标签：virtue

How Can Ethics in the Technological Age Welcome the Future? [Fourth Commentary]

Culture & Public Commentary2018.12.09
How Can Ethics in the Technological Age Welcome the Future? [Fourth Commentary]
This one was also published on Jiemian (for reprints, please contact Jiemian), but it was not a commissioned piece. I wrote it casually and sent it to them. The feedback was that the quality was worse than the previous two, which may have had something to do with the rather rambling way I wrote this one, or perhaps with the fact that the issues this article faced were more tangled and its viewpoint correspondingly more moderate. Still, they did publish it, but with very extensive changes: the title was altered (Can Technological Progress Really Tailor Human Value Preferences?), and the He Jiankui theme was also removed (don’t ask why; just…
technology commentary tradition value
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2018年12月9日
Black Bear and Virtue Ethics

Culture & Public Commentary2012.02.23
Black Bear and Virtue Ethics
The black bear issue has been blazing hot lately, so I’ll throw in my two cents as well~ Simply put, morally speaking, I oppose live bear bile extraction. As for whether Genuizhang should be allowed to go public, I think that’s another matter; I’m not familiar with the relevant legal framework. Why oppose live bear bile extraction? The usual arguments tend to focus on whether the bears are in pain, but I think that is actually a secondary issue. If the bears were injected with some kind of drug so that they not only felt no pain, but even became addicted to bile extraction, would that make everything okay? Utilitarianism,…
philosophy China freedom commentary
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2012年2月23日
Maid Cafés and “Professional Ethics”

Philosophy & Thought2012.02.03
Maid Cafés and “Professional Ethics”
Stirred by the Fang Yaohan incident, I wrote three articles in a row, which is already quite enough to have gotten my money’s worth. Since Han Han has also announced that he is stopping writing and not talking about it anymore, I may as well stop here too. So this article continues from the earlier piece “The Kingly Way”; everyone can skip the previous three articles, and we can continue talking about “morality.” We say that the kingly way is the path to supreme goodness, and supreme goodness is nothing other than “the best life.” But in the traditional sense, for a ruler, the kingly way merely provides one of…
philosophy freedom pursuit Marx
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2012年2月3日
“The Kingly Way” — The Road to the Supreme Good

Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese2012.01.26
“The Kingly Way” — The Road to the Supreme Good
You can read this article as a continuation of this earlier one: Freedom vs. Equality—I Am a Right-Wing Socialist In that essay I expressed a certain resistance to “equality”: equality in the sense of a condition for freedom, or equality as the rules that must be observed for the game of competition to unfold—those senses of equality I certainly support. But equality for equality’s sake, taking equality as a principle, is not something I agree with. So if one does not champion equality, must one necessarily tolerate “inequality”? Not necessarily. One reason for opposing “equality” is that it is an overly abstract concept; in fact, equality always requires a standard…
philosophy China freedom autobiography
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2012年1月26日
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website

AI & the Future of Technology2012.01.05
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website
The Ministry of Railways has finally rolled out an online ticketing system, and that alone is worth encouraging. Of course, it is debatable whether moving the advance-sale period for online tickets up by two days is a good idea; for migrant workers and other vulnerable groups who lack access to the internet, this is not very fair. I have already booked train tickets on this website three times (the first two times were round trips to the Winter Solstice conference), and each time I ran into one problem or another. Even when the Winter Solstice conference was still very much in the off-season for train tickets, I still encountered network…
China technology media commentary
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2012年1月5日
Arendt Reading Notes

Culture & Public Commentary2011.09.28
Arendt Reading Notes
Finally finished reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, and feel immensely relieved… Let me make some notes.. Wang Yinli’s Chinese translation of The Human Condition is basically pretty good. Though I didn’t compare it line by line with the English original, on the whole I could make sense of it, and there probably won’t be any major misunderstandings. The problem, however, is that her translation is still rather awkward. In the translator’s afterword, she also writes that she follows the principle of “literal translation,” saying that “literal translation has already become a consensus in the translation of academic works,” and so she tries not to change the original word order. I…
book reading notes freedom Aristotle
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2011年9月28日
Media and the Externalization of “Knowledge”

AI & the Future of Technology2010.11.15
Media and the Externalization of “Knowledge”
Reply to a netizen’s question: Why did knowledge change from a “virtue” into a “power”? Is it possible to reveal the root of this shift from the perspective of media? This is a great question ~ and it really can be revealed from the perspective of media. Roughly speaking, the media through which knowledge is displayed move from the age of oral speech, to manuscripts, and finally to printed books. In the oral age, the only or main way knowledge could be displayed was through speech; knowledge was displayed in lectures or debates. In such a situation, it is easy to imagine that the display of knowledge was always tied…
culture technology media knowledge
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2010年11月15日
Know Yourself, and Do Nothing in Excess—Reflections on Wang Yifang’s Lecture

Culture & Public Commentary2010.10.15
Know Yourself, and Do Nothing in Excess—Reflections on Wang Yifang’s Lecture
Scientific development is proceeding at high speed, and humanity is forging ahead rapidly on the road to knowledge—but does such development need a braking mechanism? Does science need to be “negatively thought”? This is the question Teacher Wang raised. Does science need ethical constraints? Beyond what is “correct,” is there also a standard of “justice”? When people discuss the ethical constraints or social responsibility of science, they are often referring to the personal conduct of scientists. Of course, scientists, as citizens and as members of society, are subject, like people in any other profession, to corresponding social and ethical constraints in their work and lives. Scientific ethics in this sense…
culture science knowledge pursuit
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2010年10月15日
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.01
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility
Speaking of which, Kantian ethics contains a very rigid conception of duty—for example, the command “do not lie.” This injunction is an absolute duty: even if a murderer asks you where your beloved is, and you know that if you tell the truth and do not lie to mislead him your beloved will be killed, you still must not lie. Moral duty is that hard. For, in any case, murder is the murderer’s fault, whereas lying is your fault; whether or not there is a murder, lying is always wrong. If your beloved happens to appear at the very place you falsely claimed she was, then would her being killed…
philosophy Kant human nature emotion
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2010年2月1日
Why Do I Need Ethics? — An Unconventional Introductory Book on Ethics

Philosophy & Thought2008.11.02
Why Do I Need Ethics? — An Unconventional Introductory Book on Ethics
This is an article written for submission. Although this was the first time I ever submitted anything truly of my own free will and initiative (see https://yilinhut.net/2008/09/21/2750.html), it was still awkwardly written. And because no word limit had been agreed on, it is obviously too long; if it were published in some other medium, it would certainly be excerpted, and that would depend on the editor’s deft touch. Whether it is published or not, I am posting the original text on the blog; please do not repost it before the final version appears. Why Do I Need Ethics? — An Unusual Introductory Reader on Ethics Gu Chi With the bestseller…
philosophy book reading freedom book review
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2008年11月2日