Not because I have no right to generate a sense of closeness, but because “you also agree” cannot become a fact solely through my claim.
The third kind is this:
“We have already decided to do this.”
“I accept this condition on our behalf.”
“We jointly bear this commitment.”
Here “we” is no longer merely an imagined identity; it has begun to produce external effects. It tries to dispose of other people’s actions, rights, property, or name. At this point, a unilateral claim is no longer enough.
So the real boundary is not:
Who is qualified to say “we”?
Rather:
Is this “we” merely my description of my own position, or has it already been used to speak and act for others?
You can unilaterally take me to be a fellow traveler, but you cannot sign a contract for me on the basis of that sense of closeness alone. This limit does not need a God’s-eye view to proclaim it; it comes straight from my first-person resistance: “You may understand yourself that way, but that does not thereby give you my voice.”
Inner conflict and interpersonal conflict do indeed share the same structure
Your use of the conflict between studying and scrolling on the phone, or between losing weight and eating, to show that self-unity does not mean internal consistency is very important.
There is not some little man inside me who is always clear-headed and absolutely rules over the rest. What is called “I decide” is often only a temporarily formed direction of action after different desires, memories, principles, bodily sensations, and imaginings of the future have tugged against one another. Today reason has the upper hand; tomorrow the tired body has the upper hand; later I reinterpret both again and change my understanding of “self-discipline” or “taking care of the body.”
Thus, the reason “I” is a whole is not that it has no contradictions, but that these contradictions are entangled in the same stretch of life and ultimately all need to be acknowledged by me. I cannot blame overeating on the body, failure on desire, and coldness on reason, and then declare that the truly real “I” has always remained pure and innocent.
You are also very powerful in extending this structure to public life:
A public space does not need to have agreement first; on the contrary, it may be constituted precisely by disagreements that cannot be completely eliminated.
Here, your market analogy is especially apt. A market has no common heart, nor does it have a unified “market subject” making valuations in the aggregate. Each person starts from his or her own position and exchanges within differences in valuation; prices are not an a priori consensus, but the result of countless rounds of quoting, rejecting, bargaining, and closing deals temporarily congealing together.
Likewise, public moral language need not be built on some moral law that everyone already shares in advance. It can arise from:
I say, “This is unfair to me”;
you say, “I do not accept your reason”;
a third person carries this conflict back onto himself;
the old rules are challenged;
some claims are accepted, while others remain contested.
So I would summarize your view as:
Publicness is not common opinion, but common contestability.
People do not have to become a “we” first in order to argue; they are continually proposing, revising, and withdrawing various “we’s” precisely in the course of arguing.
However, the market analogy also shows exactly this: a person’s unilateral valuation can arise, but “a deal being struck” cannot happen unilaterally. I may think one yuan is worth more than an egg; you may think the opposite; but only when both sides complete the exchange in some mutually recognizable way can we say, “we have struck a deal.”
The moral public sphere is the same: identification may happen unilaterally, but joint commitment requires some mutually recognizable process of formation. This does not mean there exists a public subject transcending everyone; it only means that certain relational facts cannot be completed by one side of the relationship alone.
The state has no conscience, but institutions may possess a continuous structure of action
You say the state has no hands or feet, no self-awareness or conscience, and thus cannot “do wrong” in the way an individual can. In the strict first-person moral sense, I agree:
The state does not feel shame, does not reflect in the middle of the night, and does not sincerely say, “I was wrong.”
So saying “the state is guilty” can easily personify the system, as if there were a national soul stretching across centuries, capable of inheriting honor, shame, and sin. Slipping from there into a bloodline-based, hereditary moral identity is indeed extremely dangerous.
But “the state did a certain thing” can still be a weaker institutional statement. It can be unpacked as:
certain specific people made a decision according to a set of office-based and authorized procedures;
others carried it out in accordance with that decision;
the resulting assets, records, rules, and consequences continued to be managed by subsequent personnel.
In this sense, institutions can accomplish actions without needing to possess a collective mind; they can have continuous obligations without having to become a moral person that bears shame.
For example, a cooperative organization collected an advance payment from a client, and later all the original managers left. The new management cannot simply say:
“I wasn’t the one who took the money, so I don’t owe you anything.”
He indeed has not inherited the subjective guilt of his predecessor, but he now controls the same organization’s assets, accounts, and capacity to perform. What continues here is not a collective conscience, but a commitment supported by real relations.
So I would make this distinction:
Guilt follows the will that performed the act;
the duty of restitution and performance can follow property, office, and institutional relations.
This can still be entirely approached from the first person. The question the new person in charge faces is not “Does this abstract organization have a conscience?”, but:
“Now that I have accepted this position, used these assets, and enjoyed the corresponding authority, have I also accepted the outstanding obligations attached to this position?”
When you say ‘inheriting another’s guilt,’ what is actually inherited is more like a ‘blemished situation’
Your example about criminal proceeds obtained by a father is very clear, but according to your own analysis, what the child inherits is not actually the father’s guilt.
The father’s guilt comes from his choice:
he committed the crime.
The child’s current obligation comes from something else:
he now possesses or benefits from a property relation whose source is improper.
Therefore, the child does not need to say:
“My father’s crime is also my crime.”
What he should say is:
“The crime was not committed by me, but this improper benefit is now in my hands, so how to deal with it has become my problem.”
This is not ancestral evil attaching itself to descendants through blood; it is a new, present first-person ethical situation. The later generation is not responsible for the father’s free will, but for how it now responds to the already known source of the property.
Your insistence that “once it is properly disposed of, one is cleared” is also very important. Otherwise, repair would lose its endpoint, and identity would replace action as the object of moral judgment:
No matter what is done, it can never be repaid;
no matter how many generations pass, one remains stained by guilt;
moral identity is determined by birth and cannot be changed.
This indeed would generate a hereditary moral hierarchy.
I would only place one limitation on the scope of “presumption of innocence.” It is very suitable for answering:
Who should be deemed guilty and punished?
But when the question becomes:
How should an asset of uncertain or partially improper origin be distributed?
then it is no longer simply a binary choice between “guilty” and “innocent.” If all that can be confirmed is that a substantial part of an inheritance came from expropriation, but the exact proportion cannot be determined, then “leaving everything with the current possessor” is not a fully neutral outcome; it is merely a decision to place all the uncertainty on the side demanding restitution.
This does not mean that the pursuit must go on forever, and it certainly does not mean that later generations are guilty. It only means this: besides deciding the facts, a system of reckoning must also decide who bears the risks created by the impossibility of reducing those facts to something recoverable. In the end, of course, there still needs to be a definitive solution; but that solution is a clear public disposition, not a God-like discovery of the one precise answer.
Historical guilt, present injustice, and historical memory must be kept separate
Putting aside for the moment whether the details of the racial history you listed are accurate, I think the most forceful conceptual distinction in your argument is this:
One cannot simply infer from “people in the past carried out a certain oppression” that “people today who have a certain skin color or ancestry inherit guilt.”
Such a move turns fluid, intersecting, complicated historical populations into a moral caste spanning several centuries. It first invents a fixed “we whites” or “we blacks,” and then binds guilt and victimhood respectively to two hereditary subjects. Even if one adopts the language of self-condemnation, this can still preserve the essentialist classification it claims to oppose.
By contrast, today’s institutional injustices can be discussed entirely in the present tense:
How do the current rules operate?
Which people are currently restricted in what ways?
Who now controls the relevant resources and institutions?
What adjustments would make present relations more just?
History can be used to explain the origins of present structures, but correcting present injustice does not require declaring today’s people the inheritors of ancestral sin. Causal continuity is not the same as guilt continuity.
I would add one more distinction:
Debts can be settled; facts cannot be settled.
After a fair disposition has been completed, later generations no longer owe a debt, nor do they need to remain ashamed; but this does not mean the past can be rewritten as if it had never happened. Not because history is still demanding payment from them, but because honest self-understanding cannot be built on a fabricated family history, institutional history, or social history.
Of course, whether this bit of history is taken by me into “my history” or “our history” can only ever begin from the present-day “I” that claims it. No history can, by its own force, compel me to produce some metaphysical collective guilt.
The view I am now willing to propose
I no longer think that “we” is a responsibility-bearing subject analogous to an individual. A more fitting formulation is:
“We” is not a common heart, but it may be a web of common commitments.
Each node in the web remains a concrete “I.” No supra-personal entity does their self-examination or repentance for them. But once someone accepts an identity, position, right, or shared asset, he may, in the first person, enter into a relation of commitment that predates him.
This is not inheriting guilt, but rather accepting the unfinished business that comes with accepting a position.
So the real question that follows is:
When I voluntarily join an organization that already has assets, rights, and unfulfilled commitments, do I, by accepting its benefits and its capacity for action, also bear in the first person the commitments that had already taken shape before I joined? If so, can such continuity across changes of membership be established without reifying “we”?
VII. The boundaries of moral philosophy, institutions, and contracts
Hu Yilin:
Your third-layer “we” has already entered the institutional realm, and at this level one at least needs some kind of “tacit contract,” or even written contracts, or actual institutions and organizations. The state’s institutional actions you mentioned are similar; all of these involve concrete institutional issues. And I have always maintained that philosophical questions should have boundaries. All fields can discuss the philosophical questions relevant to them, but that does not mean that all questions must be discussed by philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with the question of “know yourself”; at most it concerns itself with the broad principles of institutional design (for example, respecting each self’s freedom as much as possible), and should not extend to the concrete details of how institutions operate. When I say that “we” is not an entity, I mean that within the domain of moral philosophy, in the context of moral issues, we cannot reify “we”; but that does not mean this is impossible at the institutional level. At the institutional level, once we are discussing the contractual relations of some institutional entity, then this has already gone beyond the scope of moral philosophy.
So your final question is easy to answer. You ask, [When I voluntarily join an organization that already has assets, rights, and unfulfilled commitments, do I, by accepting its benefits and its capacity for action, also bear in the first person the commitments that had already taken shape before I joined?] Whether I bear certain commitments depends entirely on whether, when I join this organization, I have signed the relevant contract. If I have signed the organization’s tacit, oral, or written contract, and that contract includes the relevant commitments, then I should of course abide by those commitments as far as possible, and bear the liability for breach of contract stipulated by the contract. This belongs in the contract, not in my moral conscience.
ChatGPT5.6SolPro:
This time the boundary you drew is clear; in the previous round I really did mix the two levels together again.
Once an organization acquires institutional personhood, possesses written rules, authorization procedures, assets, and contractual relations, then whether “its commitments made earlier are to be continued by new members” is first and foremost a question of institutional attribution. The answer must be sought in the organization’s charter, the authority of offices, the terms of contracts, the rules of law, and actual custom; it cannot be inferred merely from the moral feeling that “we all belong to this organization.”
So you are right:
In moral philosophy, “we” is only an identification extended from a series of first persons;
in the institutional sphere, “we” can acquire clear boundaries through contracts and procedures, and become an institutionally accountable entity.
The same word is used for the two kinds of “we,” but they are not the same kind of existence.
Contracts specify “what responsibility I bear,” while conscience asks “how I face that responsibility”
Still, I would like to make one very small but important qualification to your last sentence:
“This matter is contained in the contract, rather than in my moral conscience.”
If “this matter” refers to the specific content of the responsibility, I entirely agree. For example, exactly how much I must pay, by what date I must perform, and what compensation I must bear in the event of breach—none of this can be determined by inner feeling. It exists in the contract recognized by both parties and in the relevant institutions. Even if I have a clear conscience, I cannot unilaterally alter the amount; even if I am in tears, I am not automatically released from the debt.
However, a contract cannot exhaust my first-person relation to the contract.
Three questions can be distinguished:
1. What does the contract require me to do?
This is a matter of contractual interpretation and institutional adjudication.
2. What consequences follow if I fail to perform?
This is a matter of law and organizational rules.
3. How do I understand my own acts of signing, performing, breaching, or exploiting the rules?
This can still become a question for moral philosophy.
For example:
“I need to pay a breach-of-contract penalty of one hundred thousand yuan.”
That is an institutional fact.
Whereas:
“Knowing full well that the other party depended heavily on my promise, I suddenly broke the contract because I found another deal more profitable; even if I paid the penalty according to law, how should I regard such a self?”
That brings us back again to “know yourself.”
A contract can tell me whether a debt has been settled, but it cannot answer for me whether I treated another person’s trust merely as a cost that can be bought off; whether I mistook “I can afford the loss” for “I am doing the right thing”; whether I am willing to become a person who, so long as he has pre-calculated the penalty, may casually abandon his promises.
This is not about letting conscience modify institutional responsibility, but about saying:
The settlement of institutions and self-examination can each have their own endpoint.
When the law says, “Compensation has been paid, the creditor-debtor relation is terminated,” it does not force me to remain ashamed forever; but neither does it necessarily entail, “Therefore I have nothing morally worth reflecting on.”
The reverse is also true. My conscience may think a certain contract is profoundly unjust, and may even think I ought to refuse to perform it, but that will not magically erase the institutional consequences. I may choose breach of contract, resistance, or litigation, while bearing the corresponding risks. Conscience cannot impersonate a judge, and a judge cannot carry out the reflection of conscience on my behalf.
A contract by itself does not generate moral truth
“Written in the contract” can answer the institutional question of “where valid obligations come from,” but it may not be able to answer the philosophical question of “why do I acknowledge this constraint?” Some contracts may have been formed under deception, severe coercion, or extreme inequality; some clauses, though formally valid, may require a person to do something they themselves regard as unacceptable. At such moments I face two questions that are not the same: Does the institution recognize this contract? Am I willing to regard obeying it as part of the person I ought to become? The first question cannot be judged by conscience alone; the second cannot be answered merely by the contract text. So I would now state the boundary we have reached as follows: Contracts generate and define institutional responsibility; conscience does not create contract content, but it can reflect on the ways I enter, fulfill, exploit, violate, or resist a contract. Moral philosophy need not study how to calculate liquidated damages down to the percentage, nor does it need to explain specific clauses for an arbitral tribunal. What it confronts is the signer himself: Why am I signing? Do I truly understand what I have promised? Am I using an informational advantage to lure the other party into unfavorable terms? When performance becomes disadvantageous, how do I look at the self who made that promise in the first place? Do I treat bearing liability for breach as an honest exit, or do I treat the compensation as a license to harm others? This still proceeds strictly from the standpoint of “I.” The boundary of philosophy is not determined by subject matter, but by the way of questioning The same contract can enter different discursive domains:- Asking “how should this clause be interpreted” belongs to law or institutional practice;
- Asking “how should liability for breach be designed to be more effective” belongs to institutional design;
- Asking “what principled limits should contract freedom be subject to” belongs to the institutional principles of practical philosophy;
- Asking “why do I make rash promises, and why do I always look for exceptions when things turn unfavorable” belongs to what you call moral philosophy.
- Reflecting on meat-eating does not mean handing nutritional science over to conscience for judgment;
- Reflecting on signing contracts does not mean letting conscience interpret contractual clauses;
- Reflecting on speech does not mean conscience replacing the law’s definition of the limits of speech;
- Reflecting on public institutions does not mean philosophy designing every administrative procedure.
- If I am too quick to declare “I have already thought it through,” reflection will degenerate into self-exculpation;
- if I never allow a question to end, reflection will degenerate into compulsive self-doubt;
- if I listen to every external accusation, I lose self-discipline;
- if I only listen to voices that already move me, I may mistake dullness for steadfastness.
VIII. Philosophy as Practice and as a Discipline
Hu Yilin: Yes. Moral philosophy is not something I can finish just by saying “self-reflection”; how to reflect on oneself, from what angle to approach it, what priorities to grasp, with what timing and rhythm, by reference to what mirrors—these are all matters of craft. And these matters of craft are precisely what explain why we need “philosophy.” Philosophy is a practice, but it is also a discipline, because what it must study precisely is the craft involved in practice. And unlike science, philosophy does not have a relatively unified and widely accepted disciplinary paradigm; but nor is philosophy a discipline in which one can simply say anything one likes. Philosophy has many schools, and different schools provide different methods. We have already said that when someone reflects on himself, he always needs the aid of “mirrors”; and others, besides providing reference points for behavior and emotion, can also provide models for methods of reflection. Some people integrate their moral cultivation into every gesture and movement of theirs, so that by following such exemplars and observing their words and deeds, we may be able to reflect on ourselves better. Some others expound their moral ideas in writing; these texts remain in the world and become philosophy books. Even if there are no suitable models around us to follow, we can still engage the sages through reading and thus gain something to draw on. I think philosophy books should not be treated as rigid norms or fixed decrees, but as prompts and references. We follow exemplars, avoid bad people, read history, and participate in public discussion; all these activities can help us perfect our own moral cultivation—and the textualized and theorized part of these references is what is called “moral philosophy.” (Have you forgotten that “the previous process” does not mean an endless back-and-forth, but that after several rounds of questions and answers you need to help me organize an article? This round of questions and answers already seems like more than enough, doesn’t it?)IX. A Staged Draft: Question the Heart, Not the Calculation
ChatGPT5.6SolPro: You’re right to remind me. I dragged the discussion into an endless string of follow-up questions and, in doing so, strayed from the original process. I’ll now organize it directly into an article that can be read on its own, without adding further questions.Question the Heart, Not the Calculation
—How moral philosophy moves from “I” to “we” When faced with an ethical issue, people are often used to asking first: “Is this thing right or wrong?” “Is this person worthy of moral praise?” “How should one act to obtain the best result?” But this way of asking is itself open to doubt. When we say that someone “did the right thing, only with selfish motives,” the word “right” has already presupposed part of the conclusion; when we assert that we know his motives completely and can also confirm all the consequences of the act, we are quietly occupying an omniscient and omnipotent standpoint. Real people cannot see through another’s heart, nor can they exhaust the long and complex consequences of an action. We can only hear how someone explains himself, observe his words and deeds over time, feel what impact his actions have on those around him, and then make a limited, provisional judgment. This limitation is not some noise to be eliminated from ethical discussion. On the contrary, it is the very condition for ethical questions to arise. If human motives were completely transparent, if all the consequences of actions could be calculated precisely, and if various values could all be arranged along the same scale, then ethics might indeed become a kind of calculating technique. But the world we live in is not like that. The reason we need to weigh, hesitate, regret, defend, and choose again is precisely that human beings are finite, reality is complex, and values cannot simply be converted into one another. So the primary task of moral philosophy is not, from some God’s-eye view, to adjudicate the good and evil of people and things in the world. It should first return to the one who can truly bear reflection: What kind of person should I become? Why did I make this choice? What kind of self does this choice reveal? Can I honestly acknowledge my own desires, emotions, and actions? The starting point of moral philosophy is not “he is wrong,” but “how does this I who has done something actually understand myself.”1. The Smallest Unit of Moral Philosophy Is “I”
The smallest unit of moral philosophy is neither an abstract proposition nor an isolated act of reflection, but “I.” “Betraying a friend is wrong” can be moral knowledge, it can be a public opinion, and it can even become a tool for hypocrites to attack others. A person may be adept at condemning betrayal and yet never let this judgment return to himself. Moral philosophy truly begins only when the proposition is transformed into: “I am wrong for betraying a friend.” Here, “I” is not an arbitrary grammatical subject tacked on in passing; it is the bearer of action, feeling, memory, and responsibility. I am not merely describing a matter; I am also acknowledging: this matter belongs to my life story, and I cannot always stand outside it and comment on it. Of course, “I” is not a fully formed concept from birth. A newborn has no clear sense of temporal continuity and no mature capacity for self-reflection. It is only through long-term adjustment with the world and with others that a person gradually forms a stable self-awareness and learns to attribute experiences across different times and situations to “I.” But once this capacity has formed, “I” becomes the basic unit that cannot be further reduced in reflection. I can analyze my own desires, emotions, bodily sensations, social roles, and sources of thought; I can also distinguish the past self, the present self, and the self I hope to become. But I cannot, through such analysis, assign responsibility to some local fragment and then declare the rest of me eternally innocent. If I hurt a friend out of jealousy, I may say that jealousy influenced me, but I cannot finally say: “It was my jealousy that hurt my friend, not me.” The unity of “I” does not mean that there is no conflict within. I decide to study seriously, yet soon start scrolling on my phone; I want to control my diet, yet cannot resist overeating; on the one hand I want to be honest, on the other hand I fear the losses honesty may bring me. Different desires, principles, memories, and bodily sensations keep pulling against one another; sometimes reason prevails, sometimes the body prevails, sometimes one principle overwhelms another.These conflicts do not prove that “I” can be split into several independent machines. On the contrary, it is precisely because they are so intricately entangled, so impossible to separate cleanly, that I am an organic whole. This whole can grow, can expand, can reinterpret itself, yet it still needs to claim all its changes in the first person:
I hesitate; I desire; I fail; and I begin again.
So the unity of “I” is both a fact that reflection must already presuppose and something that reflection continually completes through claiming, revising, and growing. The two are not contradictory. A whole can remain the continuity of the same whole even as its content keeps changing.
II. “Having a Clear Conscience” Is a Goal of Cultivation, Not an Unconditional Starting Point
If moral philosophy starts from “I,” does that mean that as long as I sincerely say I have a clear conscience, everything is over?
Not at all.
I may not know my motives better than an onlooker does. A person may describe fear as prudence, vanity as responsibility, evasion as tolerance, and a dread of social judgment as genuine shame. Even if he says it all with complete sincerity, that does not mean his self-understanding is already adequate.
So “having a clear conscience” cannot be treated as some original proof that needs no examination. It is a state toward which long cultivation strives, not a conclusion one may declare before reflection has even begun.
The task of moral philosophy is precisely to excavate and clarify one’s own feelings:
Why do I feel guilty?
Whom, exactly, did I hurt?
What promise did I break?
Am I regretting my own conduct, or merely fearing that others will look down on me?
Is my so-called innocence the result of really figuring things out, or simply of successfully persuading myself not to think about them anymore?
These questions cannot be settled by one act of introspection. The self is not a transparent chamber, and conscience is not an oracle that speaks straight from the depths of the heart. To know oneself requires distance, and human beings cannot simply remove their own hearts and inspect them from every angle as if observing an object.
So we need mirrors.
III. The World, Other People, and History Are All Mirrors of the Self
First-person introspection, second-person dialogue, third-person observation, and public judgment are not mutually exclusive ethical stances; they are different angles from which to know oneself.
Other people are first of all independent persons, not tools prepared for my spiritual growth. When a friend tells me about his suffering, the reason I listen may be that we are friends, that I have hurt him, or that I care about his situation. At that moment, I am facing a real person, not a research subject for moral philosophy.
Only later, at some subsequent moment, when I reflect again on my listening, my indifference, my sympathy, or my impatience, does that encounter become an object of moral philosophy. Philosophy is reflection after life, not a replacement for life itself.
That is exactly what it means to say that the other person is first himself, and only then can become my mirror.
To treat another person as a mirror does not mean denying his independence. On the contrary, only by acknowledging that he has his own inner life and perspective can I even attempt to “see myself through his eyes and think myself through his heart.” A mirror that is truly valuable does not simply return my original image intact. It resists my projection; it tells me, “You think you are caring for me, but what I feel is control.” “You think it was just a joke, but it really hurt me.”
This resistance gives me a distance that introspection alone cannot provide.
History and books have a similar effect. By reading the lives and thoughts of different eras, we realize that our values are not naturally given in just this way, but formed within a particular historical situation. We also rediscover our former selves in other people: seeing the immaturity of a young person, we suddenly understand our own recklessness back then; seeing someone else make a similar mistake, we finally realize whom we once hurt; seeing someone else emerge from remorse, we may also learn to forgive the still-immature self of the past.
So self-knowledge is a process of continual back-and-forth:
I understand others’ differences through my own changes;
and in turn understand my own changes through others’ differences;
I approach others from myself;
then bring back the resistance I encountered and revise my understanding of myself.
“Putting oneself in another’s place” and “using others to observe oneself” are not two parallel roads, but two directions within the same cycle of reflection.
IV. Publicity Must Begin from “I”
Starting from “I” does not mean moral philosophy can only remain within private life. Public institutions, shared rules, and what reasons people may demand of one another can of course become questions for practical philosophy.
But the philosophical foundation of these questions still cannot be some God’s-eye view conjured out of thin air, without body or history. It must begin from the first person:
What kind of public institutions am I willing to accept?
What kinds of reasons do I think I have the right to demand of others?
For what rules am I willing to offer a defense?
When I exchange positions with others, do I still acknowledge this reason?
Then I realize that others, like me, are “I”s within their own lives. If I want my own independent character and concrete situation to be respected, then I cannot treat others’ differences as irrelevant noise. The reasons I use to defend myself should also be applicable to others in similar situations.
Publicity thus is not the elimination of the first person, but rather the first person gradually opening up through putting oneself in another’s place.
This kind of publicity does not require a preexisting “we” acknowledged by everyone. “We” is not an entity with clear borders and one shared heart. A forty-year-old me can recognize the twenty-year-old me as the same “I,” even if the twenty-year-old me may not have recognized the forty-year-old self; likewise, I can unilaterally regard someone as a fellow traveler within a “we,” even if he does not identify with that belonging.
Such a claim is, first of all, merely a way for me to understand my own position. It carries no automatic institutional force, nor can it make me another person’s representative. When my “we” meets the other side’s resistance, I must admit: the “we” I speak of and the “we” he speaks of may not be the same.
But this mismatch is not a failure of publicity; rather, it is the starting point for publicity’s unfolding.
The market can serve as a metaphor. Transactions often happen precisely because buyers and sellers assign different relative values to the same object. It is these differences in valuation, these bargains, refusals, deals, public quotations, and external oversight, layered together, that form a relatively public market. The market does not need one shared heart, nor does it rest on everyone’s prior agreement to the same value.
The space of moral discourse works the same way. It is made up of countless conflicts between first persons:
I think I have been treated unjustly;
you do not accept my reasons;
a third person brings our dispute back to himself;
certain judgments form a temporary consensus;
new circumstances then compel people to argue again.
Publicity is not an a priori consensus, but a shared contestability. What is called “we” is not a super-subject standing above each individual; it is an ever-changing overlapping space formed by countless “I”s in conflict, dialogue, and mutual reflection.
V. The Subject Matter of Moral Philosophy Has No Boundary, But Its Jurisdiction Does
Every choice a person makes can become material for moral reflection.
Choosing whom to befriend, choosing whether to eat meat or vegetarian food, choosing whether to speak or remain silent, choosing whether to sign, fulfill, or violate a contract—all of these may reveal my desires, habits, fears, and value judgments. In this sense, the subject matter of moral philosophy has almost no boundary.
But this does not mean moral philosophy can take over every domain.
What a contract requires me to do, and how liability for breach should be calculated, ought to be determined by the contractual terms, legal rules, and corresponding institutional procedures, not arbitrarily judged by my conscience. Observing a contract does not mean having a clear conscience, and violating one does not necessarily mean moral guilt. Institutional norms and moral self-reflection are things on two different levels.
Moral philosophy may ask:
Why did I sign this contract?
Did I take advantage of the other party’s weakness?
Why did I suddenly deny a promise I had once made when things turned unfavorable?
Was my breach of contract an act of resistance against an unjust demand, or was I merely looking for an excuse to pursue profit?
But it is not responsible for interpreting the clauses for the arbitral body, nor for calculating specific compensation.
States, organizations, and companies can be regarded institutionally as entities, because institutions can, through contracts, authorization, procedures, and asset relations, stipulate who may act on behalf of the organization and who should bear what responsibility. But this institutional personhood cannot be directly carried into moral philosophy and turned into a collective conscience spanning centuries.
A state has no real inner life; it does not reflect on itself, nor does it feel guilty in the middle of the night. Claims like “the state is guilty” or “a certain race is guilty,” if understood as a kind of moral personality continuous across generations, can very easily remake a complex, entangled history into a hereditary moral identity.
Concrete individuals can be responsible for their own free will and actions. If a descendant inherits property of dubious origin, what they face is not some ancestor’s free will mysteriously attaching itself to them, but a present question:
This benefit is now in my hands; how am I going to treat it?
The law can pursue claims, make rulings, and redistribute; individuals can also cooperate with investigation and disposition. But once a final settlement has been completed through due process, descendants should not continue to bear endless moral guilt. Historical facts can become a mirror for understanding the present and reflecting on oneself, but they do not have to be fashioned into an ineradicable debt of bloodline.
Philosophy must respect its own boundaries. It can think about the fundamental principles of institutional design, for example how to respect as much as possible the freedom and personhood of each “I,” but it should not absorb all concrete institutional questions into its own internal affairs.
6. Philosophy Is Both a Practice of Cultivation and a Discipline Concerning the Rules of Cultivation
If moral philosophy merely says “reflect on yourself,” then it really need not become a discipline at all.
The problem is that self-reflection is not without method.
When should one stop and reflect? Should one begin with actions, motives, emotions, or relationships? Which things are worth reopening, and which problems can be set aside for the moment? How does one distinguish honest lack of shame from polished self-exculpation? How can one prevent reflection from becoming endless self-surveillance? Which people, which historical experiences, and which texts should be chosen as mirrors?
These are all methods of cultivation that require long-term study.
Philosophy does not, like science, possess a relatively unified experimental paradigm, but neither is it an activity in which one may simply say anything one likes. Different philosophical schools provide different methods: they prompt us to attend to different experiences, raise different questions, and train different modes of feeling. They may not be able, like legal statutes, to tell me directly what I must do next, but they can change the angle from which I look at myself.
Some people integrate moral cultivation into every gesture and movement. If we observe how they face benefit, humiliation, promises, loss, and the suffering of others, we may gain from their lives methods for reflecting on ourselves. The meaning of a model lies not in requiring us to imitate mechanically, but in showing us a possible form of life.
Others write down their own experiences of reflection in words. Texts preserve the lines of thought they employed when confronting desire, responsibility, freedom, death, and other people. Even if there is no appropriate model at hand, we can still, through reading, converse with the sages of the past and let another era, another temperament, and another lived experience enter into our own reflection.
Therefore, philosophy books should not be taken as decrees or rigid norms, but as prompts, references, and mirrors. Reading philosophy is not about finding a standard-answer sheet that applies to every situation; it is about learning how to ask more honest questions, how to bear inner conflict, how to move among different perspectives, and how reflection can ultimately settle into a new sensitivity and a new habit of action.
Moral life comes before moral philosophy. We first live, relate to others, make choices, make mistakes, and are rubbed against by reality; only afterward do we look back in reflection at some “dusk.” But reflection cannot keep people in dusk forever. It must return to life, becoming, in the next act, a sharper intuition, a firmer disposition, and a more honest self-knowledge.
Conclusion
Moral philosophy is not a machine for calculating good and evil, nor is it a court set up to judge others on behalf of the whole world.
It begins with “I.”
This “I” is not a sealed island of consciousness, but an integrated whole that gradually takes shape and continuously grows in the world, in time, and in relation to others. Its interior is full of conflicts among desire, principle, memory, and emotion, yet it still must take up its own life in the first person.
In order to know myself, I need to use others, history, models, books, and public disputes as mirrors. I begin from myself in understanding others, and then let others’ resistance correct me; I take my past and future selves into the same span of life, and in putting myself in others’ place and others in mine, I form a flowing and overlapping “we.”
This publicness does not come from a God’s-eye view empty of people, nor does it depend on some eternal and unchanging collective subject. It is rooted in the differences, conflicts, dialogues, and reflections among countless concrete “I”s.
Philosophy is both a practice of cultivation and a discipline precisely because cultivation cannot be completed by a single phrase like “reflect on yourself.” It requires perspective, timing, rhythm, and method; it requires choosing mirrors, and it also requires learning how to look at oneself in the mirror. What philosophical traditions preserve is exactly these rules of reflection.
So what moral philosophy is truly asking is not:
“Standing outside the world, who is truly good, and who is truly evil?”
but rather:
“As the ‘I’ who is within the world, how can I know myself more honestly, and how can I, in each and every choice, gradually become the person I am willing to claim as my own?”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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