Relativism and Asian philosophy, revisited

Many, many years ago, I read online an essay by someone (no one famous, I'm pretty sure) about Eastern philosophy, and (I think) Buddhism, that argued that they were essentially relativistic about morality.   I didn't keep a link to it, and in fact I think I may have been reading it on a library computer - it was the very early days of the internet - and even if I am wrong and was reading it at home, I have been through umpteen different computers and laptops since then, and who really keeps bookmarks that consistently?   (That's a good reason to blog, actually - it does help me find links to things I read years ago.)   

Anyway, it was the type of online content that I am never likely to find again, but Googling around I see that a philosopher David B Wong has been prominent in arguing for (a kind of?) moral relativism as being legitimate, and his work has prompted a book Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy.  

Why am I thinking about this?   Probably because of the Daoism content on Religion for Breakfast, and some anti-China Tweet I saw the other that ran the argument (usually promoted by American Christians, I think) that the mainland Chinese have become irreligious and purely materialistic and hence ruthlessly immoral (using the terrible example of drivers who make sure the people they run over really are dead, as that way there is little to be claimed in compensation.)   (Lots of people tweeted in response that this is ridiculous oversimplification of the state of Chinese society.)  

So, this post is just a reminder of things I ought to get around to looking into more deeply one day.  I still haven't read more about Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, even though I posted about him 18 months ago.  He does sound very "middle way", which seems an appealing approach to everything as I get older.    

And speaking of which, Googling turns up this - the Middle Way Society, which seems to have been recently created by people with a secular Buddhist approach:  

The Middle Way is the idea that we make better judgements by avoiding fixed beliefs and being open to practical experience. We challenge unhelpful distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion, religion and secularism or arts and sciences. Though our name is inspired by some of the insights of the Buddha, we are independent of Buddhism or any other religion. We seek to promote and support integrative practice, overcoming conflict of all kinds.

Another page says this:

Moral judgement is an everyday part of our experience, not a remote or ‘queer’ thing requiring extraordinary proof to be justified. There are a variety of types of moral principle that people draw on – for example, religious authority, utilitarianism, Kantian principle, or virtue ethics – and any and all of these can reflect our experience of moral demands. Yet none of these types of moral principle offers the whole story, and our judgements can always gain in objectivity by addressing conditions better, whichever type of principle may be drawn on to help us do this.

Middle Way Philosophy can offer a sceptical perspective on the claims of many ethical systems that are based on metaphysics. It can also offer the grounds of confidence that there is incremental objectivity in ethical judgements. If we keep trying to extend our awareness, and draw on a variety of approaches to ethics rather than only one, we can make moral progress in the judgements we make. This perspective can be asserted with confidence because it takes into account the uncertainty of ethics, not despite it. If we avoid false certainty either of a positive or of a negative type, we have much better grounds of confidence than we had either when we appealed to false certainty or when we merely lamented its loss.

I should read more about it...  

Update:   Oh, this, a paper from Singapore, sounds interesting too: