## 1. Methodological Commensurability



Those arguing for radical incommensurability - the view that the
questions and answers in one tradition cannot sustain meaningful
statement in the other tradition - rely on the recognition of
radical difference in basic concepts and modes of inquiry. Given such
radical differences, they argue, there can be no cross-traditional
reference to a common subject matter and to a truth about that subject
matter that is independent of the basic conceptual vocabulary and
theories and justificatory practices of a particular tradition (see
Rorty, 1989, and Shweder, 1989). Looking for a possible
Chinese-Western instance of radical incommensurability, one might go
to Daoist texts such as the *Daodejing* and the
*Zhuangzi*. When it is said in chapter one (as traditionally
arranged and on one translation) of the *Daodejing* that
"The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way,"
or in chapter two that the "sages abide in nonaction and
practice the teaching that is without words," one is finding
something different from the usual in Western texts infused with
ideals of discursive rationality and argumentation. Or consider the
*Lunyu* or *Analects* 1:2, where the importance of
rightly ordered family relations is emphasized for right order in the
state ("He who has grown to be a filial son and respectful
younger brother will be unlikely to defy his superiors and there has
never been the case of someone inclined to defy his superiors and stir
up a rebellion"). The prominent and enduring place of this theme
of state as family writ large sets that tradition apart from Western
contractual traditions that have come to emphasize right order in the
state as that which can be ratified by an uncoerced agreement among
equals concerned to protect their private interests. Opponents of
radical incommensurability will level the charge that it presupposes a
hyperdramatic contrast between traditions. For example, the Western
tradition has not lacked for skeptics on the power of discursive
rationality, and some of these skeptics have nevertheless believed in
a mode of veridical access to something of supreme significance
- to a powerful experience within themselves or to something
much larger outside themselves. At the same time, it must be noted
that the positive theme is more recessive in the Western tradition and
appears mainly in theistic versions, as it does in Plotinus
(*Enneads*), Meister Eckhart (*Von unsagbaren Dingen*)
and Hildegaard of Bingen (*Scivias*). Similarly, the Western
tradition has certainly housed strains of thought that do view the
state as more of a natural outgrowth of small human groups such as
family and community. Even a major modern figure such as David Hume
(*Treatise of Human Nature*, 3.2.2) explicitly rejects the idea
of contract as central to understanding the origin or justification of
social and political bonds. There might still be a difference between
Chinese and Western traditions with respect to which strains of
thought become dominant or at least prevalent, but that difference
does not appear to come under the heading of radical
incommensurability.



Samuel Fleischacker (1992) proposes a more moderate version of
incommensurability - sometimes we can understand others just
well enough to know that we don't understand them. His argument
has roots in Wittgenstein's view that knowledge depends on a
background of shared assumptions and standards of evidence.
"World pictures" are embedded within cultures. Our world
picture involves not only a distinctive set of beliefs about the world
but also an ordering of interests that determines how we go about
trying to have reliable beliefs. This ordering differs from those
dominant in other cultures. We in the West have given precedence to
our interests in "egalitarian knowledge"(wanting and
believing that people have roughly equal access to the truth) and in
prediction and control of this-worldly objects. The world pictures of
other cultures embody other interests, and we may not be able to prove
that they are wrong, or indeed, we may be unable to fully understand
why it is that they value the interests they value so highly.
Nevertheless, we understand that they do value these interests highly
and think they are wrong to do so. We make such judgments despite our
merely partial understanding because we tend to see a certain set of
interests as the proper guide for a minimally decent or sensible human
life.



The idea that the distinctive character of a "world
picture" lies partly in the interests they embody seems
plausible. Daoism and Confucianism, at least after a certain stage in
the development of these schools, exemplify the way that a set of
interests intertwine with beliefs about the world. Both schools
exemplify in different ways a conception of understanding the world
that is inseparable from the interest in coming into
"attunement" with it, to use a felicitous word from
Charles Taylor (1982). To become attuned to the world is to see its
goodness and to know one's place in the order of the world. To
say that Daoists exemplify this theme about seeing the goodness of the
world is in a way misleading, since there is in the *Daodejing*
and *Zhuangzi* a profound mistrust of our conceptual
separations between opposites such as good and bad. The notion of
"nonaction" or *wuwei*, most prominently featured
in the *Daodejing*, does not denote literal inaction but
presupposes something like the possibility of an unforced acting
*with* the grain of things, and that presupposes that it is
possible to become attuned to that grain while in a state of awareness
that is not cluttered by distorting conceptual oppositions. The
*Daodejing* straightforwardly recommends *wuwei* and in
this sense seems to presuppose the goodness of the world and the way
its "grain" goes. Confucian texts uphold the ideal of a
different kind of attunement, under which the world and its order can
be called good without the ambiguity that Daoist skepticism with
conceptual opposition creates. For example, the *Mencius* (the
name is actually a latinization given by Christian missionaries
for'*Mengzi*') presents a theory that human nature
contains the germs or sprouts of goodness, tendencies to certain
feelings and judgments such as manifested by the feeling of compassion
for a child about to fall into a well. These sprouts are in human
nature because they were sent by *tian* (literally meaning
'sky' but most often translated as 'Heaven'
and perhaps best conceived as an impersonal ordering force of the
universe). Taylor thinks that modern science has severed the
connection between understanding and attunement. In
Fleischacker's terms, modern science is predicated on different
interests, prediction and control foremost among these interests.
Taylor believes that the severance of understanding and attunement
resulted in superior understanding at least of physical nature. But as
he is careful to point out, no single argument can prove global
superiority. If we can take attunement as an ideal, we have failed
miserably, even as our technological control of nature has increased
immeasurably. Perhaps, then, the contrast between a Chinese world
picture in which attunement figures prominently and a modern
scientific view predicated on the interests of prediction and control
serves as an example of the sort of moderate incommensurability
Fleischacker has in mind. One question to be raised about this kind of
incommensurability, however, is whether it truly involves lack of
understanding between traditions. Taylor himself draws examples of the
theme of attunement from Plato and the European cultural tradition. Do
we really fail to understand the appeal behind world pictures of
attunement? Taylor's complex assessment suggests no inability on
our part to understand the force behind both kinds of world pictures.
Even to take the stance that attunement pictures are comforting
illusions (an assessment less complex than the one Taylor adopts) is
to suppose that one does understand the appeal behind them.



Sometimes the case for incommensurability is made by pointing to the
pervasive and central presence of a term in one tradition for which no
equivalent term can be found in another tradition. Such a difference
may point to a degree of divergence of interests as suggested by
Fleischacker. However, it is better to explore the implications of
this kind of untranslatability case by case. Erin Cline (2013) has
argued for the presence of a concept of justice in the
*Analects* despite the fact that it contains no word that is
equivalent in meaning. Cline points to concerns expressed in the text
that relate to justice: about poverty and distribution of wealth;
about the need for trust in others in striving for a common good that
one shares with them; about how that sense of trust begins in the
family; about the need for concern to expand to all people even if it
starts in the family; and about *yi* or rightness as a virtue
as involving fair- mindedness. If there is a contrast between the
ancient Chinese tradition as represented by the *Analects* and
modern Western traditions, it may be more a matter of the latter being
especially focused on matters of distribution of goods by
institutions, rather than that interest being entirely absent in the
Confucian tradition. Often, the comparative situation is a complex one
in which philosophers from different traditions diverge substantially
in many ways, yet converge in interesting ways in some of their
central concerns. Aaron Stalnaker (2006) proposes a comparative
methodology involving "bridge concepts" that facilitates
exploration of such simultaneous divergence and convergence. Augustine
and Xunzi, he suggests, are both centrally concerned with human nature
and "spiritual exercises" intended to transform the self.
But such concepts as those of human nature and spiritual exercises are
not single concepts but a cluster of concepts, and in using them as
focal points of comparison, one should be aware of their complexity
and the different as well as similar ways they might operate in the
thought of Augustine and Xunzi.



A different kind of incommensurability that may arise is not
incomprehensibility between traditions but lack of common standards
sufficient for settling significant conflicts between them. Alasdair
MacIntyre (1988, 1989) has illustrated the difference between being
able to understand a tradition and being able to translate all its
claims into the language of another tradition by pointing to the
possibility of "bilinguals" - people who, for
example, might have been raised within one community and its
tradition, and then through migration or conquest, become a member of
another community and its different tradition. Such bilinguals might
very well understand each tradition, and such understanding might
include knowledge of those parts of each that cannot be translated
into the language of the other. Such bilinguals would not encounter
the sort of radical incommensurability constituted by
incomprehensibility, but they may be *unable to resolve conflicts
of belief* between the traditions, instead having to relativize
the claims of each in some such form as "seems true to this
particular community" or "seems justified to this
particular community." This kind of "evaluational"
incommensurability, rather than meaning incommensurability, might fit
better the case of world pictures based on attunement versus world
pictures that sever the connection between understanding and
attunement. MacIntyre himself presents a possibility for resolving
such conflicts in case one tradition continually fails in its attempts
to address certain key problems or issues. If another tradition has
the conceptual resources to explain why it is that the first tradition
continues to fail, then advocates of that first tradition may have to
acknowledge its limitations and even transfer their allegiances.
Whether that is the case for conflicts over attunement is not obvious
(See Wong, 1989).



Moving to the end opposite from various forms of incommensurability,
we find views holding that there must be substantial agreement
between traditions. The argument stems from a conception of the way
interpretation works. We proceed on the assumption that the others we
are interpreting live in the same world as we do.We subvert this
assumption, however, if we attribute to them beliefs that
substantially differ from our own. As Donald Davidson (1980) has
argued, a belief is identified by its location in a pattern of
beliefs, and it is this pattern that determines the subject matter of
the belief, what the belief is about. If we attribute to others a
pattern of beliefs that are different from our own, i.e., false
beliefs, this tends to undermine the identification of the subject
matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of the belief as being
about that subject. David Cooper (1978) applies a Davidsonian
principle of charity to the question of whether different cultures
have more or less the same morality. We can only identify
others' beliefs as moral beliefs about a given subject matter if
there is a massive degree of agreement between their and our beliefs
about that subject matter. For Cooper this implies that the moral
beliefs we attribute to others must be about something connected with
welfare, happiness, suffering, security, and the good life. Michele
Moody-Adams (1997) gives a more recent version of the same argument,
starting with the premise that understanding others requires that
there be quite substantial agreement about many of the basic concepts
that are relevant to moral reflection. She concludes that
"ultimate" or "fundamental" moral disagreement
is not possible.



The way that an earlier example of putative radical difference can be
questioned serves as some confirmation of this argument from charity
for strong agreement between traditions. Confucian conceptions of the
state as family writ large are not especially puzzling even when we do
not subscribe to them. We find similar themes that have arisen within
the Western tradition, and again, it is possible to conceive what the
appeal would be. However, these points also raise certain doubts about
the use of charity to argue for strong agreement. The fact that we can
point to similar beliefs within our own tradition and that we can
imagine what the appeal would lie behind such beliefs does not mean
that we share those beliefs with others even as we attribute to them.
Even if we were to share with them a belief in certain values, that
would not necessarily mean that we place the same importance on those
values relative to other values we (and perhaps they also) hold. It is
often observed that a distinctive feature of the Chinese Confucian
tradition is the very high value placed on filial piety. It is a
common feature of many cultures that one should honor thy father and
mother, of course, and it is not difficult to find analogies within
American society to Confucian filial piety. At the same time, the
Confucian tradition is unusual in the stringency of its duties to
parents. The scope of filial duties includes taking care of what
parents alone could have given one - one's body. Cengzi, one
of Confucius' students, is portrayed in 8.3 of the
*Analects* as gravely ill and near death. He bids his students
to look at his hands and feet, and quotes lines from the *Book of
Poetry* to convey the idea that all his life he has been keeping
his body intact as part of his duty to his parents. It is only now
near death, he says, that he can be sure of having been spared and
thus fulfilling this duty to parents. This very idea, that one must
keep one's body intact as a duty of gratitude to one's
parents, has remained a central idea in Chinese culture. While
American culture certainly contains similar themes of gratitude toward
those from whom one has received great benefits, such themes do not
necessitate agreement on the centrality and stringency of filial duties
in the Confucian tradition. Important kinds of moral difference, then,
may consist in the differing emphases given to values that are shared
across cultural traditions (Wong, 1996b). Thomas Kasulis (2002) puts a
similar point in a visual metaphor: what is foreground in one culture
may be background in another culture.



To accommodate this more subtle kind of difference, proponents of the
principle of charity might point out that charity does not require
complete agreement, but only "substantial" agreement or
agreement on "ultimate" or "fundamental"
disagreement. A further question that will pressed against this
position is how much agreement is sufficient for identification of
others' beliefs as being about the same subject matter as ours.
We do attribute to others error and simple difference (without judging
that someone is in error) of belief about the same subject matter. We
can attribute error to others if we believe them to be in
circumstances that encourage error, and we identify such types of
circumstance from past experience of discovering ourselves to be in
error. Furthermore, we attribute simple difference of belief when we
recognize that there is a range of reasonable interpretations or
weightings to be given to evidence.



In his later writings on charity (2001, p. 196), Davidson recognized
its ambiguities, noting that he previously tended to construe it in
terms of "maximizing" agreement in belief and that a more
perspicuous statement of what he had in mind all along is that
agreement in beliefs should be "optimized." Rather than
the "most" agreement, we need the "right sort"
of agreement that enables understanding of others. We should try to
reach agreement "as far as possible, subject to considerations
of simplicity, hunches about the effects of social conditioning, and
of course our common-sense, or scientific, knowledge of explicable
error." This very qualified formulation of charity amounts to
the admission that the principle of charity itself needs
interpretation and hence cannot be the ultimate standard for
interpretation. Henry Richardson (1997) points out that interpreting a
philosophical text requires taking account of the cognitive aims the
authors had in writing what they did. Is it more charitable,
Richardson asks, for a translator of Machiavelli's *The
Prince* to resolve ambiguities and seek to maximize agreement
between Machiavelli and ourselves? Or is it more charitable to set him
out as intentionally provocative and deliberately cryptic? It should
be unsurprising that charity cannot fulfill its promise as a firm and
clear guide to interpretation. Charity bids us to render others like
"us," but "we" are already a diverse group who
believe and want and value somewhat different things. That is, the
range of the intelligibly human already embraces diversity (think of
how impoverished our models of understanding would be if we could only
rely on our individual selves). See Mou (2006) for a range of articles
on the way that Davidson's interpretive principle and other
aspects of his philosophy relate to Chinese philosophy.



An alternative to both the radical incommensurability and strong
agreement positions is that there is no general answer on how much
agreement or disagreement is to be found between complex and
heterogeneous traditions such as the Chinese and Western. As emerged
above, one must distinguish between meaning and evaluational
incommensurabilities. Furthermore, how much disagreement we will find
not only depends on the particular subject matter but also on the
answers we find most plausible within a larger context of inquiry: the
attempt to explain others, their actions, practices, institutions,
and history. In such a larger context, attribution to others of
beliefs different from ours may be more or less reasonable depending
on how it fits into a reasonable explanation of them. And what counts
as a reasonable explanation in particular cases will be set within the
context of one's larger theories about persons and societies,
among other things. One's explanation of people can reasonably
attribute error or simple difference of belief on an indefinite number
of important matters that might even deserve to be called
'fundamental' as long as it seems plausible to attribute
error or simple difference of belief to them in their epistemic
situation as we construe it (see also Grandy, 1973). Or one's
explanation can reasonably imply convergence or similarity of belief.
An intermediate possibility is that the difference or similarity
becomes more prominent as one defines the subject matter in a
'thicker' or 'thinner' way (Shun, 2004). Does
the Chinese tradition recognize individual rights? The answer, as
shall emerge below, may depend on how specifically one defines the
notion of a right. If one defines a right rather thinly as what one
has whenever one has justifiable claims on others to assure
one's possession of things or one's exercise of certain
capacities, then one can plausibly argue that there is a common notion
of rights between the Chinese and Western traditions (Wong, 2004a).
If, on the other hand, one 'thickens' one's
definition of rights with the idea that they are justifiable
independently of what is a good and worthwhile life for human beings,
then one plausibly argue against a common notion of rights.


## 2. Metaphysical and Epistemological Commensurability



One common portrait of the difference between the Chinese and Western
traditions posits a radical incommensurability on the very nature of
philosophical inquiry. Chinese philosophy is "wisdom"
literature, composed primarily of stories and sayings designed to move
the audience to adopt a way of life or to confirm its adoption of that
way of life. Western philosophy is systematic argumentation and
theory. Those who identify philosophy with the latter will commonly
assert that Chinese thought has no philosophy (see DeFoort, 2001; and
Van Norden, 2017 for discussion of this aspect of the controversy). Is
there such a difference? One reason to think so is the fairly
widespread wariness in Chinese philosophy of a discursive rationality
that operates by deduction of conclusions about the particular from
high-level generalizations. The seventeenth chapter of the
*Zhuangzi* notes that the sage-king Yao looked for a suitable
successor, found the perfect candidate in Shun, and then abdicated so
that Shun could take over the throne. The result was glorious.
However, when Kuai imitated Yao the result was disastrous. Tang and Wu
were kings who fought and conquered. But Duke Bo also acted on that
rule, fought, and lost. That is why it is impossible to establish
"any constant rule." Inspired by the achievement of
insight or wisdom in some particular cases, we create general rules
that we believe will work for many other cases in the future. The
unfortunate result is that our original insights and wisdom are
magnified beyond the scope of their applicability. Confucians are more
willing to articulate their teachings in the form of principles, but
such principles seem to function as designators of values or general
considerations that ought to be given weight in judgments about what
to do. Never lost is recognition of the necessity for the exercise of
discretion in judgment according to the particular circumstances at
hand. The best rules lose applicability in unusual circumstances.
Rules and values conflict in many circumstances, and there are no
"super-principles" to supply ready answers. The
appropriate resolution to each conflict depends very much on the
situation. In *Mencius* 7A35, Mencius is asked what the
legendary sage-king Shun would have done if his father had killed a
man. Mencius replies that the only thing to do would be to apprehend
him. Shun could not interfere with the judge, who was acting on the
law. However, Mencius continues, Shun would then have abdicated and
fled with his father to the seacoast. As Mencius portrays it, then,
Shun's actions strike a balance between the different values in
tension with one another. The refusal to interfere with the judge is a
way of acknowledging the necessity of impartially administering a
social order. At the same time, fleeing with one's father is
honoring the value of greater loyalty to family. Shun manages to honor
both values at different moments in his dealing with the situation.
Deduction from a principle could not yield such a balance. We are
expected, however, to learn from stories such as Shun's,
precisely because they function as concrete paradigms for
judgment-making in the future. When we encounter situations that pose
similar-looking conflicts between impartial concern and familial
loyalties, we have Shun's judgment as a resource and a model.
That model is not the same as a general principle that would
deductively yield a judgment about what to do in the present
situation. We must exercise judgment in determining whether new
situations are similar enough to the case of Shun, and we must
exercise judgment as to what actions would be parallel to Shun's
actions.



Naes and Hanay (1972) have characterized Chinese philosophy as
"invitational" in its method of persuasion, meaning that
it portrays a way of life in a vivid fashion so as to invite the
audience to consider its adoption. The *Analects*, for example,
portrays the ideal of the *junzi* (often translated as
"gentleman" but perhaps more accurately glossed as the
noble person) as realized by persons of genuine substance who are
undisturbed by the failure of others to recognize their merits (1.1:
"To be undisturbed by others yet not complain, is this not the
mark of the *junzi*?"). In the *Mencius*
(2A2)*,* such a person possesses a kind of equanimity or heart
that is unperturbed by the prospects of fame and success. This
unperturbed heart corresponds to the cultivation of one's
*qi* (vital energies) by uprightness. One might be able to see
such passages as appealing to experiences the audience might have in
its encounters with persons who do seem to possess special strength,
substance, and tranquility through identification with and commitment
to a cause they perceive to be far greater than themselves. One need
not interpret such sayings as attempting to persuade by the pure
emotive effect of certain words, as in propaganda. Rather, they may
correspond to a way of doing philosophy that attempts to say something
about values in life that can be supported by experience, even if not
all testimony will agree (Kupperman, 1999). The Daoists recommend a
way of life that they explicitly characterize as one that cannot be
argued for, but their recommendation receives some support through
commonly shared experience. Consider again the notion of
*wuwei* and its illustrations in the *Zhuangzi* through
stories of exemplary craft. Most famously, Zhuangzi's Cook Ding
cuts up an oxen so smoothly and effortlessly that his knife never
dulls, and it is if he is doing a dance with his knife as it zips
through the spaces between the joints. He does this not through
"perception and understanding" but through the
*qi*, the vital energies of the body. His marvelous skill is
knowledge of how to adjust his own movements to the spaces within oxen
so that he and the oxen form seamless wholes. Similarly, Woodcarver
Qing has learned to prepare for carving his marvelous bellstands in
such a way that he clears his mind of all distraction and sees the
stand within the timber he has selected. Suggested here is a portrait
of acting in the world that consists of complete and full attention to
present circumstances so that the agent can act with the grain of
things (the Cook Ding passage refers to *tianli* or heavenly
patterns). Such a portrait does resonate with the actual experience of
craftspeople, artists, athletes, musicians and dancers who have
advanced beyond self-conscious technique and rule-following, who
become fully absorbed in the experience of working with the material,
the instruments or in the movement of their bodies, and who experience
their actions as an effortless flow and in fact perform at very high
levels. In such ways, Chinese thinkers draw a picture of the world
that must in the end be evaluated by explanatory power in some very
broad sense. We must ask whether the picture helps make sense of our
experience of the world (again in a broad sense of
'experience' not limited to quantifiable observations in
replicable experiments) and whether it preserves features of that
experience that we think are *prima facie* genuine. Much of
Western philosophy must be judged according to the same standard. 



So then, is it right to say that Chinese philosophy is invitational
while Western philosophy is argumentative? One answer is that there is
a difference but that it is more a matter of degree than an absolute
contrast. It was Aristotle, after all, who said that discussions about
the good in human life cannot be properly assimilated by the young
because they do not have enough experience of life (*Nichomachean
Ethics* I.3). And Plato despite his insistence on the centrality
of argumentation to philosophy, dispatches the short analytical
arguments presented in Book I of the *Republic* in favor of
lengthy expository portraits of the ideal city-state and the
harmonious soul for the rest of that work. Those portraits sometimes
present only the thinnest of arguments for crucial premises, and at
other times no argument at all. Some of his claims, about the divisive
effects of family loyalties and the ill-effects of democracy,
obviously appeal to experience, even if not all testimony will agree.
In fact, it is hard work to find an acknowledged great in the Western
tradition to whom such characterizations do *not* apply, at
least to some degree. Sometimes, as in Spinoza (*The Ethics*),
the contrast is glaring between the aspiration to prove points by way
of deductive argument from self-evident axioms and the obvious source
of those points from experience of life and at best some mix of theory
and intuition. It is true that much Western philosophy, especially of
the late modern variety, and most especially emanating from the United
Kingdom and North America, attempts to establish its claims through
argumentation that is more rigorous than appeals to experience and
explanatory power in the broad sense. But it must also be noted that
there is argument in Chinese philosophy. Chad Hansen (1992) has
pointed out the pivotal role of the philosopher Mozi, who criticized
the Confucians for an uncritical acceptance of tradition and who
explicitly introduced standards for the evaluations of belief. This
introduction of argumentation required response in kind. Mencius gives
a Confucian response to to the Mohists and argues on behalf of his
theory of human nature as containing the germs or sprouts of the
ethical virtues, in the form of natural dispositions to have certain
kinds of feeling and judging reactions to situations, such as
compassion for a child about to fall into a well (2A6, and see Shun,
1997 for an extensive analysis of argumentation in the
*Mencius* text). He defends himself against the arguments of
rival theorists who hold that human nature has no innate ethical
predispositions but is neutral (6A). Xunzi, a later Confucian thinker,
attempts to give a refutation of Mencius's theory in favor of
his own theory that human nature has dispositions that get us into
trouble and that ethical norms are an invention designed to avoid that
trouble (*Xunzi*, chapter 23). Methods of argumentation reach
their most sophisticated state of development in Xunzi (See Cua,
1985).



Differences in the way philosophy is conceived may reflect differences
in the interests philosophy is meant to satisfy. Chad Hansen (1992)
points to another possible difference in interests - this time
in interests that language is meant to satisfy, arguing that the
classical Chinese thinkers did not conceive of the primary function of
language to be descriptive and as attempting to match propositions
with states of affairs, but rather as a pragmatic instrument for
guiding behavior. In fact, Hansen sees the Chinese tradition as
centrally concerned with the conflict of *daos*, which he
defines as sets of behavior-guiding practices, including discourses.
Western interpreters have been unable to see this, argues Hansen,
because they have imposed their own concerns with correspondence truth
and metaphysics on the Chinese tradition. They have as a result
imposed upon Daoism an irrational mysticism focused on a
metaphysically absolute *Dao*. Michael LaFargue (1992) also
argues that the *Daodejing* is not to be interpreted as as
concerning some metaphysical entity called the *Dao*, but is
rather concerned with self cultivation that allows one to have a
transforming experience of deep and peaceful stillness within
one's personal center. *Wuwei* is the style of action
that is rooted in such an experience. David Hall and Roger Ames (1987)
give a related interpretation of Confucius, in part reacting against
Herbert Fingarette's (1972) influential interpretation of
Confucius' *Dao* as an ideal normative order transcending
the contingencies of time, place, history, and culture. Hall and Ames
argue Confucius's *Dao* was not conceived as a tradition
and language-independent reality against which linguistically
formulated beliefs were to be measured as reliable or unreliable, but
in fact a cumulative creation of individuals working from within a
context provided by a society's tradition, consisting of
customs, conventions, conceptions of proper behavior and good manners,
conceptions of right conduct and of what is of ultimate value and of
what lives are worth living.



These interpretations perform valuable functions in questioning what
is sometimes an unreflective imposition of Western philosophical
agendas on Chinese thinkers. The debate will go on, however.
Concerning Confucius, it is true that the *Analects* often
displays an attitude of tolerance and flexibility in judging where the
*Dao* lies. On the other side, it can be pointed out that in
sayings such as 1.2 (filial piety and brotherly love are at the root
of the virtue of *ren* or humanity), there is no indication
that the claim is limited to Chinese culture but extended to human
beings generally. One way to understand it is to take it as saying
that human beings have to learn to respond to a kind of authority that
is not based on force and coercion, but respect and care. Or consider
the consistent Confucian theme that rulers cannot hold power simply on
the basis of law and punishment. There is no sign such judgments are
meant to be limited in scope to one's own time and place.
Concerning the *Daodejing*, it is clear that there are very
strong practical concerns underlying the text. A way of life is being
recommended (as in Hansen), and perhaps that way of life is rooted in
a certain kind of transforming experience (as in LaFargue). On the
other side, it could be argued that such practical and experiential
concerns do not exclude metaphysical concerns. Consider chapter four
of that text where *Dao* is described as being empty, as
seeming something like the ancestor of the myriad of things, as
appearing to precede the Lord (*di*). For something that at
least *looks* metaphysical in the *Mencius,* consider
aforementioned 2A2, concerning the unperturbed heart that can be
achieved by cultivating one's floodlike *qi.* Such
*qi* is vast and unyielding, and if cultivated with uprightness
will fill up the space between *tian* (Heaven) and earth.
Perhaps the lesson to draw is not that Chinese thinkers lacked
metaphysical concerns but that they did not separate practical from
metaphysical concerns in the way that contemporary Western thinkers
might.



However this issue is resolved with respect to the classical Chinese
thinkers, few have disputed that classical concepts such as that of
nonbeing *eventually* acquired frankly metaphysical meanings in
the Chinese tradition, where it refers at the least to an
indeterminate ground in which the determinate "ten thousand
things" are incipient (Neville, 1989). This embrace of an
indeterminate ground of the determinate may reflect the decision to
give the phenomenon of change a fundamental place in ontology, rather
than an absolutely stable being as in Parmenidean ontology and as
later reflected in Aristotelian and Cartesian notions of substance
(Cheng, 1989, 1991). The revival of interest in Chinese metaphysics
has partly been fueled by the perception that twentieth century
physics has in fact undermined the strategy of giving determinate
being ontological primacy (Zukov, 1979). 



The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (*Zhuzi yulei*) reinterpreted ethical
themes inherited from the classical thinkers and reframed them within
a cosmology and metaphysics that was deeply influenced by Daoism and
Buddhism, even as he asserted the ethical superiority of Confucianism
over these other philosophies. On his conception of *ren* as an
all inclusive virtue, it constitutes the *Dao* and consists of
the fact that the mind of Heaven and Earth to produce things is
present in everything, including the mind of human beings. *Li*
(not the word for ritual or ritual propriety),the principles or
patterns of the universe, runs through all things. It runs through the
mind of human beings and enables them to form "one body"
with all things, including a sensitivity to harm that comes to them
that is like the response we have to harm to comes to ourselves (see
Shun, 2020). Another great Neo-Confucian, Wang Yang-Ming (*Quan
xilu*) is known for his view that genuinely moral knowledge is
inherently practical and motivated. Knowing goodness is to know to
love it (see Huang, 2017). In comparison to Zhu, Wang showed little
interest in the sort of empirical investigation of things prescribed
in the *Great Learning* but rather a rectification of the mind
with evil thoughts. Nevertheless, there are metaphysical commitments
in Wang that are intimately related to his ethical commitments (see
Ivanhoe, 2017).



Within the Chinese tradition, Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist
approaches to understanding the world are broadly similar in their
tendencies to understand things in terms of their relationships to
other things and ultimately to the wholes that contain them. Rather
than seeing the world as composed of plural substances causally
interacting in a linear fashion on the model of a billiard ball
hitting another billiard ball and setting it into motion, there is a
tendency to think of systems or wholes, the structures of which are
constituted by the relationships between their parts. The paradigms
here are biological or organic systems (Wang, 2013). The mode of
thinking about these relationships in Confucianism and Daoism, has
been termed "correlative." Eminent sinologists have meant
significantly different things by these terms (see Granet, 1934;
Needham, 1954; Graham, 1989; Hall and Ames, 1998), but they all seem
to be pointing to a species of analogical thought identifying
correspondences between kinds (*lei*). These kinds might be
differentiated according to functions within a structure of
relationships, such that those having similar functions in similar
structures would be of the same kind. The most general of kinds came
to be identified as *yin* and *yang*, where *yin*
is the tendency to contract and yield (associated with darkness and
the feminine), and *yang* is the tendency to expand and
dominate associated with light and the masculine). A thing that is
*yin* has a relationship with something that is *yang*.
Natural patterns displayed by interactions within wholes, whether they
be the universe or the human body, involve the interaction of things
that are *yin* and *yang*, and this interaction can
involve opposition, complementarity, and cyclical alternation (Wang,
2013). 



Though the nature of the interactions is sometimes described as
non-causal, the contrast is most plausibly made with reference to
mechanical and linear notions of causation in which the effect (like
the second billiard ball hit by the first) is purely passive and
inert. The interactions envisioned in Chinese thought are not
necessarily incompatible with notions of causation in which the cause
"works with the tendencies of the thing affected"
(Perkins, 2019). This is in keeping with the paradigm of wholes being
the biological and the organic. A significant example of the more
dynamic and complex notion of causation is Mencius' conception
of the development of moral sprouts in human nature (mentioned in
section 1 above and further discussed in section 3 below). To become
virtuous is to grow one's moral sprouts (such as a natural
compassion for others' suffering) into a mature and vigorous
plant (such as the full virtue of *ren* or humanity) through
reflecting on their importance to one's flourishing as a person
under the environmental conditions of secure material livelihood and
ethical education (*Mencius* 1A7, 6A7, 6A14-15). Cultivation of
a person's virtue, then, is an instance of factors (in this case
some external and some internal to the person) interacting with the
tendencies affected. It is not writing on a blank slate nor is it
discovering something that is already fully there.



Trying to understand something in terms of its relationships to a
larger whole has been said to be a characteristic of Chinese (and more
generally East Asian) thought (Nisbett, 2004) and this more holistic
approach may be contrasted with an analytic approach that begins with
the parts and tries to understand the whole in terms of their
relationships. These two approaches are not necessarily mutually
exclusive, and both approaches may be employed at different stages of
inquiry or to different aspects of the subject matter. If there is a
difference between the very broad and internally diverse traditions of
East Asia and the West, it is one of the degree and frequency of
dominance of one approach versus the other. 



The relational approach in Confucian and Daoist philosophies is
apparent in their conceptions of what it is to be a person. The
Confucian conception of the person is that of a profoundly social
being. Hall and Ames (1998) use the language of the individual's
being the focal point of an interlocking "field" of
relationships. Henry Rosemont, Jr. (1991b) identifies the individual
with the sum total of their social roles. One issue here is whether a
person's identity is *wholly* constituted by their
relationships and how this can be compatible with what Shun (2004) has
identified in Confucianism as the capacity to step back from an
established social setup, to criticize it and possibly to reject and
separate oneself from it. Hall and Ames, furthermore, want to affirm
as part of Confucianism the belief in the individual's power to
contribute creatively to the constitution of social roles in the
"field," and the question is how such a power co-exists
with being wholly constituted by the field (Wong 2004b). However one
ends up resolving that question, it seems clear that a good part of a
person's identity on the Confucian view must lie in their
relationships to other persons, and even the reasons for distancing
the self from the established social setup would involve a critical
ethical stance toward that setup based on rightness and humanity
together with realization that these values could not be fully
realized in one's lifetime.



Whereas early Confucianism tends to find the relational elements of
personhood in the human social world, early Daoism tends to find them
in the world at large, especially beyond the human social world.
Returning to the theme of correlative thinking, Daoism invites human
beings to find their most fundamental being in the natural patterns
that are more clearly evidenced in the nonhuman natural world and that
tend to be obscured by developed human social orders and the
conceptual oppositions embedded in them. People are invited to find
their identities in harmonizing with natural forces. The
neo-Confucians, in trying to establish the primacy of Confucianism
over Daoism and Buddhism, incorporated some of the most powerful
themes from these rival philosophies, as illustrated by Wang
Yang-Ming's declaration that human beings form one body with
Heaven and Earth and the myriad things.



In Chinese Buddhism, we get an explicit, metaphysical deconstruction
of the human self in the Buddha's view of it as a floating
collection of various psychophysical reactions and responses with no
fixed center or unchanging ego entity. He did not deny that we think
of the self as a fixed and unchanging center, but considered such a
self a delusion. Our bodily attributes, various feelings, perceptions,
ideas, wishes, dreams, and in general a consciousness of the world
display a constant interplay and interconnection that leads us to the
belief that there is some definite 'I' that underlies and
is independent of the ever-shifting series. But there is only the
interacting and interconnected series. This metaphysical concern, of
course, had deep practical implications for the Buddha. It points
toward the answer to human suffering, which ultimately stems from a
concern for the existence and pleasures and pains of the kind of self
that never existed in the first place. The recognition that none of
the "things" of ordinary life are fixed and separate
entities, anymore than the self is, leads to a recognition of all of
life as an interdependent whole and to the practical attitude of
compassion for all of life. In a comparative perspective, one cannot
help but be struck by the similarity between the Buddhist view of the
self and David Hume's doubts about the existence of a unitary
and stable self (*Treatise of Human Nature*, 1.4.6). Consider
also Derek Parfit's (1984) point that acceptance of a Humean or
a Buddhist view of the self can lead to sense that one is less
separate from other selves and to a wider concern when
"my" projects seem not so absolutely different from
"your" projects. However one might regard the argument for
impersonal concern from such a view of the self, the view itself may
seem to have a claim to our renewed attention. It certainly fits
better with a naturalized conception of human beings as part of this
world and not as Cartesian thinking substances that somehow operate
apart from the rest of nature. Siderits (2003) Flanagan (2013) have
brought Buddhism into dialogue with naturalistic analytic philosophy
in sophisticated and productive ways that benefit both sides.



Going back to the issue of the relative differences between Chinese
and Western philosophy, it would be fair to say that the former is
more consistently focused on the question of how to live one's
life, even when the topic is the metaphysics of the world or of the
self. This makes a difference to the way philosophy is done. As argued
above, Chinese philosophy has argumentation and the ambition to
explain through theory, but its commitment to the ethical and the
practical in general has led to a tighter connection between
approaches to how to live one's life and what it is to do
philosophy. Chinese philosophy is done in ways that have significantly
non- or extra-discursive dimensions. Jenco (2007) has pointed out that
even when Western philosophers have discussed the ills of
ethnocentrism, they have typically framed their critiques in concepts
and language from Western discourses, such as Marxism and
poststructuralism. They have called for cross-cultural dialogue as a
way of countering ethnocentrism without raising the question of
whether the exclusive use of dialogue itself might be a form of
ethnocentrism. Dialogue tends to focus our attention on texts and
leaves out of focus practices such as memorization, recitation,
meditation, imitation, ritual, and dance (Jenco, 2007; Kalmonson,
2017). It is not as if the texts are left out of one's
attention. It is rather that these non-discursive practices become
part of one's attempt to interpret and live the meaning of the
texts in one's personal experience. To fully engage in
cross-cultural philosophy may require an openness to and
experimentation in these non-discursive practices. At a time when the
boundaries between reason and emotion and body and mind are being
called into question, and when the operations of reason and
decision-making have increasingly been found by cognitive psychology
and science to depend on the state of the emotions and the body, it
seems appropriate to consider that meditation and ritual practices may
alter for the better the emotional and somatic basis of effective
thinking and acting.


## 3. Ethical Commensurability



Confucianism is a perfectionist virtue ethic if such an ethic is
distinguished by its central focus on three subjects: character traits
identified as the virtues; the good and worthwhile life; and
particularist modes of ethical reasoning. These three subjects are
interrelated. The virtues are traits of character necessary for living
a good life. The virtues typically involve acting on particularist
modes of ethical reasoning that do not rely on deducing specific
action-guiding conclusions about how to act from general principles
but rather on judging in the context at hand what needs to be done
(see Van Norden, 2004, 2007, Hutton, 2003, Wong, 2002, and Ivanhoe,
2002 for discussions of judgment and its relation to reasoning and
emotion in Mencius). Consider some of the virtues that belong to the
*junzi* (the noble person): *ren* (humanity,
benevolence), *xiao* (filial piety), *yi*
(righteousness), and *li* (acting according to ceremonial
ritual or more generally propriety). The very concept of y*i*
connotes the ability to identify and perform the action that is
appropriate to the particular context (*Analects* 4:10 says
that the *junzi* is not predisposed to be for or against
anything, but rather goes with what is *yi*). While traditional
rules of ritual provide one with a sense of what is courteous and
respectful action given standard contexts, the virtue of
*y**i* allows one to identify when those rules need to
be set aside in exigent circumstances (see Cua, 1997). The previously
discussed example in the *Mencius* of Shun and his father shows
how a ruler's more general concern for his subjects and his
filial duties to his fathers must be balanced in ways that cannot be
given by principle but only by reflection on what the particular
circumstances suggest and allow. Finally, consider that another
example from the Mencius about the time when Shun wanted to marry. He
knew that his parents, not the wisest nor the best of parents, would
not permit him to marry if told of Shun's intention. Shun went
ahead and got married without telling his parents, an act that
normally would be a grave offense against filial piety. Two reasons
are given for the justifiability of this act. One is that the worst
way of being a bad son is to provide no heir (4A26); the other is that
letting his parents thwart his desire to realize the greatest of human
relationships which in turn would cause bitterness toward his parents
(5A2). Hence an act that normally would be a grave offense against
filial piety constitutes filial piety in the particular circumstances.
Particularist modes of reasoning are needed, then, to judge when the
usual rules apply, to balance conflicting values, and to specify the
concrete meaning of single values in application to context.



The parallels to ancient Greek virtue ethics, medieval virtue ethics,
and also to contemporary virtue ethics in the West are striking, and
help to account for the renewal of Western interest in Confucianism.
For example, Jiyuan Yu (2007) argues that the concept of
*eudaimonia* (happiness, living well, flourishing) in Aristotle
and the concept of *dao* (the way for human beings to live) in
Confucius are parallel starting points in their ethics, and that the
next step in both their ethics is to discuss virtue (*arete*
for Aristotle and *de* for Confucius). In general, Chinese and
Western virtue ethics converge in focusing on certain virtues as
crucial for ethical development of the person. There are particularly
interesting discussions of courage and the possible role of fear in
Mencius and Aristotle (see Van Norden, 1997, 2007; Jiang, 2008).
Particularist modes of reasoning in Confucianism parallel the
Aristotelian notion of a *phronesis* or practical wisdom that
depends significantly on knowledge of particulars acquired through
experience. A good example is his doctrine of the mean, which holds
that virtuous action and feeling consists of avoiding the extremes of
deficit and excess. The doctrine does not imply that we ought always
to act moderately and with moderate feeling. Aristotle says that the
mean is "relative to us," giving the illustrative analogy
that too little food for Milo is too much for the beginner in athletic
exercises (*Nichomachean Ethics*, 2.6). Depending on the
situation, the appropriate action and feeling may be extreme on a
common sense understanding but appropriate given the agent and the
circumstances. Part of the contemporary revival of virtue ethics is
premised partly on a reaction against the ambition of modern ethical
theory to guide primarily through general principles of action rather
than through the specification of ideal character traits. Virtue
ethics also tend to embody the theme that the ethical life of right
(and in the case of Chinese and contemporary Western virtue ethics)
caring relationship to others is necessary for human flourishing. In
the *Mencius* this theme emerges in identification of the
distinctively human potentials with the incipient tendencies to
develop the moral virtues (*Mencius* 2A6, 6A1, 6A3, 6A7).
Aristotle held that reason makes us distinctively human and that our
reason and social nature compel recognition of the desirability of the
ethical life for human beings (see Nivison, 1996 for comparisons of
Aristotle and Mencius; and Yearley, 1990 for comparisons of Aquinas
and Mencius). Xunzi is equally emphatic about the necessity of right
and caring relationship to others for human flourishing, even though
he denies (at least when he is criticizing Mencius) that human nature
contains tendencies to engage in such relationships (see Ivanhoe,
1991, on the way ethical norms help human beings to flourish; and
Nivison, 1996a, 1996b, Van Norden, 1992, 2007, Wong, 1996b, and Kline,
2000, on the difference between Mencius and Xunzi's theories of
human nature; see Goldin, 1999, for a book-length treatment of
Xunzi's philosophy; and Wong 2015a).



The similarities coexist with significant differences, however. There
is no parallel in Greek virtue ethics for the centrality of family
life in the Confucian conception of the good life. Part of the reason
for this lies in the Confucian appreciation for the family as the
first arena in which care, respect, and deference to legitimate
authority is learned (*Analects* 1.2; see also Cline, 2007,
2013 for a discussion of the Confucian view of the family in moral
development and for an interesting comparison to John Rawls'
conception of the role of the family). Van Norden (2004, 2007) points
out that the moral emotion of shame plays a crucial role in
Mencius' conception of moral development and that there is no
comparable role played by the emotion in Aristotle. He suggests that
the explanation lies in Mencius' greater focus on moral agency
*in media res*. The way in which particularist reasoning is
illustrated in historical stories such as those about Shun is also a
distinctive feature of Confucian ethics. These stories present
paradigms of good judgment and of good individuals, from which persons
engaged in ethical cultivation of themselves should learn. Another
distinctive feature of Confucian ethics is the emphasis it gives to an
aesthetic dimension of the good life. To act according to ritual
propriety is not simply to conform to notions of appropriate behavior
in this or that context. It is to act with the right attitude,
reverence, say, in the case of serving one's parents in an
appropriately respectful manner, and it is to express such an attitude
so gracefully and without internal conflict that doing so has become
second nature (see Kupperman, 1999 and Cua, 1997). The importance
attached to *li*, to ritual propriety itself, indicates the
Confucian appreciation for the role of culture and convention in
enabling human beings to express ethical attitudes toward each another
such as care and respect (see Cua, 2005 for rich explorations of
*li* in the thought of Xunzi). It is not as if bowing naturally
*means* deferential respect; it must be agreed through
convention that it does mean something like this (see Fingarette,
1972; see Shun, 1993, for a discussion of the relationship of
*li* to the important virtue of *ren*). 



Confucianism offers a rich moral psychology. Among sinologists,
Nivison (1996; see especially "Motivation and Moral Action in
Mencius," "Philosophical Voluntarism in Fourth-Century
China," "Two Roots or One?" and "Xunzi on
'Human Nature'") was especially influential in
mining Confucian texts for insight into moral psychology from a
comparative perspective. Van Norden (2017) holds that Confucianism has
a decided edge over modern Western philosophy in terms of presenting
rich and insightful theories of moral development. On his narrative,
early modern Western philosophy abandoned Aristotelian explanations by
appeal to actualization of potentiality for quantitative explanations
in terms of material objects in motion. While this was a positive
development for the natural sciences, it was a disaster for ethics,
particularly in the intersection with moral psychology. It is probably
not just the early modern turn in the West toward mechanistic
quantitative explanations that accounts for the comparative
difference. Aristotle's explanation of the actualization of the
potential for virtue was relatively skimpy in gesturing toward
habituation as the means, whereby one becomes courageous by acting
courageously, and so on (*Nichomachean Ethics* II.1). Xunzi
seems to have a similar problem when he declares on the one hand that
human nature is bad, with powerful self-seeking and competitive
impulses that threaten to throw human being into destructive conflict
with one another, and on the other hand, that the performance of
ritual, through following models of virtue, and through a social
environment with roles fashioned to be in accordance with standards of
rightness (*yi*), human beings can come to love virtue for its
own sake. However, Xunzi at one point in his chapter on ritual
observes that all creatures of blood and breath (*qi*) know to
love their own kind and long after others of its group if they become
separated. Human beings are most of all like this, which is why
rituals such as mourning and grief for loved ones are so powerful and
help shape our impulses for the better. Ritual, which most of the time
seems to have a restraining, reformative function in Xunzi, now
acquires a crucial expressive function that strengthens and enhances
motivations that are congenial to morality. It is at this point that
Xunzi, however inadvertently, points toward a more complex and
pluralistic theory of human nature that becomes a more plausible
theory of moral development because it takes just enough from
Mencius's theory that there are natural inclinations that could
form a positive basis for the love and development of virtue (Wong,
1996a; 2015a; for a different view of how ritual works in
Xunzi's theory of moral development see Sung, 2015; 2017).



Mencius, of course, attributes a much more extensive set of positive
tendencies such as natural compassion for the suffering of others that
can be shaped into virtues such as *ren* or humanity, and the
debate between Xunzi and Mencius is how much the development of virtue
is set up by inborn affective and cognitive impulses and intuitions,
and how much is shaped by cultural processes and the influence of
norms. This brings out another reason why Confucians were set up to
produce a rich moral psychology. They took emotions as a potentially
positive base for virtue, a base that could be made receptive to the
insights of reflection and reasoning. Modern Western philosophy is
often more inclined to see emotion as an impediment to morality, as in
Kant (except for the feeling of respect for the moral law) or as a
competitor to reasoning and its potential master, as in Hume. Rarely
is there an exploration of reasoning and emotion as partners that
develop as they interact with each other (for a comparison see Wong,
2015b, 2017). 



The differences between Mencius' and Xunzi's theories are
substantial and raise sophisticated philosophical issues that remain
relevant to this day. Xunzi launched a vigorous critique of
Mencius' claim for the existence of natural tendencies that form
the basis for development of a good person. In arguing against
Mencius, he presupposes a strict separation between that which is
given in human nature and that which must be developed through
deliberate effort. Mencius' conception of human nature, on the
other hand, presupposes that what is in human nature can be something
that can be further developed along tendencies that are given but need
to be triggered by interaction through learning in the right
environment. Their differing conceptions of human nature exemplify a
variability and ambiguity in conceptions of human nature that is a
subject of analysis for contemporary philosophers of science (see
Griffiths, 2002; Wong, 2015a). Furthermore, Mencius and Xunzi differ
in their theories as to whether ethical norms and values are
discovered or invented, with Mencius' theory construing them as
part of the order established by Heaven, and Xunzi's theory
construing them as constructed by human beings to solve problems for
cooperation arising from the self-seeking and competitiveness of human
nature.



One debate that arises within the comparative perspective, however, is
whether the Confucians had anything that fits the Western notion of
morality. The words 'ethics' and 'ethical'
have been used to in this piece to remain neutral on this matter. Some
contemporary thinkers (most prominently, Williams, 1985) have tended
to confine the 'moral' to a relatively narrow set of
characteristics associated with Kant's moral philosophy -
a belief in universal laws validated by pure reason, a belief that
responsibility for one's actions requires a freedom from
determination from external causes - and on this view of the
moral, it could be argued that there is no equivalent in Chinese
philosophy (see Rosemont, 1988). If such a contrast is made, then
Confucians are acknowledged to have an ethics as opposed to a
morality, where an ethics does embrace questions about value, how one
ought to live one's life, and what the good life consists in.
One question to be debated here is whether Western notions of the
moral are so uniform and narrow as to conform to one
philosopher's (even a great one) specific conception of the
moral. On the criteria given by Williams, Hume wouldn't have a
morality, even though he used the term. It is true that a dominant
strain of modern Western morality makes use of a crucial distinction
between a morally significant sphere of life that has to do primarily
with one's relationships with others and a "private"
sphere of life in which one has moral "time-off" that is
no one's business but one's own. If this dominant strain
is taken to define morality, then Confucians would have no morality.
It also would eliminate certain utilitarians from having a morality:
those who insist that there is no purely private sphere because any
type of action or omission could have substantial impact on others
given the right circumstances.



Another potential contrast arises from the focus in modern Western
moralities on individual rights to liberty and to other goods, where
the basis for attributing such rights to persons lies in a moral worth
attributed to each individual independently of what conduces to
individual's responsibilities to self and others. Confucianism
lacks a comparable concept, given its assumption that the ethical life
of responsibility to others and individual flourishing are
inextricably intertwined (Shun, 2004). A frequent criticism from the
Western side is that Confucianism fails to provide adequate protection
to those legitimate interests an individual has that may conflict with
community interests. On the other side, some advocates of Confucian
ethics criticize rights-focused moralities for ignoring the social
nature of human beings and of portraying human life in an excessively
"atomistic" or "individualist" conception of
persons (e.g., Rosemont, 1986). Against those who argue that
Confucianism does not protect the individual enough, it could be
replied that the Confucian framework of responsibilities to others can
afford significant protections to the individual and arguably
addresses the human need for community and belonging better than
rights frameworks (Rosemont, 1991a, 2004). Another criticism from the
Western side is that the dignity of the individual cannot be honored
without recognition of individual rights. It has been replied,
however, that dignity can lie in one's human capacity to
participate in the distinctively human life of relationship and in
living up to one's responsibilities to others (Ihara, 2004).
Moreover, it is possible that rights in some sense can play a role in
the Confucian tradition, even if such rights are not grounded in the
idea of the independent moral worth of the autonomous individual.
Within that tradition, rights may be seen as necessary for protecting
individuals' interests when the right relationships of care
irretrievably break down (Chan, 1999). Rights in the sense of
justified claims to be protected in one's speech even when
protest and dissenting against authority can be justified as conducive
to the health of the community (Wong, 2004a). Mencius recognized a
right to revolution against tyrannical kings (1B8); he furthermore
advised kings to attach more weight to the opinions of his people than
to those of his ministers and officers in making certain crucial
decisions (1B7). Xunzi recognized the need for subordinates to speak
their views freely to their superiors (*Xunzi*,
*Zigong*, *Way of the Son*). If we carry the reasoning
in Mencius and Xunzi one step further, we see the need to protect a
space in which they may speak freely without fear of suppression, and
hence a derive a right in the "thin" sense of what one has
whenever one has justifiable claims on others to assure one's
possession of things or one's exercise of certain capacities.
(This article focuses on rights in relation to classical Confucianism.
For a detailed discussion of rights discourse in seventeenth and
eighteenth century Confucianism, see Angle, 2002). On the other side,
one must be wary of oversimplifications of Western rights-oriented
ethical codes. The social nature of persons is not denied by all such
codes (of the major theories only Hobbes seems to take an
unambiguously "atomistic" view of human beings, and
Rousseau and Locke seem to require no such view).



The fact that there are developments of each tradition that bring each
closer to the other may suggest that each could learn from the other.
Even if not all rights-oriented codes are "atomistic," an
increasing worry about Western culture as it has actually developed in
practice is the prevalence of an individualism that Tocqueville
defined as a "calm and considered feeling which disposes each
citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw
into the circle of family and friends," such that "with
this little society formed to his taste he gladly leaves the greater
society to look after itself." Such people, Tocqueville
observed, form "the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation
and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands." They
come to "forget their ancestors" and also their
descendants, as well as isolating themselves from their
contemporaries. "Each man is forever thrown back on himself
alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of
his own heart" (1969, pp. 506, 508). Those impressed with this
worry and connect it with gross inequality in the most affluent nation
in the world would do well to look to a tradition that appreciates the
way we thrive or falter within specific communities that nurture or
shut us out. Or consider an intriguing argument by Bell (2008, pp.
43-55) that in contemporary East Asian societies the importance
placed on social hierarchy provides an outlet for the rich and
powerful members of these societies to distinguish themselves, whereas
in socially egalitarian societies such as the U.S., the primary outlet
is through the accumulation of wealth, and hence the relative economic
equality of East Asian societies as compared to Western societies such
as the U.S. On the other side, a tradition that has tended to value
the idea of social harmony at the cost of sufficiently protecting
dissenters who desire to point out abuses of power or just plain bad
thinking by authorities would do well to look at another tradition
that does not value social harmony as highly but has endured and is
vigorous.



These arguments for greater compatibility between Chinese and Western
ethics do not eliminate all significant differences between them on
the subject of rights. It is possible to argue that even if
responsibility-frameworks are developed and institutionalized to
provide genuine protection to dissenting individuals, they cannot
provide as much protection as rights frameworks when individual
interests seriously threaten communal or social interests. And if
Western ethics sometimes provides more protection to the individual
against communal or social interests, this could be seen as
unacceptable from a Confucian standpoint. One possible stance on these
kinds of differences is evaluational incommensurability. The stance is
that each tradition is not wrong to emphasize different values, that
no judgment of superiority can be made here. The argument for this may
start with the claim that each sort of ethic focuses on a good that
may reasonably occupy the center of an ethical ideal for human life.
On the one hand, there is the good of belonging to and contributing to
a community; on the other, there is the good of respect for the
individual apart from any potential contribution to community. It
would be surprising, the argument goes, if there were just one
justifiable way of setting a priority with respect to the two goods,
even when we take into account the justifiable ways in which the two
kinds of ethics could be brought closer together. On this view,
comparative ethics teaches us about the diversity and richness of what
human beings may reasonably prize, and about the impossibility of
reconciling all they prize in just a single ethical ideal (e.g., Wong,
1984, 1996).



Daoist ethics are often cited as exemplars of substantial difference
with the Western tradition. Both the *Zhuangzi*'s and
*Daodejing*'s commendation of *wuwei* is a case in
point. It is a commendation of a style of action that consists in
being receptive rather than aggressive, following from behind rather
than leading in front, accommodating rather than confrontational, and
being flexible and ready to change with the situation rather than
rigid and operating from general predetermined principles. While the
theme of attunement with the world is present at the roots of Western
traditions, no major ethic in the West gives the ideal of spontaneous,
effortless attunement the kind of centrality Daoism gives to it, and
indeed, Slingerland (2003) argues that the ideal of spontaneous and
effortless action that is in accord with the normative order of the
cosmos is quite important to the early Confucian thinkers. Ames (1994)
traces the *wu-wei* ideal as it is applied to rulership in
Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism.



Another case for substantial difference with the Western tradition
rests on the strong skepticism in Daoist ethics about the benefits of
conceptualized distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong. Yet
these ethics make recommendations that add up to putting forward a way
of life. In the *Zhuangzi*, that way of life involves not
taking taking oneself and one's ideas so seriously. Chapter two
contains a story of monkeys who were furious with their keeper when he
announced the policy of three nuts every morning and four in the
evening. The keeper then announced a change: "four nuts in the
morning and three in the evening," this time to the great
delight of the monkeys. Kupperman (1999) suggests that we are invited
to view our own urgent concerns in the humorous light of the
monkeys' concern about the difference between the two policies.
At the same time we are invited to question our own judgment of the
monkeys. Why think the monkeys are silly if our urgent concerns might
look to some other kind of creature the way the monkeys'
concerns look to us? The way of life recommended in the
*Zhuangzi*, then, includes openness to what might escape our
current conceptualizations and preconceptions. We are invited to see
that our conceptualizations of the world are inevitably incomplete and
distorting. We attempt to order the world by sorting its features
under pairs of opposites, but opposites in the real world never match
up neatly with our conceptual opposites. Real "opposites"
escape our attempts to cleanly separate them. Despite our best
efforts, they switch places in our conceptual maps, blur, and merge
into one another. That is why chapter two of the *Zhuangzi*
says that the sage recognizes a "this," but a
"this" which is also "that," a
"that" which is also "this."The appropriate
response to the inadequacies of our conceptual structures is to remain
open to what those structures distort or hide. In chapter five, men
who have had their feet amputated as criminal punishment are scorned
by society, but not by their Daoist masters, who see what is of
*worth* in them. In chapter one, Zhuangzi chastises his friend
Huizi for failing to see beyond the ordinary, humdrum uses of some
large gourds. Huizi tried using one of the gourds for a water
container, but it was so heavy he couldn't lift it. He then
tried to make dippers from them, but they were too large and unwieldy.
He deemed the gourds of no use and smashed them to pieces. Zhuangzi
asks why he didn't think of making the gourd into a great tub so
he could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying
because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things!
"Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your
head!" concluded Zhuangzi. He does not deny that the more
ordinary uses are genuine uses for the gourds, and indeed, they are.
Rather, Zhuangzi's point is to clear the underbrush from our
heads and to get an *enlarged* view of what is of value. Much
of the value of Daoist ethics lies in its warnings against the
constricting effects of conventional ethical codes, the blinkering of
vision that comes with what we might otherwise regard as admirable
integrity and dedication. The other side of this warning is an
intriguing positive: that there is a way we can pay attention to the
world that allows us to "see around" our blinkering
conceptualizations, to see what is of value that we have missed, to
move with the grain of things. One of the central interpretive
problems concerning the *Zhuangzi* in particular is how to
reconcile the skeptical themes about the limits of our concepts and
theories with the recommendations for living in a certain way, since
the recommendations are framed with concepts (see Kjellberg and
Ivanhoe, 1996, Hansen, 2003, and Wong, 2005 for a variety of
interpretations).



It is not easy to find an analogue to someone such as Zhuangzi in the
Western tradition. There are some important parallels in the
Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans to certain themes in Zhuangzi. They,
like him, emphasized the need to accept the inevitable in human life,
the need to dampen one's desires to achieve tranquility in the
face of the inevitable, and to identify with the world that makes
acceptance and dampening of desires possible (Nussbaum, 1994). On the
other hand, there is contrast in the Stoic belief in *logos* as
the basis of order in the universe. There are parallels to some
Zhuangist themes in Nietzsche: the skepticism about the adequacy of
our conceptualizations of the world and of value; the warnings against
conventional moralities as constricting, and the awareness of how the
application of ethical judgment to others can be a means of asserting
power over them (*The Genealogy of Morals*). However,
Zhuangzi's vision possesses a generosity and inclusiveness, an
embrace of the lowly and cast-off, that seems anathema to
Nietzsche's celebration of the ubermensch and his project
of fashioning himself like a work of art. Nietzsche proposes strong,
vital desire at the heart of this aesthetic project, rather than the
dampening of desire. He represents a kind of radical individualism
that did not find a congenial home in the Chinese tradition (Solomon,
1995).



In Buddhism, especially Chan Buddhism, there also is rejection of
conventional ethical values as blinkering and distorting (see Hui
Neng, *Liuxu tanjing*, and The *Recorded Conversations
of* *I-Hsuan*), and also a sense that one can become
attuned to the world so as to move with its grain. This is not
surprising since Buddhism was profoundly influenced by Daoism upon its
importation into China. However, Buddhism may have especially
challenging implications for Western ethics in its special emphasis on
the elimination of suffering and on the way it explains suffering by
referring to the human attachment to self as fixed ego entity. As
noted above in discussing Parfit's connection to the Buddhist
view of the self, realization that the self is not a bounded and
discrete entity may encourage a much more impersonal view of oneself
and one's projects and desires. One's concern widens to
all of life, and one dampens one's desires so as to lessen
attachment to the self's cares and concerns. Some may find this
an unacceptably demanding ethic. It may seem to drain all passion from
life, and it requires that we dampen the attachment we have not only
to our selves but also to special others. This negative reaction may
fit with Kupperman's (1999) characterization of much Western
ethics as upholding only a limited altruism that allows one a private
sphere of life free from moral demands and in which one gives much
more weight to the cares and concerns of the self and those close to
the self. However, as the above comparison with Parfit suggests, there
are themes in Western philosophy that parallel the kind of impersonal
altruism urged upon us by Buddhism. Some utilitarians have strongly
held to the theme that each counts for one in calculating what
produces the greatest good, and they have derived challenging
consequences from that theme for the question of what one should be
prepared to give to alleviate the suffering of strangers (see Singer,
1972, and Unger, 1996), arguing that the way many in affluent nations
indulge themselves and their own is simply insupportable in a world of
widespread and severe suffering. Some have seen the sort of impersonal
concern that utilitarianism may demand as an indication that it
unsuitable for human beings, who are so strongly partial to themselves
and their own (see Williams, 1981 and Wolf, 1982). Buddhism presses
for the possibility that impersonal concern is humanly possible, and
the fact that it is a vibrant and long-lived tradition with many
committed practitioners provides some support for the viability of
impersonal concern as a ideal that is capable of claiming allegiance
and influencing how people try to live their lives (see Flanagan, 2013
for a reference to Buddhism in support of the viability of such an
ideal .


## 4. Why Do Comparative Philosophy If It's So Hard?



The most obvious sin of doing comparative philosophy is assimilating
another tradition to one's own by unreflectively importing
assumptions, frameworks, and agendas into one's reading of that
other tradition. Sometimes too much charity (as a principle of
interpretation) is insufficiently respectful of the distinctness of
the other tradition. There are more subtle dangers. If one is a
dissident from main trends in one's home tradition, one is
tempted to find another tradition that "got it right."
This is fine as long as the desire to find another such tradition does
not lead to distortion or oversimplification of that other tradition
(see Hansen, 1992, 2004, for discussions of taking Confucianism as
representative of the Chinese tradition as a whole and of trying to
find in Confucianism something one may perceive as lacking in
one's own tradition). The result is a kind of
"Orientalism" (Said 1978) that is turned on its head, so
that the radical other is now superior. 



Another debate involving this sort of possibility was initiated by
Goldin (2003) and later on taken up by Slingerland (2013), who have
criticized interpretations (e.g., in Ames, 1993; Jullien, 2007) that
take Chinese thought to be innocent of commitment to mind/body dualism
(which is implicitly or explicitly deemed to be a fundamental error).
They present historical and textual evidence to argue that some sort
of mind/body dualism operated within many if not all early Chinese
texts. Slingerland also backs up his conclusions with qualitative and
quantitative analysis designed to guard against cherry-picking
passages from texts guided by one's preconceptions of what is in
them. He uses keyword-focused random sampling of passages from the
pre-Qin corpus of received texts supplemented by recently discovered
archaeological texts from Guodian. Goldin emphasizes that different
texts will reveal different views about the relationship of mind and
body, whereas Slingerland is inclined to think the texts tend to
reveal belief in a "weak dualism" he believes to be a
human universal. Weak dualism falls in between a strong dualism that
posits an ontological distinction between mind and body, such as
Descartes' claim that mind and body are distinct substances with
nothing in common, on the one hand, and a strong "holism"
that asserts no qualitative differences between mind and body. Weak
dualism holds that there are functional and qualitative differences
between mind and body without asserting ontological distinction.
Slingerland sometimes mentions "weak holism" as a possible
fourth position, but its difference with weak dualism is unclear.



Raphals (2015) does explicitly include the latter as a fourth position
and seems to distinguish the two intermediate positions according to
whether they emphasize more or less the distinction between mind and
body, noting that there is no firm boundary between the two.
Mencius' conception of mind and body seems to fall somewhere in
this intermediate zone. He regards mind (*xin*) as an organ of
the body whose function is to think, and it has the four sprouts of
goodness. Thus there are functional and qualitative distinctions he
makes between mind and the (rest of the?) body, and the mind is
certainly functionally distinct, but it is consistent with what he
says to regard mind as composed of the same energy-stuff (*qi*)
that composes the body. Indeed, Chinese metaphysics later came to
commonly recognize *qi* as the universal stuff of the world. On
the other hand, as Goldin points out, no less a text than the
*Zhuangzi* provides passages that suggest the possibility of
disembodied minds, such as speculation that a dying friend might next
turn up as a rat's liver or an insect's leg. Raphals
points out much of the interest and the variety of ways in which early
Chinese thought relates the mind to the body as lying not in the
dualist/holist contrast but in the details, such as the body portrayed
as the container of the mind, or the mind being ruler of the body.
Comparing ideas from Greek and Chinese texts, she finds that neither
dualism nor holism is anyone's cultural property.



The dangers of reading into another tradition one's own peculiar
assumptions on the one hand and on the other hand excessively
"othering" it (even if in the service of saying they were
right) are hard to avoid, or at least hard to avoid being accused of
falling prey to them. It is hard enough to master a single tradition
to the point where one can avoid saying silly things about it. Are the
risks worth it?



One reason for thinking so is that comparative philosophy is an
instance of a sound and sensible strategy for doing philosophy. When
facing hard problems it is simply a good strategy to consider a wide
range of enduring, respected ideas bearing on those problems. We of
course must be wary of the possibility that the other tradition is not
really addressing the same problem we are, or that it is addressing
only part of the problem we are addressing. But when there is common
address of a problem, it is not always the case that one tradition
must be adjudicated as entirely right and the other as entirely wrong.
There is a good possibility that each tradition has something
insightful to say about some aspect of the problem and that each
tradition could incorporate something of what the other tradition has
to say (see Yu and Bunnin, 2001). Yu (2007) appropriates
Aristotle's conception of the friend as a second self, a mirror,
by which one can come to know oneself better, one's unexamined
presuppositions, for instance. May Sim (2007) argues that
Aristotle's metaphysics of the soul supplies a substantial self
that is both needed and presupposed by Confucius' virtue ethics.
At the same time she argues that Aristotle's metaphysics tilts
too far towards an individualism that does not motivate sufficient
attention to the culturally laden social relations required by his own
ethics of character and politics of virtue, and so Aristotelian ethics
could benefit by taking from Confucianism an acknowledgment of the
ethical importance of ceremony and decorum. When one crosses
traditions in enacting such strategies, there is the opportunity for
fruitful interaction and mutual influence. Already discussed above is
the opportunity for fruitful interaction between rights-oriented
traditions and traditions such as Confucianism focused on the value of
relationship and community.



Consider another area of potential interaction: when a tradition as
long-lived and as sophisticated as the Confucian tradition brims full
with writing on the nature of agency, human motivation, and the
problem of developing ethical excellence and commitment, one cannot
afford to ignore it (see Ivanhoe, 2000, for portraits of the tradition
of Confucian and neo-Confucian thinkers on these subjects).
Confucianism and Daoism emphasize the need to to pay attention to the
concrete details of the situation at hand and displays healthy
skepticism about the power of general principle to reveal what sort of
action is suitable to the situation. Confucianism displays an
appreciation for the power of community, custom, convention and
ceremony for helping to make vivid and concrete and meaningful such
ethical abstractions as love, respect, and care (Fingarette, 1972,
Shun, 1993, Kupperman, 2004). From these themes, there is much to be
learned, especially if one's home tradition has had a strong
focus for a good portion of the modern period on the top-down
deduction of specific ethical judgments from extremely abstract
principles. At the same time, an appreciation for the concrete and for
the culturally specific may obscure the possibility of general and
transcultural principles that help to evaluate the concrete and
culturally specific, and the Chinese tradition could benefit from
interaction with the Western (Cua, 1985). In fact, one's case
for the existence of transcultural principles becomes stronger when
one dives into other tradition and finds correlates to important
themes in one's own tradition. 



Flanagan (2017) identifies Mencius' theory of the moral sprouts
as the ancient precursor of moral modularity theory, an example of
which is Haidt's moral foundations theory. Just as Mencius held
that there are in contemporary parlance automatic,
affective-cognitive-conative (prompting to action) inclinations and
intuitions (such as our alarmed and distressed reaction upon seeing a
child about to fall into a well) that could develop into the moral
virtues (such as *ren* or humanity), so Haidt theorizes that
there are several such modules or "foundations"
(Haidt's look somewhat different from Mencius', but one
of Haidt's modules is "harm/care or
suffering/compassion") that form moralities. Flanagan compares
Mencius' and Haidt's theories, and finds that each
possesses a different set of strengths and weaknesses. For example,
Mencius' theory correctly does not encourage us to think that
the sprouts, which begin as automatic, intuitive reactions, remain
that way. One of the other Mencian sprouts is the capacity to make
distinctions between *shi* and *fei* (that's it,
and that's not it, where the first has the connotation of
approval and the second the connotation of disapproval), and this
develops into the virtue of *zhi* or wisdom. It looks as if
this sprout is the inborn capacity that forms the basis of analogical
reasoning and other kinds of reflection that in fact go into the
development of the other sprouts. For example, natural compassion can
grow into the virtue of humanity only when we learn how to care for
others and respond to their suffering in an appropriate fashion.
Flanagan thinks this is the right kind of picture. If we are talking
about moral development, what begins as automatic and intuitive should
develop into something that is guided by knowledge, reflection and
reasoning. By contrast, Haidt's theory holds that the modules go
all the way up, in the sense that they remain largely automatic and
intuitive. On the other hand, Haidt's theory shows a well-taken
sensitivity to the possibility that the modules could take different
forms in different cultures and societies, that some modules could
receive greater emphasis in some moralities, and that in fact
different moralities result from such variation in emphasis. 



Finally, recall the case of the Buddhist ideal of impersonal concern
being brought to bear on a debate in Western philosophy over the
viability of ideals of impersonal concern. This illustrates the point
that comparative philosophy can stretch one's sense of
possibility, in this case, of human possibility. That is a benefit in
itself.



Comparative philosophy that is done along the Chinese-Western axis can
proceed from one end or the other, in the attempt to bring to bear
concepts, frameworks, and insights from one tradition to the project
of making progress on questions and problems in the other tradition.
Kwong-loi Shun (2009) has observed that there has been an asymmetry in
the amount of work done in these two possible directions. There is
much more work done that starts from the Western end and works towards
the Chinese end. Shun questions whether there is a good intellectual
grounding for this asymmetry, given that Chinese philosophy promises
to illuminate some aspects of the ethical life that are not as well
appreciated or studied in Western philosophy. The alternative, as Shun
puts it, is that "that there is no such grounding and that the
[asymmetrical] tendency is just a collective phenomenon explainable in
terms of historical trends that wax and wane over time" (2009,
p. 475). In speculating about possible explanations exemplifying
Shun's second alternative, it is worth reminding ourselves that
the trends of philosophy are often reflections or distillations of
larger historical trends and the shifting balances of power between
different regions of the world. If this is so, we may be witnessing an
incipient correction in the asymmetry between Chinese and Western
philosophy.



Whether such a sociological trend is fruitful is a question for
philosophical exploration. Sometimes what is gained through
comparative inquiry starts with the realization that concepts or major
distinctions that one has taken for granted as central to
philosophical inquiry are not taken to be so central or even have no
close equivalents in another philosophical tradition. That may further
raise the issues of what role that concept is playing in the first
tradition, whether the second tradition has no need for that role, and
whether this implies some fundamental difference in their orientations
toward the ethical life. Shun's work (2014, 2015) on approaches
to anger and resentment, and on the absence of a concept of
forgiveness in Confucianism is an interesting case in point. The way
that this work points to a fundamental difference in orientation
toward the ethical life might best be brought out in comparison with
P.F. Strawson's characterization of resentment as "a
reaction to injury or indifference." It is an instance of the
class of "reactive attitudes" that rest on, and reflect,
an expectation of, and demand for, "the manifestation of a
certain degree of goodwill or regard on the part of other human beings
towards ourselves;" or at least"an absence of the
manifestation of indifferent disregard" (2008, 15). Resentment,
then, is based on a sense of what is due to oneself, and may be
conceived as a defense of self-respect. Forgiveness may be conceived
as the foregoing of resentment, and a prominent form of forgiveness
that became established in the West is based on the idea that it
should only be given if the offender repents. Shun points out that
Confucians generally regard resentment (*yuan*) as an emotion
one should rise above. Though anger might be appropriate as a response
to someone else's wrongful treatment of the self, it is properly
directed at the wrongful treatment rather than at the fact that it was
directed at oneself rather than someone else. One should be focused on
determining the appropriate response going forward. This downgrading
of the ethical status of resentment helps to explain the absence of an
equivalent in Classical Chinese for forgiveness, especially the kind
that should be given only if the offender repents. Resentment is not
regarded as something one may rightfully bear unless the offender
repents. Shun stresses that the generally negative attitude toward
resentment in Confucianism does not imply a lack of concern for
self-respect. The basis for self-respect should be the morality of
one's own actions and character, not how others treat one.



There are conceptions of forgiveness in the Western tradition that are
closer in ethical spirit to the Confucian idea that one should rise
above resentment, such as ones that forgive the offender in order to
avoid bitterness and self-consuming anger and seek meaning and purpose
in striving to prevent further wrongdoing in the future. However, it
is significant that a very prominent form of Western forgiveness is
the foregoing of resentment, which in turn is regarded as appropriate
and at one's discretion to forego. It may be revealing of the
underlying ethical orientation that the focus is on what others owe to
the self, and that the basis of self-respect should depend on how
others treat one. That it is focused on the self may be an indication
of Western individualism, but it is also arguably social in a way that
makes self-respect dependent on how others treat one. In this regard,
Confucianism expresses a more independent spirit in locating the basis
of self-respect in how the self responds to wrongdoing and not
primarily to what was done to oneself. Comparative philosophy can
result in surprising comparisons that require qualification of the
usual broad-stroke comparisons such as individualistic versus social
orientations.


## 5. Hybridity as a result of comparative philosophizing



It was stipulated at the beginning that comparative philosophy brings
together philosophical traditions that have developed in relative
isolation from one another. It is time to emphasize the
'relative' qualifier. A common assumption of those who do
philosophy in the West nowadays is that it had its roots in Greece.
Park (2013), however, has argued that the more common view in the
eighteenth century was that it began in India and/or Africa, which
then passed it onto Greece. And as Van Norden (2017) points out,
European philosophers who encountered Chinese thought in the 17th
century immediately recognized it as philosophy. The Jesuits, who were
deeply trained in philosophy, produced the first major translation of
the *Analects* into a European language, and titled it
*Confucius Sinarum Philosophus* (*Confucius the Chinese
Philosopher*, 1687). Leibniz was greatly struck by the way the
*Book of Changes* represents the structure of the world through
a system of broken and unbroken lines, which he believed to bear
uncanny resemblance to his invention of binary arithmetic, which was
to become the digital language of computers. 



Chinese and Western traditions may currently be undergoing an
increased period of interaction and mutual influence. Wong (2009)
develops a metaethical theory drawing from contemporary forms of
philosophical naturalism, Hume, Mencius, and Xunzi. Stephen Angle
(2012) defines two kinds of comparative philosophy: (a) "rooted
global philosophy" is working within a particular live
philosophical tradition in such a way as to be open to stimulus and
insights from other philosophical traditions, and (b)
"Constructive engagement," on the other hand, is an
approach that is focused on the interaction of stimulus and insights
between two live philosophical traditions. Angle exemplifies the
rooted approach by working within the neo-Confucian tradition and by
being open to exchange with other philosophies, primarily within the
American tradition. At the same time, his position as an American
philosopher allows Angle to focus on mutually enriching interaction
between American philosophy and neo-Confucianism. Joseph Chan is
grounded both in Confucian ethical and political thought, primarily
classical, and in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. He
regards himself as a Confucian scholar in the sense of one who engages
in the activity of making sense of Confucian thought, and develops,
revises, and improves it as a tradition. At the same time, his
proposed improvements of the tradition are related to a broader
argument that the modern language of freedom, rights, and democracy
should not and will not replace the traditional language of virtue,
responsibility, and benevolent care, but rather be enriched by it
(2013). 



Hutton (2006), Sarkissian (2010) and Slingerland (2011) develop
responses based on Confucian moral psychology and virtue ethics to
challenges mounted by Gilbert Harman (1998-99) and John Doris
(2002) to the viability of virtue ethics (as conceived in the Western
tradition). A contingent of those working in Chinese philosophy have
found that its insights into moral psychology resonate with recent
findings in cognitive and social psychology and neuroscience (see
Flanagan, 2017; Sarkissian, 2010; Slingerland, 2011; Wong 2015a,
2015b; Cline, 2015; Bruya, 2015; Seok, 2017). Besides the
contributions of Confucian moral psychology, insights contained in
Daoist texts such as the *Zhuangzi* resonate with recent
findings in cognitive psychology and cognitive science concerning the
intuitive, automatic and non-conscious operations of the mind and body
(Slingerland, 2014; Bruya, 2015; Wong, 2017).



As mentioned above, Cline (2007, 2013) argues that insights from the
*Analects* and from Rawls can be combined to produce a more
plausible conception of how a sense of justice develops starting with
the family. More recently (2015), she has argued that Confucians were
right about the critical importance of parental-child relationships to
the moral development and well-being of the individual, and connects
with contemporary psychological theories of development and successful
social welfare programs that seek to support parents raising their
children. 



In writing about the concepts of integrity and vulnerability as they
apply to early Confucian texts, Ing provides a particularly fruitful
demonstration of how the comparative philosopher can set up a
dialogical relationship between the texts and the contemporary
inquirer, such that "the text shapes the questions we ask as
much as the questions we ask shape our readings of the texts"
(2017: 10-11). 'Integrity' is a term for which there is no
readily translatable equivalent in classical Chinese. Ing first
glosses it in a familiar way as wholeness and integration, but then
relying upon the Confucian idea that persons are at least partly
constituted by relationships, Ing proposes that integrity is
understood as a social relation. The work of integration is not purely
internal but also about tending to one's current relationships
as well as entering into new ones that further self-cultivation.
Vulnerability also has the familiar meaning of susceptibility to harm,
but Ing imbues it with a meaning at home in certain feminist analyses
and in Confucianism: an openness and affectivity that comes with
relationships, together with our human inability to predict, control
and to fully know that to which we are open and how it will affect us.
Our vulnerability to harm is of a piece with that which makes our
lives most worthwhile. Because our relationships are plural and of
different kinds, we are vulnerable to conflicts between their
requirements. Confucians have traditionally been much concerned with
conflicts engendered by one's attempts to better a social and
political world rife with corruption and immorality. One prominent
stance toward these conflicts present in some of the most prominent
Confucian texts such as the *Mencius* and the work of Zhu Xi is
that an inability to resolve such conflicts stems from a lack of skill
or virtue. The stories about Shun the sage-king told in the
*Mencius* (cited in section 2 above) are presented as models of
skilled and virtuous resolution of value conflicts. However, an
alternative stance toward value conflicts also found in a tradition as
rich and as diverse as Confucianism is that the world can sometimes
defeat even the best we can muster from ourselves. One particularly
striking apparent clash of values that resists harmonization is the
story of Shen Ming as told by the *Han Shi Waizhuan*. Shen Ming
became minister of Chu. Enemies captured and threatened to execute his
father in an attempt to get him to turn against Chu. Known for his
filiality, Shen nevertheless decided to attack and defeated the
insurgents, and his father was killed. Unable to bear the fact that he
did not fulfill his duties of filiality while maintaining loyalty to
his ruler, Shen killed himself. The tragedy of this situation is
compounded by Shen Ming's being initially reluctant to accept
the position because he feared conflicts between loyalty to ruler and
filial care. He accepts only at his father's urging him to do
so, partly because he would with his salary be better able to support
his father. An act of filial care thus leads to the father's
death for the sake of loyalty to ruler. That which is of greatest
value to us can make our lives impossible. Such a conclusion is not
unfamiliar, of course, but the path we take to get to it, through a
dialogue between traditions, brings it home with a force and vivacity
that demonstrates the power of comparative philosophy.