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David B. Wong (1949–)

Wong is the leading defender of pluralistic relativism — the view that there is a plurality of true and defensible moralities, but not an unlimited one. Against the caricature that relativism means anything-goes, he argues that universal features of human nature and the shared function of morality set constraints on which moral systems are admissible; within that floor, genuinely different moralities can each be adequate, and no single one is uniquely correct. The position is deliberately built to occupy the ground between moral realism and an unconstrained relativism, and it draws heavily on comparative work between Western and Chinese ethical traditions.

David B. Wong is Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. His first book, Moral Relativity (1984), set out an early version of the view; Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (2006) is its mature statement. He is also a prominent figure in comparative philosophy, bringing Confucian and Daoist thought into sustained dialogue with contemporary analytic ethics rather than treating it as a historical curiosity.

Key concepts

Pluralistic relativism. There is no single true morality, but neither is every morality as good as every other. A plurality of moral systems can be equally valid — each an adequate response to the circumstances of human social life — while some purported moralities are ruled out for failing the constraints. The label marks the two commitments held together: pluralism (more than one valid morality) and relativism (validity indexed to a system, no framework-independent ranking of the admissible ones).

The universal constraints. What keeps the pluralism from collapsing into anything-goes. Wong grounds two kinds of limit: formal constraints from the function of morality — any adequate morality must serve to coordinate social life and regulate conflict, internally and between persons — and substantive constraints from human nature — moralities must be livable by creatures with the needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities humans actually have. A code that failed these would not be a candidate morality at all, however sincerely held.

The floor is meant to be underdetermining, and this is the crux of the design. The constraints are drawn from a naturalistic story — what human beings need to live together, what functions any morality has to discharge — that is supposed to be substantial enough to exclude some systems yet too coarse to select a single one. Many ways of weighting the goods (autonomy against community, individual right against relational role) each satisfy the same functional and human-nature demands; the constraints rule out the non-starters without ranking the survivors. Whether a naturalistic account can be pitched at exactly that level — excluding the cruel while leaving the deep disagreements genuinely open — is where the whole position stands or falls.

Accommodation. From the fact that others hold a different but admissible morality, Wong derives an ethic of engagement: where reasonable moral differences persist, the appropriate response is a qualified accommodation — a disposition to seek terms of coexistence and mutual learning rather than to impose or to withdraw. This is a normative upshot he takes the meta-level view to support, not merely a description of moral variety.

Comparative grounding. Wong’s case leans on the reality of developed, coherent moral traditions that weight the goods differently — a Confucian ethic centred on relational roles and communal harmony set beside a modern Western ethic centred on individual rights and autonomy. He argues both can satisfy the constraints while diverging deeply, which is his standing evidence that valid moralities are plural rather than convergent on one ideal.

Where Wong stops

The constraints carry the weight of the whole position, and the standing objection is that they are either too weak or too strong. If the constraints on human nature and the function of morality are demanding enough to rule out the moralities we want to condemn — the cruel, the caste-bound — critics argue they may narrow the admissible set so far that a substantive common morality re-emerges, and the view slides toward a constrained universalism wearing relativist dress. If instead the constraints stay thin enough to preserve real plurality, it is disputed whether they can do the excluding work Wong needs. The realist and universalist reception presses the first horn — that a floor robust enough to condemn cruelty is already doing the work of a common morality; Bernard Williams’s question, whether a relativism that keeps genuine critical purchase across frameworks has stayed a relativism at all, bears directly on it. Where exactly the floor sits, and whether it can hold both jobs at once, is the live question his reception presses.

A second difficulty is the accommodation ideal. Critics ask on what footing accommodation itself stands: if it is a substantive value derived from the pluralistic picture, it looks like a first-order moral commitment smuggled in at the meta-level, and one that some admissible moralities might themselves reject. Whether a metaethical relativism can underwrite a determinate practical stance toward disagreement, without exceeding what the meta-level view entitles it to, remains contested.

Key works

See also: Ethics · Harman · Berlin