## 1. Characteristics of Chinese Ethics: Practical Focus and Closeness to Pre-theoretical Experience



In the *Analects* 13.18, the Governor of She tells Confucius of
a Straight Body who reported his father to the authorities for
stealing a sheep. Confucius (Kongzi, best known in the West under his
latinized name, lived in the 6th and 5th century
B.C.E) replies that in his village, uprightness lies in fathers and
sons covering up for each other. In the *Euthyphro*, Socrates
encounters Euthyphro (whose name can be translated as "Straight
thinker"), reputed for his religious knowledge and on his way to
bring charges against his father for murder. The conversation between
Socrates and Euthyphro leads to a theoretical inquiry in which various
proposed answers as to piety's *ousia* (essence) are
probed and ultimately found unsatisfactory, but in which no answer to
the piety or impiety of Euthyphro's action is given. The
contrast between these two stories highlights one of the distinctive
features of Chinese ethics in general: its respect for the practical
problem. The practical problem discussed by Confucius and Socrates is
arguably a universal one: the conflict between loyalty owed to a
family member and duty to uphold public justice within the larger
community. Confucius's response is one dimension of a
characteristically Chinese respect for the practical problem. The
nature of the problem demands a practical response. However, another
dimension of a *reflective* respect for the practical problem
is to maintain a certain humility in the face of a really hard
problem. It is to be skeptical that highly abstract theories will
provide a response that is true to the complexities of that problem. A
tradition exemplifying such respect will contain influential works
that will not pretend to have resolved recurring tensions within the
moral life such as those identified in the *Analects* and the
*Euthyphro*.



Confucius gives an immediate practical answer in 13.18, but the reader
and commentators have been left to weave together the various remarks
about filiality (or as it is often called, "filial piety")
so as to present a rationale for that answer. These remarks quite
often concern rather particular matters, as is the matter of turning
in one's father for stealing a sheep, and the implications for
more general issues are ambiguous. Do fathers and sons cover up for
each other on all occasions, no matter how serious, and if there is a
cover-up, is there also an attempt to compensate the victim of the
wrongdoing? The particularity of these passages is tied up with the
emphasis on praxis. What is sought and what is discussed is often the
answer to a particular practical problem, and the resulting
particularity of the remarks invites multiple interpretations. The
sayings often are presented as emerging from conversations between
Confucius and his students or various personages with official
positions, or among Confucius's students. One passage (11.22)
portrays Confucius as having tailored his advice according to the
character of the particular student: he urges one student to ask
father and elder brother for advice before practicing something he has
learnt, while he urges the other to immediately practice; the reason
is that the first has so much energy that he needs to be kept back,
while the second is retiring and needs to be urged forward. With this
passage in mind, we might then wonder whether the apparent tension
between remarks made in connection with a concept is to be understood
in terms of the differences between the individuals addressed or other
aspects of the conversational context. 



All texts that have become canonical within a tradition, of course,
are subject to multiple interpretations, but Chinese texts invite
them. They invite them by articulating themes that stay relatively
close to the pre-theoretical experience that gives rise to the
practical problems of moral life (see Kupperman 1999 on the role of
experience in Chinese philosophy). The pre-theoretical is not
experience that is a pure given or unconceptualized, nor is it
necessarily experience that is universal in its significance and
intelligibility across different traditions of thought and culture.
This attention to pre-theoretical experience also leads to differences
in format and discursive form: dialogues and stories are more suited
for appealing to and evoking the kind of pre-theoretical experience
that inspires parts of the text. By contrast, much Western philosophy
has gone with Plato in taking the route of increasing abstraction from
pre-theoretical experience.



The contrast is not meant to imply that Chinese philosophy fails to
give rise to theoretical reflection. Theoretical reflection of great
significance arises in the *Mozi*, *Mencius*,
*Hanfeizi*, *Xunzi*, and *Zhuangzi*, but there is
more frequent interplay between the theorizing and references to
pre-theoretical experience. In Chinese texts there are suggestions for
theorizing about this experience, but the suggestions often indicate
several different and fruitful directions for theorizing to go
further. These directions may seem incompatible, and they may or may
not be so in the end, but the tensions between these directions are
real. The result is a fruitful ambiguity that poses a
*problematic*. Pre-theoretical experience poses a practical
problem. Apparently incompatible solutions to problems are partially
theorized in the text, but the apparent incompatibility is not
removed. Much of the value of these texts lies in their leaving the
tensions in place with enough theory given to stimulate thinking
within a certain broadly defined approach. There is more than enough
for the sophisticated theorist to try to interpret or to reconstruct a
more defined position as an extension of that broadly defined
approach. At the same time, the problematic is partly framed with the
language of pre-theoretical experience in the form of dialogue and
story, making the texts accessible to a much broader range of readers
than is usually the case with philosophy texts. The following sections
present some of the major kinds of problematic that appear in the
major schools of Chinese ethical thought.


## 2. Confucian Ethics


### 2.1 Virtue ethics: the *dao*, the *junzi*, and *ren*



A common way to understand Confucian ethics is that it is a virtue
ethic. For some scholars this will be an obvious, uncontroversial
truth. For others, it is a misconstrual that imposes contentious
Western assumptions on Confucianism about what it is to be a person
and what an ethics should be about. In light of this controversy, it
is important to specify the sense in which it is relatively
uncontroversial to claim that virtues constitute a major focus of
attention in these texts. Virtues in the relevant sense are qualities
or traits that persons could have and that are appropriate objects of
aspiration to realize. These virtues go into the conception of an
ideal of a kind of person that one aspires to be. Given this rather
broad sense of "virtue," it is unobjectionable to say that
Confucian texts discuss ethics primarily in terms of virtues and
corresponding ideals of the person.



What makes the characterization of Confucianism as a virtue ethic
controversial are more specific, narrower senses of
"virtue" employed in Western philosophical theories.
Tiwald (2018) distinguishes between something like the broad sense of
virtue and a philosophical usage that confers on qualities or traits
of character explanatory priority over right action and promoting good
consequences. Virtue ethics in this sense is a competitor to rule
deontological and consequentialist theories. There simply is not
enough discussion in the Confucian texts, especially in the classical
period, that is addressed to the kind of questions these Western
theories seek to answer.



There are other narrower senses of "virtue" that are
clearly mischaracterizations when applied to Confucian ethics. Virtues
might be supposed to be qualities that people have or can have in
isolation from others with whom they interact or from their
communities, societies, or culture. Such atomistic virtues could make
up ideals of the person that in turn can be specified or realized in
social isolation. Further, virtues might be supposed to be
identifiable through generalizations that hold true in every case,
such that the ways these traits are concretely manifested in conduct
do not vary across context or situation. Prominent and influential
critics of the "virtue" characterization of Confucian
ethics--Roger Ames (2011, 2021) and Robert Neville (2016)--seem to be
supposing that the term is loaded with such controversial
presuppositions.



As will become clear in subsequent discussion here, one can employ
virtue language with the appropriate qualifiers and at the same time
acknowledge much of what the critics claim as insights of Confucian
ethics: e.g., that the process of realizing the virtues
characteristically takes place in relationship to others--those to
whom one has responsibilities as a son or daughter or mother or
father, for example--and that it can be part of one's very
identity to be a particular person's son or daughter, mother or
father. It is part of the Confucian vision of a life befitting human
beings that it is a life of relationships marked by mutual care and
respect, that one achieves fullest personhood that way. One achieves
this in a manner that is particular to one's circumstances,
including the particular others with whom one most interacts. None of
this is inconsistent with virtue characterizations in the broad sense
(for an alternative role-ethic characterization of Confucian ethics
that incorporates these insights in a different way, see Ames, 2011,
2021).



The most frequently discussed ideal is that of the *junzi*. The
Chinese word originally meant "prince's son," but in
the *Analects* it refers to *ethical* nobility. The
first English translations rendered it as "gentleman," but
Ames and Rosemont (1998) have usefully suggested "exemplary
person." Among the traits connected to ethical nobility are
filiality, a respect for and dedication to the performance of
traditional ritual forms of conduct, and the ability to judge what the
right thing to do is in the given situation. These traits are virtues
in the sense that they are necessary for following the *dao*,
the way human beings ought to live their lives. As Yu (2007) points
out, the *dao* plays the kind of role in ancient Chinese ethics
that is analogous to the role played by *eudaimonia* or
flourishing, in ancient Greek ethics. The *junzi* is the
ethical exemplar with the virtues making it possible to follow the
*dao*.



Besides the concepts of *dao* and *junzi*, the concept
of *ren* is a unifying theme in the *Analects*. Before
Confucius's time, the concept of *ren* referred to the
aristocracy of bloodlines, meaning something like the strong and
handsome appearance of an aristocrat. But in the *Analects* the
concept is of a moral excellence that anyone has the potential to
achieve. Various translations have been given of *ren*. Many
translations attempt to convey the idea of complete ethical virtue,
connoting a comprehensive state of ethical excellence. In a number of
places in the *Analects* the *ren* person is treated as
equivalent to the *junzi*, indicating that *ren* has the
meaning of complete or comprehensive moral excellence, lacking no
particular virtue but having them all. However, *ren* in some
places in the *Analects* is treated as one virtue among others
such as wisdom and courage. In the narrower sense of being one virtue
among others, it is explained in 12.22 in terms of caring for others.
It is in light of these passages that other translators, such as D.C.
Lau, 1970a, use 'benevolence' to translate *ren.*
However, others have tried to more explicitly convey the sense of
'*ren*' in the comprehensive sense of
all-encompassing moral virtue through use of the translation
'Good' or 'Goodness' (see Waley, 1938, 1989;
Slingerland, 2003). It is possible that the sense of *ren* as
particular virtue and the sense of comprehensive excellence are
related in that attitudes such as care and respect for others may be a
pervasive aspect of different forms of moral excellence, e.g., such
attitudes may be expressed in ritual performance, as discussed below,
or in right or appropriate action according to the context. But this
suggestion is speculative, and because the very nature of *ren*
remains so elusive, it shall be here referred to simply
as'*ren*'.



Why is the central virtue discussed in such an elusive fashion in the
*Analects*? The answer may lie in the role that pre-theoretical
experience plays in Chinese philosophy. Tan (2005) has pointed to the
number and vividness of the persons in the *Analects* who serve
as moral exemplars. She suggests that the text invites us to exercise
our imaginations in envisioning what these people might have been like
and what we ourselves might become in trying to emulate them. Use of
the imagination, she points out, draws our attention to the
particularities of virtue and engages our emotions and desires. Amy
Olberding (2008, 2012) develops the notion of exemplarism into a
Confucian epistemology, according to which we get much of our
important knowledge by encountering the relevant objects or persons.
Upon initial contact, we may have little general knowledge of the
qualities that make them so compelling to us, but we are motivated to
further investigate. Confucius treated as exemplars legendary figures
from the early days of the Zhou dynasty, such as the Duke of Zhou and
Kings Wu and Wen. Confucius served as an exemplar to his students,
perhaps of the virtue of *ren*, though he never claimed the
virtue for himself. Book Ten of the *Analects* displays what
might appear to be an obsessive concern with the way Confucius greeted
persons in everyday life, e.g., if he saw they were dressed in
mourning dress, he would take on a solemn appearance or lean forward
on the stanchion of his carriage. Such concern becomes much more
comprehensible if Confucius is being treated as an exemplar of virtue
from which the students are trying to learn. The focus of Book Ten and
elsewhere in the *Analects* also suggests that the primary
locus of virtue is to be found in how people treat each other in the
fabric of everyday life and not in the dramatic moral dilemmas so much
discussed in contemporary Western moral philosophy.


### 2.2 The centrality of *li* or ritual



*Analects* 1.15 likens the project of cultivating one's
character to crafting something fine from raw material: cutting bone,
carving a piece of horn, polishing or grinding a piece of jade. The
chapter also stresses the importance of *li* (the rites,
ritual) in this project. In the *Analects* ritual ranges quite
widely to include ceremonies of ancestor worship, the burial of
parents, and customs governing respectful and appropriate
behavior within the family and with friends, in everyday
interactions with others in one's village, and protocols for
officials performing their duties within the court.



Ritual is an exemplification of the saying that the personal is the
political. It is personal in the sense that engaging in ritual,
learning to perform it properly and with the right attitudes of
respect and consideration while performing it, is to engage in a kind
of cutting and carving and polishing and grinding of the self. One of
the most distinctive marks of Confucian ethics is the centrality of
ritual performance in the ethical cultivation of character. For
example, while Aristotelian habituation generally corresponds to the
Confucian *cultivation* of character, there is no comparable
emphasis in Aristotle on the role of ritual performance in this
process of character transformation. Ritual is also political in the
sense that the right governance of a society is thought to be founded
upon the appropriate conduct of relationships at all levels in a
society, starting with family relationships as the foundation. As
Olberding puts it, the term *li* covers both
good manners and political civility because the Confucians did not
distinguish between them: "both require interpreting situations and
steering conduct to communicate respect, consideration, and
toleration. Success in both will likewise often depend on developed
disposition, on prior patterning that renders me more prone to one
kind of response than another" (2019, 28).



It is clear that in the *Analects* any complete
description of self-cultivation must include a role for the culturally
established customs that spell out what it means to express respect
for another person in various social contexts. Just how that role is
conceived, however, is one of the central interpretive puzzles
concerning the *Analects*. The interpretive question of
*how* *li* is central to self-cultivation is posed in
particular about its relation to the chief virtue of *ren*. In
the *Analects* 3.3 the Master said, "A man who is not
*ren*--what has he to do with ritual?" The
implication is that ritual is a means of cultivating and expressing a
*ren* that is already there, at least in a raw or unrefined
state. This implication about the role of ritual is consistent with
passages of the *Analects* in which Confucius shows flexibility
on the question of whether to follow established ritual practice. 9.3
shows him accepting the contemporary practice of wearing a cheaper
silk ceremonial cap rather than the traditional linen cap. 9.3 also
shows Confucius rejecting the contemporary practice of bowing after
one ascends the stairs leading up to the ruler's dais, and
maintaining the traditional practice of bowing before one ascends the
stairs. The implication is that the contemporary practice expresses
the wrong attitude toward the ruler--presumptuousness in assuming
permission to ascend. 9.3 suggests that it is something like the right
attitude that is cultivated and expressed by ritual. Kwong-loi Shun
(1993) has called this kind of understanding of ritual the
"instrumental" interpretation.



However, in other places of the *Analects*, ritual seems to
take on a more central role in the achievement of *ren*.
Indeed, it seems to be presented as the *key*. A very common
translation of 12.1 has Confucius telling his favorite student Yan Hui
that "Restraining yourself and returning to the rites
constitutes *ren*. If for one day you managed to restrain
yourself and return to the rites, in this way you could lead the
entire world back to *ren*. The key to achieving *ren*
lies within yourself--how could it come from others?"
(translation from Slingerland, 2003, though see Li, 2007, for a
different translation of the word *wei* usually translated as
'constitutes', with different implications for the
question of the relation between *li* and *ren*). Such
passages have given rise to the "definitionalist"
interpretation, as Shun calls it, which makes *li* definitive
of the whole of *ren*. Obviously the instrumental and
definitional interpretations cannot both be true.



One possibility for resolving this tension is to construe
Confucius' remarks as directed towards a particular student and
informed by his conception of what sort of advice that student needs
to hear given his strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps Confucius believes
that Yan Hui should be focusing on disciplining himself through
observing the rites, but his advice should not be be taken as an
intended generalization about the relationship between *ren*
and *li*. Perhaps the remarks that suggest more of an
instrumentalist construal of the relationship are similarly context
and audience bound. Such interpretation, of course, leaves open the
question of what that relationship is, or indeed, whether Confucius
ever had in mind a generalization about the relationship that informed
his remarks.



Some have argued that such serious conflicts within the text
constitute reasons for thinking that the *Analects* is an
accretive text, i.e., composed of layers added at different times by
different people with conflicting views. To some extent, viewing the
*Analects* as accretive is nothing new, but Bruce and A. Takeo
Brooks (1998, 2000) have taken that view very far by identifying Book
4 (and only part of it, for that matter) as the most reflective of the
historical Kongzi's views, and the other books as stemming from
Confucius's students and members of his family. The different
books, and, sometimes, individual passages within the books, represent
different time periods, people, with different agendas who are
responding to different conditions, and often putting forward
incompatible strands of Confucianism. The Brooks suggest that the
parts of the *Analects* most directly associated with the
historical Confucius and his disciples are the parts that feature
*ren* as the pre-eminent virtue and that de-emphasize the role
of ritual. The parts that are due to another trend in Confucianism,
headed by Confucius's descendants, are the parts that elevate
ritual as the key to *ren*. The Brooks's theory of the
*Analects* has drawn appreciation and disagreement (e.g., see
Slingerland, 2000 for both). It threatens to dislodge the assumption
that underlies the dominant mode of interpreting the
*Analects*, which is that the text, or most of it, reflects the
coherent thought of one person.



Tao Jiang (2022) distinguishes between the sinological approach of the
kind done by the Brooks and the approach of
philosophers that focuses on the "influential received
text" which presents to the reader a "textual
author," e.g., a Confucius, to whom authorial intent is
attributed through the sayings and ideas in the text. The philosopher
investigates this textual object as part of a lengthy and highly
influential philosophical and cultural tradition that often deploys
texts to address problems of contemporary concern. 



A third approach, different from though in some respects simiar to the
second, is to acknowledge the real possibility that different sets of
passages are the products of different thinkers, but also to hold that
these different thinkers might have employed different but
philosophically substantial perspectives on common problems. One of
those problems might indeed have been the relation between
*ren* and *li*, and at least part of the explanation of
why different and potentially conflicting things are said about that
relation is that the relation is a difficult one to figure out and
that different thinkers addressing that common problem might
reasonably have arrived at different things to say. Whether these
different things are ultimately irreconcilable remains an open
question. This third approach merges with the second if one is open to
the possibility that the "textual author" could be
conceived as being of more than one mind as to how to solve the
problem in question. This, after all, is a plausible thing to say
about some philosophers of whom we are pretty sure that they were the
single authors of the texts under study. One might take a constructive
attitude to the different possible solutions, ask what good
philosophical reasons could motivate the different approaches, and
determine whether there is a way of reconciling what all the good
reasons entail. If not, one can ask what might be the best solution,
all things considered.



Kwong-loi Shun's approach to the *ren* and
*li* is compatible with the third approach. Shun holds
that on the one hand, a particular set of ritual forms are the
conventions that a community has evolved, and without such forms
attitudes such as respect or reverence cannot be made intelligible or
expressed (reasons in favor of the definitionalist interpretation). In
this sense, *li* constitutes *ren* within or for a given
community. On the other hand, different communities may have different
conventions that express respect or reverence, and moreover any given
community may revise its conventions in piecemeal though not wholesale
fashion (reasons in favor of the instrumentalist interpretation).



Chenyang Li (2007) proposes a different approach based on a different
reading of the word '*wei*' used in 12.1 and often
translated as 'constitutes' to render the crucial line,
"Restraining yourself and returning to the rites constitutes
*ren*." Li notes that a common meaning of the word is
'make' or 'result in.' The relation between
*li* and *ren* need not be construed as either
definitional or constitutive, nor need it be construed as purely
instrumental. Li proposes that *li* functions something like a
cultural grammar where *ren* is like mastery of the culture.
Mastery of a language entails mastery of its grammar but not *vice
versa*.



Both Shun and Li are striving to capture a way in which *ren*
does not reduce to *li* but also a way in which *li* is
more than purely instrumental to the realization of *ren*.
There are good philosophical reasons for this move. Consider the
reasons for resisting the reduction of *ren* to *li*. As
indicated above, 9.3 suggests that the attitudes of respect and
reverence that are expressed by ritual forms are not reducible to any
particular set of such forms, and Shun has a point in arguing that
such attitudes could be expressed by different sets of such forms as
established by different communities. In studying the cultures of
other communities, we recognize that certain customs are meant to
signify respect, even if we do not share these customs, just as we
recognize that something that does not signify disrespect in our
culture does indeed so signify in another culture. The fact that we
can distinguish the attitude from the ritual forms that we use to
express them allows us to consider alternative ritual forms that could
express the same or similar attitude. Ceremonial caps that are made of
more economical material are acceptable, perhaps, because wearing such
caps do not affect the spirit of the ceremony. By contrast,
bowing after one ascends the stairs constitutes an unacceptable change
in attitude. To maintain that particular ritual forms do not
*define* the respect and reverence they are intended to express
is not to underestimate their importance for cultivating and
strengthening these attitudes. Acting in ways that express respect
given the conventionally established meanings of accepted ritual forms
helps to strengthen the agent's disposition to have respect. The
ethical development of character does involve strengthening some
emotional dispositions over others, and we



 strengthen dispositions by acting on them. By providing
conventionally established, symbolic ways to express respect for
others, ritual forms give participants ways to act on and therefore to
strengthen the right dispositions. The cultivating function of
observing ritual highlights the distinctive practical focus of
Confucian ethics. It is every bit as concerned with *how* to
acquire the right sort of character as it is with what the right sort
is.



On the other hand, there is good reason to resist the reduction of
*li* simply to the role of expressing and cultivating a set of
attitudes and emotional dispositions. In his influential
interpretation (1972) of the *Analects*, Herbert Fingarette
construes ritual performance as an end in itself, as beautiful and
dignified, open and shared participation in ceremonies that celebrate
human community. Ritual performance, internalized so that it becomes
second nature, such that it is gracefully and spontaneously performed,
is a crucial constituent of a fully realized human life. There are
nonconventional dimensions of what it is to show respect, such as
providing food for one's parents (see *Analects* 2.7),
but the particular way the agent does this will be deeply influenced
by custom. Indeed, custom specifies what is a respectful way of
serving food. On the Confucian view, doing so in a graceful and
whole-hearted fashion as spelled out by the customs of one's
community is part of what it is to live a fully human life.



Ritual constitutes an important part of what *ren* is, and
hence it is not merely an instrument for refining the substance of
*ren*. At the same time it is not the whole of *ren*.
Consider that part of *ren* that involves attitudinal
dispositions. Attitude is not reducible to ritual form even if acting
on that form can cultivate and sustain attitude. Moreover, 7.30
emphasizes the connection between desire for *ren* and its
achievement ("If I simply desire *ren*, I find that it is
already there"). The achievement of *ren* is of course a
difficult and long journey, and so 7.30 implies that coming to truly
desire it lies at the heart of that achievement. The multifaceted
nature of *ren* emerges in Book 12, where Confucius is
portrayed as giving different descriptions of *ren*. In 12.1,
as already noted, he says that ritual makes for *ren*. But then
in 12.2, he says that *ren* involves comporting oneself in
public as if one were receiving an important guest and in the
management of the common people behaving as if one were overseeing a
great sacrifice (the duty to be respectful toward others). 12.2 also
associates *ren* with *shu* or "sympathetic
understanding," not imposing on others what you yourself do not
desire. Here the emphasis is not so much on ritual or not exclusively
anyway, but on the attitudes one displays toward others, and on the
ability to understand what others want or do not want based on
projecting oneself into their situation. In 12.3, when asked about
*ren*, Confucius says that *ren* people are hesitant to
speak (suggesting that such people take extreme care not to have their
words exceed their actions). And then in 12.22, when asked about
*ren*, Confucius says that it is to care for people. Such
diverse characterizations are appropriate if *ren* is complete
ethical virtue or comprehensive excellence that includes many
dimensions, including but not reducing to the kinds of excellence
associated with *li*.



If we take the relevant passages on *li* and *ren* as
forming a whole in which a coherent view is embedded, there is a
pretty good case for regarding the observance of ritual propriety as a
constituent of *ren* as well as crucial for instrumentally
realizing some other dimensions of *ren*. But it does not
exhaust the substance of *ren*. If the text is as radically
accretive as the Brooks maintain, then the proposed construal of the
relation is more of a reconstruction of what the best philosophical
position might be on the nature of the relation. The reconstructive
possibility should not be disturbing as long as we recognize it for
what it is. Thinkers within a complex and vigorous tradition
frequently re-interpret, expand, develop, revise, and even reject some
of what one has inherited from the past. The fact that the
*Analects* itself might be a product of this kind of engagement
might usefully be taken as encouragement for its present students to
engage with the text in the same way.



The Confucian position on the importance of *li* in ethical
cultivation is interesting and distinctive in its own right, and this
is partly because Confucianism hews close to a kind of pre-theoretical
experience of the moral life that might otherwise get obscured by a
more purely theoretical approach to ethics. If we look at everyday
experience of the moral life, we see that much of the substance of
ethically significant attitudes such as respect is in fact given by
cultural norms and practices, and learning a morality must involve
learning these norms and practices. Children learn what their behavior
means to others, and what it should mean, by learning how to greet
each other, make requests, and answer requests, all in a respectful
manner. Much of our everyday experience of moral socialization lies in
the absorption of or teaching to others of customs that are
conventionally established to mean respect, gratitude, and other
ethically significant attitudes (see Olberding, 2016, 2019).



So construed, Confucian ethics provides an alternative to
understanding the nature of the moral life that is different from an
understanding that is primarily based on abstract principles, even
abstract principles that require respect for each person. This is why
there is significant resonance between Confucianism and communitarian
philosophies such as those defended by Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, 1989)
and Michael Walzer (1983). One of the distinctive marks of
communitarianism is the theme that much of the substance of a morality
is given not in abstract principles of the sort typically defended in
modern Western philosophy but in a society's specific customs
and practices. In the *Analects*, the ambiguous relation
between *ren* and *li* poses the problematic of how we
are to understand the relation between cultural norms and practices on
the one hand and that part of morality that appears to transcend any
particular set of norms and practices. The *Analects* suggests
a large role for culture, but on the reading suggested here, not a
definitional role. There is much room for theoretical elaboration on
the nature of that role.



Furthermore, in understanding why Confucians take a life of ritual
practice to be partly constitutive of a fully human life, one must
understand the aesthetic dimension of their notion of a fully human
life. Such a life is lived as a beautiful and graceful coordinated
interaction with others according to conventionally established forms
that express mutual respect. A good part of the value attached to the
fully human life lies in the aesthetic dimensions of a
"dance" (Ihara, 2004) one performs with others. To better
understand why the moral and the aesthetic cannot be cleanly separated
in Confucian ethics, consider that a graceful and whole-hearted
expression of respect can be beautiful precisely because it reflects
the extent that the agent has made this moral attitude part of their
second nature. The beauty has a moral dimension. Both these
themes--the importance of contextualized moral judgment and
aesthetic value of human interaction according to custom and
tradition--offer opportunities for practitioners of, say,
Anglo-American moral philosophy to reflect on what their approaches to
the moral life might miss.


### 2.3 *Ren* and *li* as relational values in contrast to values of individual autonomy



Consider *ren* in its meaning as the particular virtue of
caring for others and *li* in its aspect as the valued human
dance. These values are the basis for characterizing Confucian ethics
as a relational ethic, meaning that it is in part distinguished by its
placement of relationships at the center of a well-lived life (see
Ames, 2011, 2021). Confucian ethics are often taken to stand in
contrast to ethics that place individual autonomy and freedom to
choose how to live. While there is much that is true about this
contrast, it must be carefully described so as to differentiate it
from some other contrasts. For example, the value of individual
autonomy usually includes several different dimensions that do not
necessarily accompany one another: (1) prioritizing of individual
interests over group or collective interests when these conflict; (2)
giving moral permission to the individual to choose from a
significantly wide range (within certain moral boundaries) of ways to
live; and (3) emphasizing the importance of living according to
one's own understanding of what is right and good even if others
do not see it the same way.



Confucian ethics in significant part, though not in all parts, accepts
autonomy in the sense of (3) (see Shun, 2004; and Brindley, 2010).
Confucius is often depicted in the *Analects* as emphasizing
the importance of cultivating one's own character even when
others do not recognize or appreciate one's efforts (e.g., 4.14)
and of acting independently of what is conventionally approved or
disapproved (e.g., 5.1). The texts associated with Mencius (Mengzi,
best known in the West under his Latinized name, lived in the 4th
century B.C.E.) and Xunzi (4th and 3rd centuries
B.C.E.), the most pivotal thinkers in the classical Confucian
tradition after Confucius, both articulate the necessity to speak up
when one believes the ruler one is serving is on a wrong course of
action (e.g., *Mencius* 1A3 and *Xunzi* 29.2). On the
other hand, none of these classical thinkers argue for the necessity
of protecting a frank subordinate from a ruler who is made angry by
criticism, and it could be argued that Confucianism does not fully
endorse autonomy in sense (3) without endorsing such protection for
those who wish to engage in moral criticism of the powerful.



Most interpretations present Confucian ethics as rejecting (2). There
is a way for human beings to live, a comprehensive human good to be
realized, and there can be no choosing between significantly different
ways of life that are equally acceptable from a moral perspective (an
important exception to this kind of interpretation is provided by Hall
and Ames, 1987, who interpret Confucius's *dao* as a
human invention, collective and individual). On the other hand,
Confucian ethics de-emphasizes legal coercion as a method for guiding
people along the way and instead emphasizes moral exhortation and
inspiration by way of example (see, most famously, 2.3 of the
*Analects*, which emphasizes the necessity of a ruler's
guiding his people by instilling in them a sense of shame rather than
by the threat of external punishment). While a Confucian might believe
in a single correct way for human beings, they might endorse a
significant degree of latitude for people to learn from their own
mistakes and by way of example from others (see Chan, 1999).



Confucian ethics does not accept (1), but not because it subordinates
individual interests to group or collective interests (for criticism
of the rather common interpretation of Confucianism as prioritizing
the group over the individual, see Hall and Ames 1998). Rather, there
is a different conception of the relationship between individual and
group interests. The best illustration of this different conception is
a story to be found in the *Mencius* that concerns sage-king
Shun. When Shun wanted to marry, he knew that his father, influenced
by his stepmother, would not allow him to marry. In this difficult
situation, Shun decided to marry without telling his father, even
though he is renowned for his filiality. Mencius in fact defends the
filiality of Shun's act in 5A2. He observes that Shun knew that
he would not have been allowed to marry if he told his father. This
would have resulted in bitterness toward his parents, and that is why
he did not tell them. The implication of this version of Shun's
reason is that filiality means preserving an emotionally viable
relationship with one's parents, and in the case at hand Shun
judged that it would have been worse for the relationship to have
asked permission to marry. The conception of the relation between
individual and group interests embodied in this story is not one of
subordination of one to the other but about the mutual dependence
between the individual and the group. The individual depends on the
group and must make the group's interests part of their own
interests, but, on the other side of the equation, the group depends
on the individual and must make that individual's interests part
of the group's interests. Shun's welfare depends on his
family and therefore must make his family's interests part of
his own (he resolves to do what is necessary to preserve his
relationship to his parents), but his family's welfare depends
on Shun, and therefore it must recognize his interests to constitute
part of its welfare (the family must recognize that it is damaging
itself in requiring Shun to deny himself the most part important of
human relationships).



The way that Confucianism conceives of the relationship between the
individual and the group, as well as the way it is typically
*mis*conceived, is reflected in its notion of harmony or
*he*. A typical misconception of harmony as a Confucian value
is that it involves agreement and conformity with the views of others.
In *Analects* 13.23, however, Confucius says that the
*junzi* pursues harmony rather than sameness, while the small
person does the opposite. The pre-Confucian thinker Yan Ying expresses
a similar idea about harmony in likening it to a soup made with meat
or fish, the strong flavor of which must be balanced and complemented
by other ingredients such as vinegar, sauce, salt, and plum
(*Zuozhuan*, Duke Zhao, 20th year; see Legge 1960 translation).
The metaphor is meant to convey the idea that a ruler will not seek
only ministers who agree with him but will seek to reconcile a
diversity of viewpoints from his ministers. Reconciliation not only
involves acceptance of difference but also acceptance of a degree of
tension and conflict, even if one seeks to reduce the latter from
dangerous levels (Li 2014; Wong 2020) to achieve a productive
equilibrium. Moreover, that equilibrium is dynamic and is continuously
created and re-created.



Success in achieving a satisfactory equilibrium is never guaranteed.
Confucian ethics draws much of its appeal and power from its placing
at the center of our attention the human desire for connection with
others. At the same time, satisfying connections can be surprisingly
fragile and subject to both predictable and unpredictable conflict.
Acting in accordance with *li* and cultivating one's
dispositions for respect and tolerance of others is a way of
making desired relationships more fruitful and less alienating
(Olberding 2019). However, we have limited control over what others do
and over what happens to them. As a result, the most satisfying
relationships also make us exceedingly vulnerable when they break or
are lost through separation and death. We may never be the same
persons when such loss occurs, and a continuing concern of the
Confucian tradition is how to reckon with such loss when one's
identity as a person includes significant others and our moral
commitments to them (for a discussion of how this is treated in the
Confucian tradition, with connections drawn to feminist analyses of
the way our ties to others makes for value and vulnerability, see Ing
2017). The wholeness and integrity of one's relational identity may be
threatened with disintegration upon the loss of these others, or when
one's multiple attachments present conflicting and possibly
irreconcilable demands on the self. Ing (2017) points out that
the Confucian tradition as a whole produced different points of view
on whether it was always possible to deal successfully with threats to
the integrity of the self. One point of view, which might be
reasonably attributed to the *Analects*, *Mencius*,
and *Xunzi*, is that there is always a way to preserve
one's integrity if one is wise and able enough. Ing articulates
another point of view elsewhere defended in the Confucian
tradition, to the effect that there are inherently tragic situations
in which no option could be said to be right or best. This second
possibility resonates with one defended in contemporary Western moral
and political philosophy by philosophers such as Michael Walzer
(1973).


### 2.4 Filiality and care with distinctions in Confucian ethics



Along with the emphasis on *li*, the centrality of filiality is
one of the most distinctive characteristics of Confucian ethics. The
*Analects* 2.6 says to give parents no cause for anxiety other
than illness, whereas 2.7, as mentioned earlier, emphasizes the need
for the material support of parents to be carried out in a respectful
manner. 2.8 emphasizes that it is the expression on one's face
that is filial and not just taking on the burden of work or letting
elders partake of the wine and food before others.



Is obedience to parents always required of the filial child? What if
the child believes that parents are wrong and their wishes run
contrary to what is right or to *ren*? In those cases where one
thinks them wrong, what is one to do? The *Analects* 2.5
portrays Confucius as saying, "Do not disobey," but when
queried further as to his meaning, he explains obedience in terms of
conformance to the rites for burying and sacrificing to deceased
parents. In 4.18 Confucius says that when one disagrees with
one's parents, one should remonstrate with them gently. Most
translations of what follows have Confucius concluding that if parents
are not persuaded, one should not oppose them (e.g., Lau, 1979;
Slingerland, 2003; Waley, 1938), but it is possible to read the spare
and ambiguously worded passage as requiring instead that one not
abandon one's purpose in respectfully trying to change
one's parents' minds (Legge, 1971; see Huang, 2013,
133-137 for a survey of the different interpretations and an argument
for the persistence-in-remonstrating translation). In other Confucian
texts, the question of whether obedience is required has received
different answers in the Confucian tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 of the
*Record of Ritual* (Legge, 1967, vol. 1) say that one must obey
if one fails to persuade one's parent. On the other hand, Xunzi
declares that following the requirements of morality rather than the
wishes of one's father is part of the highest standard of
conduct (29.1 of the *Xunzi*; for a translation see Knoblock,
1988-94; or Hutton 2014) and moreover that if following the
course of action mandated by one's father would bring disgrace
to the family and not following it would bring honor, then not
following is to act morally (29.2 of the *Xunzi*).
Xunzi's position is supported in part by the distinction between
service to parents and obedience to them. It might very well fail to
be of service to parents if following their wishes is to bring moral
disgrace to them and the family.



Another ethical issue arising from the strong Confucian emphasis on
filiality concerns possible conflicts between loyalty to parents and
loyalty to the ruler or public justice. Consider again
*Analects* 13.18, in which Confucius says that uprightness is
found in sons and fathers covering up for each other. In this case, at
least, loyalty to parents or to children takes precedence over loyalty
to ruler or to public justice. This precedence is one implication of
the Confucian doctrine of care with distinctions ("love with
distinctions" is a frequent translation, but perhaps "care
with distinctions" is less misleading because it covers both the
emotionally freighted attitude toward kin and a more distanced
attitude toward strangers). Though all people are owed moral concern,
some are owed more than others, according to the agent's
relationship to them.



Jiang (2021) argues that much of the dynamic development of classical
Chinese philosophy springs from a tension between values of humaneness
based on special relationships such as family membership, on the one
hand, and on the other hand, impartial values such as justice, a
tension that surfaces in the *Analects*. The Confucian
response to this tension divides, he suggests, between two streams: an
"extensionist" approach that sees the two kinds of value as ultimately
compatible, and a "sacrificialist" approach that focuses on the
conflict between them and prioritizes humaneness. 



An alternative reading of the tradition that does not put the tension
quite so much at the center would not construe the relationship
between humaneness and justice as inherently conflictual: after all,
the Confucians recognized that family loyalty is the foundation
for the development of moral concern for the welfare of others
outside the family and at the same time that circumstances can bring
the two kinds of value into conflict. In any case, it seems right to
see the relationship between these values and the different ways that
thinkers reacted to that relationship as a fertile source of newly
developing streams of thought.



This issue works into understanding the thought of a pivotal
critic of Confucianism in the classical period. Mozi (probably
5th century B.C.E), who possibly was once a student of
Confucianism, came to reject that teaching, partly on the grounds that
the Confucian emphasis on ritual and musical performance was a
wasteful expenditure of resources that could otherwise be used to meet
the basic needs of the many (*Mozi*, for a translation,
see Books 25, 32 in Fraser 2020). A related criticism in the text
of the *Mozi* is that tradition does not hold normative
authority simply because it is tradition, for there was a time when
the practice in question was not tradition but new (Book 39 in
Fraser). If a practice has no authority when it is new, it has no
authority at any subsequent time simply because it is getting
older.



Mozi also argued that exclusive concern for one's own (oneself,
one's family, one's state) is at the root of all
destructive conflict (Book 16 in Fraser). Exclusive concern for the
self causes the strong to rob the weak. Exclusive concern for
one's family causes great families to wreak havoc on lesser
families (it is not difficult to see how this thought might apply to
the idea of protecting one's own, even if they have committed
serious crimes against others outside the family). Exclusive concern
toward one's state causes great states to attack small states.
Mozi advocated the doctrine of *jian ai* as a remedy.
"*Ai*" usually means "love" or
"affection," but for Mozi it probably meant an emotionally
cooler form of concern. "*Jian*" usually means
"inclusive." One possible translation of "*jian
ai*" is "inclusive care" (see Fraser, 2016).
Other translations render "*jian*" as
"impartial," as in "impartial care" (see
Ivanhoe 2005). The latter translation conveys clearly the
understanding that Confucians, at least since Mencius, have had of
*jian ai*, which is that it requires one to have equal concern
for everyone regardless of one's relationship to them. The next
section explains how Mencius incorporated this understanding of
*jian ai* in his criticism of it and in his development of
Confucian ethics.


### 2.5 Mencius's defense of care with distinctions and his theory of the roots of moral knowledge and motivation in human nature



The substantial following that Mohism gained in the classical period
forced a response from Confucians (see Hansen, 1992, and Van Norden
2007, for a discussion of Mozi's pivotal impact on the Chinese
tradition). They responded on two subjects: first, they had to address
what is required by way of concern for all people and how to reconcile
such concern with the greater concern for some that the Confucian
doctrine of care with distinctions requires; second, they had to
address the question of what kinds of concern are motivationally
possible for human beings, partly in response to the Mohist argument
that it is not difficult to act on *jian ai* (which they came
to interpret as being contrary to care with distinctions), and partly
in response to others who were skeptical about the possibility of
acting on any kind of genuinely other-regarding concern. Mencius, in
the text purporting to be a record of his teachings, explicitly sets
himself to the task of defending Confucianism not only against Mohism
but the teachings of Yang Zhu. Yang's teachings seemed to
Mencius to sit on the opposite end of the spectrum from Mohism (there
is no surviving text purporting to articulate and defend Yangism).
According to Mencius's characterization, Yang Zhu criticized
both Mohism and Confucianism for asking people to sacrifice themselves
for others. Yang Zhu on this view was an ethical egoist: i.e., one who
holds that it is always right to promote one's own welfare.
Mencius positioned Confucianism as the occupying the correct mean
between the extremes of having concern only for oneself on the one
hand and having an equal degree of concern for everyone.



*Mencius* 1A7 purports to be an account of a conversation
between Mencius and King Xuan, the ruler of a Chinese state. Mencius
is attempting to persuade the king to adopt the Confucian *dao*
or way of ruling. The king wonders whether he really can be the kind
of king Mencius is advocating, and Mencius replies by asking whether
the following story he has heard about the king is true. The story is
that the king saw an ox being led to slaughter for a ritual sacrifice.
The king decided to spare the ox and substituted a lamb for the ritual
sacrifice. Thinking back on that occasion, the king recalls that it
was the look in the ox's eyes, like that of an innocent man
being led to execution, that led him to substitute the lamb. Mencius
then comments that this story demonstrates the king's capability
to become a true king, and that all he has to do is to extend the sort
of compassion he showed the ox to his own people. To say that he can
care for an ox but not for his people is like saying "my
strength is sufficient to lift heavy weight, but not enough to lift a
feather" (translation adapted from Lau, 1970a) His failure to
act on behalf of his people is due simply to his not acting, not to an
inability to act. What the king has to do, suggests Mencius, is to
treat the aged in his family as aged, and then extend it to the aged
in other families; treat his young ones as young ones, and extend it
to the young ones of others; then he can turn the whole world in the
palm of his hand.



The passage demonstrates one characteristic of the text that is
pertinent to Mencius's response to Mohism and quite possibly its
influence on him. In contrast to the *Analects*, the
ruler's duties to care for his people are more frequently
discussed and play a more prominent role in the conception of a
ruler's moral excellence. Mencius is portrayed in this text as
very much engaged in getting the kings of Chinese states to stop
mistreating their subjects, to stop drafting their subjects into their
wars of territorial expansion, and to avoid overtaxing them to finance
their wars and lavish projects. At the same time, Mencius's
assertion that the king is able to extend the kind of concern he
showed the ox toward his own people is a reply to those who advocate
Yangism on the grounds that acting for one's own sake is
natural. Mencius holds that natural compassion is a part of human
nature. The task of moral self-cultivation is the task of
"extending" what is natural. What is natural, or at least
more so, is properly acting toward the aged and the young in
one's family and then extending that to the aged and the young
in other families.



Extension is necessary because natural compassion is uneven compared
to where it ought to extend. King Xuan may find it natural to have
compassion for an innocent man about to be executed or a terrified ox
about to be slaughtered, but not toward all his subjects when he is
focusing on the benefits that a war of territorial expansion might
bring him. This story of Mencius, the King, and the ox is rich
material for reflection on the nature of moral development. It seems
plausible that development must begin with something that is of the
right nature to be shaped into the moral virtues, and also plausible
that what we begin with is not as it fully should be. The questions
posed by the story is what the natural basis of morality is and how
further development occurs. Mencius's theory of the "four
*duan*" addresses these questions.
"*Duan*" literally means "tip of
something" and is often translated as "beginnings"
in this context.



What are the four beginnings of morality? In 2A6 human nature (*ren
xing*) it is said that no person is devoid of a heart (the word
for heart in Chinese stands for the seat of thinking and feeling,
hence often translated as "the mind") sensitive to the
suffering of others, and to illustrate this beginning, Mencius asks us
to suppose that a man were suddenly to see a young child about to fall
into a well. Such a man would certainly be moved to compassion, not
because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor
because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or
friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. This
natural compassion can develop into the virtue of *ren* (in
Mencius, *ren* is more often a particular virtue that concerns
caring and hence is often translated as "benevolence" or
"humaneness"). A second beginning is the heart that feels shame in
certain situations, e.g., in 6A10, Mencius says that if rice and soup
are offered after being trampled upon, even a beggar would disdain
them. Under the right conditions, innate shame develops into the
virtue of *yi* or righteousness--being able to do the
right thing and dedication to doing it. The third beginning is the
heart that feels courtesy,e.g., the younger sometimes instinctively
knows to respect and be courteous to the older. Under the right
conditions, courtesy develops into *li,* which as a virtue
consists in the observance of the rites or the virtue of ritual
propriety. And finally, there is the heart that can make morally
relevant distinctions (*shi/fei*, the thing to do or not
to do). Under the right conditions, this sense of approval and
disapproval develops into wisdom, which includes having a grasp of the
spirit behind moral rules so that one knows how to be flexible in
applying them.



It is important to note that Mencian beginnings of morality are not
just blind feelings or primitive urges to act in certain ways, but
contain within them certain intuitive judgments about what is right
and wrong, what is to be disdained and what is deferential, respectful
behavior. In the example of the beggar who does not accept food that
has been trampled upon, it seems that Mencius is suggesting we have an
original, unlearned sense that allows us to judge the sort of respect
that is due to ourselves as human beings. Similarly, in suggesting
that we have an unlearned sense of deference, Mencius is suggesting
that we have an unlearned sense of what is due to others such as
elders and our parents. Mencius's theory tallies with some of
the more recent theories of emotion that point toward the intertwining
of cognitive and affective dimensions (the theory does not necessarily
imply, however, that the affective amounts to nothing more than the
cognitive, as shall be discussed later).



The *Mencius* contains different metaphors that convey a view
of human nature as the basis for moral development. On one metaphor,
used in a debate with rival philosopher Gaozi in 6A2, the inborn
goodness of human nature is like the tendency of water to flow
downward. The metaphor implies that human beings develop virtues in
the absence of abnormal interference such as water being damned up or
struck so that it splashes upward. On the other way of conceiving
ethical development, the four beginnings are more like barley sprouts
that need nurture analogous to sun, water, and fertile soil (6A7).
Mencius seems to treat the the two conceptions as equivalent, but
arguably they are are significantly different since
the "growing" conditions for the sprouts are not
necessarily provided in the normal course of affairs (see Wong,
2015b).



In some passages, extension is characterized as a matter of simply
preserving or not losing what is given to one at birth (4B12, 4B19,
4B28, 6A10, 6A11), and such passages accord with the water metaphor in
suggesting that moral development happens in the absence of abnormal
interference. In other places, the thinking seems to be more in accord
with the sprout metaphor and identifies conditions for moral
development that go well beyond noninterference: kings are held
responsible for providing for their subjects a constant means of
livelihood (1A7) that enables them to support parents and nurture wife
and children; kings must also ensure the appropriate moral education
about filiality, about the duties that rulers and subjects owe to each
other and about respect for the elder. Mencius furthermore recognized
natural predispositions other than the four beginnings that could
potentially lead human beings astray. He mentions the desires of the
senses in this regard (6A15). This is why Mencius places
responsibility on everyone to *si* (reflect on, turn over in
one's mind) (6A14, 6A15) the manifestations of the four
beginnings. With such reflection, human beings can recognize that
virtue takes precedence over satisfaction of potentially conflicting
desires and feelings (e.g., the priority of righteousness over the
desire for life if one cannot have both), but lack of reflection will
stunt moral development (6A9). If the deprivation of nourishing
conditions is severe enough, the sprouts can be killed off (6A8).
Thus, while Mencius is often characterized superficially by his saying
that human nature is good (6A6), he means (at least when his thinking
is guided by the sprout metaphor) that it contains predispositions to
feel and act in morally appropriate ways and to make intuitive
normative judgments that can with the right nurturing conditions give
human beings guidance as to the proper emphasis to be given to the
desires of the senses (see Shun, 1997; Van Norden, 2004, 2007).



It is not surprising that there should be the kind of ambiguity
expressed by the juxtaposition of the water and sprout metaphors in
Mencius. A very common contemporary conception of the innate comes
very close to the implications of the water metaphor, i.e., that which
develops under normal conditions. On the other hand, we are also
capable of recognizing that other things develop under a narrower or
much more contingent (not necessarily realized in the normal course of
affairs) set of conditions. A barley sprout develops only if human
beings plant it in the right kind of soil and put effort into
cultivating it. Yet it seems intuitively correct to say that its
direction of growth is innate. If the conditions for growth are
realized, it will become a barley plant, not a corn plant.
Contemporary thinking about the innate bases of morality also shows
this range of thinking. Claims that morality is constrained by an
innate universal grammar (e.g., Hauser, 2008; Mikhail, 2011) seem
closer to the idea that the moral (or its underlying universal
structure) develops under normal conditions; other conceptions
acknowledge more of a role for contingent factors (Nichols, 2004;
Haidt and Bjorklund 2008). The ambiguity in Mencius' thought,
then, anticipates contemporary swings in thinking about the relative
roles of what human beings are born with and what they acquire through
learning, experience and culture.



Much of what is fascinating in Mencius lies in his explorations of how
moral learning takes place and how this learning might also interact
with emotion. Consider now in combination the theme that the cognitive
and affective go into the constitution of emotion and the theme that
the emotional beginnings of morality can be extended through provision
of the right kind of nurture. What is necessary for extension? Is
cognitive extension, i.e., more moral knowledge, sufficient? The
answer to this question depends on the nature of the intertwining
between the cognitive and affective in emotions. Consider again the
story of King Xuan and the ox. Mencius expresses confidence in King
Xuan's ability to have compassion for his people, based on his
act of compassion for the ox. Here the question of whether cognitive
extension is sufficient emerges in the concrete. Was it sufficient for
Mencius to have reminded the king that he has even more of a reason to
spare his people from suffering than he had to spare the ox from
suffering (more reason because Mencius clearly ranks the interests of
animals below those of human beings, and because for him there is a
good moral reason for the performance of ritual sacrifices)? Logical
consistency alone cannot be expected to provide motivation, as David
Nivison has pointed out (1996), but then what is Mencius trying to do
with the King if not move him through logic?



Nowhere in the *Mencius* is there enough said to point to a
definitive interpretation on this matter, but various reconstructions
of possible positions can be given. Perhaps the King's innate
nature contains all the motivation he needs, and all that Mencius is
doing is reminding him that he has the motivation to spare his people.
This interpretation seems roughly in accord with Mencius'
likening moral development to water flowing downward: it will proceed
unless interfered with. Perhaps the King's nature needs some
degree of transformation that starts with the sort of compassion he
can feel for a terrified ox or an innocent man about to be executed
and then expands the scope of that compassion to more of its
appropriate objects. This interpretation seems roughly in accord with
Mencius' likening moral development to the growth of sprouts
that need the appropriate water, soil and cultivation efforts. (See
Im, 1999, Ivanhoe, 2002, Shun, 1997, Wong, 2002, Van Norden, 2007, and
McRae 2011 for a range of different possible positions that could be
attributed to Mencius).



What seems philosophically fruitful about the Xuan and ox story is
that it portrays an attempt at moral teaching of the kind that
actually occurs in the moral life, and the ambiguity that it presents
to the reader is fruitful precisely because it is not a completely
theorized story. We are not told exactly what Mencius is trying to do
with the King in terms of a theory of the nature of emotions and the
relation between the cognitive and affective. Rather, we are led to
reflect on the most plausible possibilities in trying to arrive at a
reconstruction of what might have been meant by the text, as well as
what might be the most illuminating position on its own merits. The
story is particularly intriguing for those philosophers who believe in
the possibility that learning can influence emotion at the same time
that emotion can help learning become motivationally efficacious. At
one moment in the conversation between King Xuan and Mencius, the King
remarks that Mencius has helped him to understand that he was truly
motivated by compassion to spare the ox. As Mencius was talking, he
says, he felt the stirrings of compassion again. It is at this point
that Mencius reminds the King of the suffering of his people. Perhaps
what Mencius was trying to do was to expand the scope of the
King's feeling for those who suffer. He may know in the abstract
that he has a duty to advance the welfare of his people, but he may
not feel it very much, and by stimulating the King to re-experience
the feeling of compassion he had for the ox, Mencius is perhaps trying
to get that feeling to expand to include his subjects. Mencius is
reminding the King of his duty precisely when he has primed the King
to assimilate it emotionally. In any case, this is a plausible picture
of how the cognitive and affective can interact in emotionally
development and both be necessary for effective moral motivation (see
Wong, 2015a).



If we recall Mencius's saying in 6A10 that even a beggar would
refuse food that has been trampled upon, we may infer that something
like a concept of human dignity is implied. In virtue of the four
*duan*, we are entitled to respect. What is of further
interest, however, is the idea that the source of our dignity is also
the source of our responsibilities to each other and to ourselves. We
have the responsibility of reflecting on the *duan*, and if we
abuse them and kill them off, we have made ourselves unworthy of the
respect to which we were originally entitled. These implications of
the Mencian idea about the source of human dignity are not so much
highlighted in the Western tradition. The idea that we might render
ourselves unworthy of the basic respect to which we are originally
entitled might appear harsh, but what should be kept in mind is that
others share in the responsibility to develop our *duan* (see
section 2.8 below). Most importantly our family shares in that
responsibility, but as Mencius also emphasizes, the king has
responsibility for putting in the conditions for material security
that enable most people to reflect on and develop their *duan*.
In fact Mencius holds responsible the king who does not provide a
constant means of livelihood for the crimes his people commit in order
to survive and feed their families. It is those who have adequate
material security and moral education and yet who still fail to
reflect who must bear the fuller share of responsibility for their
wrongdoing.



What about the priority of filial loyalty over loyalty to the larger
community? Mencius' defense of this priority draws from his
theory of human nature as containing not only the beginnings of
affective motivations for being moral but also intuitive judgments
about what is right and about what deserves the feeling of shame. His
question to a Mohist, Yizi, is how Yizi can justify providing his
deceased parents a special burial when the Mohist prescriptions are
for a plain burial for anyone. Yizi's reply is to quote from the
*Book of History*: the sage-kings treated all their subjects as
if they were their new-born children. Yizi's interpretation of
this saying is that there should be no distinctions in one's
concern for people, though the practice of it may begin with
one's parents (how concern without distinctions is compatible
with special burial for one's parents is unclear, and there is
no further clarification in 3A5, but the issue involves the question
of what Mohists meant by *jian ai*, which is addressed in
section 3 below). Mencius's counter-reply is to ask whether Yizi
really holds that a person loves his elder brother's son no more
than his neighbor's baby. This is not just an assertion about
what people tend to feel but also an assertion about what people
intuitively hold to be right to feel and to do. Then Mencius makes a
puzzling remark to the effect that Yizi is singling out a special
feature in a certain case: "when a new-born babe creeps toward a
well, it is not its fault." This last part of Mencius's
response is puzzling because Yizi did not say anything about a baby
and a well. One possibility is that Yizi may have obliquely referred
to Mencius's claim that all have the original and unlearned
feeling of distress at seeing a child about to fall into a well. In
other words, Yizi might have been challenging Mencius by asking,
"Does not your own postulated unlearned compassion require us to
regard that child the same way, regardless of whose child it
is?" This way of taking Yizi helps makes sense of
Mencius's reply. First, he points out what he takes to be the
indisputably greater affection one feels for elder brother's son
over one's neighbor's baby. Mencius grants that we all
respond to a child about to fall into the well with alarm and
distress, and it doesn't matter whose child it is. However, one
cannot infer from this one particular situation that we ought to have
equal concern for everyone *in all* situations. The case of the
child about to fall into the well has a particular feature that makes
it relevant to treat it as one would any child. That feature seems to
be innocence.



The Mencian position is premised on the principle that it is right to
treat all people alike only when the ways they are alike are the most
ethically relevant features of the situation. We should do the same
thing only when the similarities between two cases are the most
ethically relevant features of the situation. Mencius believes that in
many instances, the presence or absence of a family relationship to a
person is the most relevant feature (in deciding which children to
give gifts, the fact that one child is one's elder
brother's son and the other child is one's
neighbor's child may be the most relevant feature). In other
types of situations, such as a child about to fall into a well, it is
the innocence that children share that is the most relevant feature.
That is why it is proper to feel alarm or distress toward any child in
that situation. The implied application of this idea to the
sage-kings' treatment of the people is that these kings treated
all people alike insofar as they did not deserve the harm about to
befall them.



Two issues arise from this response to Mohism as he understood it
(whether he understood it correctly will be addressed in section 3).
One issue is whether Mencius has sufficient warrant to trust the kinds
of intuitive judgments he attributes to human nature. Mencius holds
that the beginnings of morality are sent by Heaven, but in the absence
of such a metaphysical warrant, can these intuitive judgments be
accepted, particularly the ones that underwrite care with
distinctions? Doubt about the metaphysical warrant may not doom
Mencius's response to Mohism, however, if one holds that all
normative theories ultimately depend on intuitive judgments and if one
has no good reason to be skeptical about these judgments. Thus one
might hold that whether or not there is a metaphysical warrant, there
is a great deal of plausibility to the intuitive judgment about owing
parents more concern because they are the source of one's life
and nurturance. Of course one might also hold, as Mencius appears to
hold, that people are owed concern in virtue of their being human, and
the possibility for conflict of duties arises from these different
sources of concern. The second issue is how the *Mencius* text
deals with conflicts of the sort exemplified by the sheep-stealing
case in the *Analects*.



The text contains themes embodying the theme of filial loyalty, and as
in the *Analects*, such loyalty takes precedence over public
justice. 7A35 tells a story about the sage-emperor Shun that
illustrates this theme. Because Shun was renowned for his filiality,
Mencius is asked what Shun would have done if his father killed a man.
Mencius replies that Shun could not stop the judge from apprehending
his father because the judge had the legal authority to act. But then,
Mencius says, Shun would have abdicated and fled with his father to
the edge of the sea. 5A2 and 5A3 describe the way that Shun dealt with
his half-brother Xiang's conspiring with his father and
stepmother to kill him. He enfeoffed Xiang because all he could do as
a brother is to love him. At the same time, Shun appointed officials
to administer the fief and to collect taxes and tributes, to protect
the people of Youbi from Xiang's potentially abusive ruling.
That is why some called Shun's act a banishment of Xiang.
However, the Shun stories exhibit a complexity that differentiates
them from the story of the sheep-stealing coverup in the
*Analects*. Though filial loyalty is clearly given a priority
in each story, there is in Shun's actions an acknowledgment of
the other value that comes into conflict with filial loyalty. Though
Shun ultimately gives priority to filial loyalty in the case of his
father, his first action acknowledges the value of public justice by
declining to interfere with the judge while he is king. While Shun
declines to punish his half-brother, he protects the people of
Xiang's new fiefdom.



These Shun stories illustrate that an agent's response to a
situation in which important values come into conflict need not be a
strict choice between honoring one value and wholly denying the other.
While some sort of priority might have to be set in the end, there are
also ways to acknowledge the value that is subordinated, but how
exactly that is to be done seems very much a matter of judgment in the
particular situation at hand. The Shun stories are an expression of
the Confucian theme that rightness cannot be judged on the basis of
exceptionless general principles but a matter of judgment in the
particular situation. It is difficult to see how this theme can be
taught except by the way it is done in the *Mencius*: through
exemplars of how it is done, and where the situation is presented
through some kind of narrative.



The characteristic form of reasoning in Mencius is analogical
reasoning (see Lau, 1970b; Wong, 2002). Starting from what seems true
in one case and "extending" similar conclusions to another
case that has similar conclusions. The trick in doing analogical
reasoning correctly, as suggested earlier, is to extend the similar
conclusions only when the two cases share ethically relevant and
decisive features. The *Mencius* 4A17 shows a similar concern
for treating like cases alike. Mencius grants that to save the life of
one's drowning sister-in-law, one of course suspends the
customary rule of propriety prohibiting the touching of man and woman
when they are giving and receiving. Another philosopher proposes to
apply this idea of suspending the usual rules of propriety to save
something else from drowning--the entire Empire! Mencius replies
that one saves one's sister-in-law with one's hand but
cannot save the Empire from drowning in chaos and corruption with
one's hand. The Empire can only be pulled out by the Way.
Mencius is rejecting the analogy between compromising on ritual
propriety to save the country and compromising on propriety to save
one's sister-in-law. There is a relevant dissimilarity between
the case of the drowning sister-in-law and saving the country: one
cannot save the Empire through compromises of ritual propriety, but
instead by following the Way, which itself involves following ritual
propriety.



So what do we do when we confront a problematic case in the present
and we do not automatically know what the right thing to do is?
Mencius believes we can rely on past cases in which we have made
reliable judgments about, for example, what is right and shameful.
These reliable judgments made in past cases serve as *paradigms or
exemplars* of correct ethical judgment. In encountering new
problem situations, we determine what sort of ethical reaction to the
new situation is correct by asking which of the cases in which
we've had paradigm judgments are relevantly similar. We then
determine what reactions to the new situations would be sufficiently
similar to the relevant paradigm judgments. Analogical reasoning is
careful attention and *comparing* to a concrete paradigm. The
pool of paradigm ethical judgments we have not only includes cases
from our own personal experience, but also include the experience of
others, especially those who serve as models of wise judgment. The
stories of sage-king Shun in the *Mencius* text seem to give us
such paradigms. Shun's judgments on what to do about conflicts
between filial loyalty and public justice are perhaps meant to serve
as paradigm judgments. The conception of moral reasoning found in the
*Mencius* offers important material for reflection on the
process of moral judgment, especially for those who have come to
reject the simple model of judgment as deduction from premises
including a general moral principle and a description of the
conditions that make the principle applicable to the situation at
hand. The Mencian picture includes general moral considerations or
values that bear on the situation at hand, such as the importance of
family loyalty and public justice, but the picture also suggests that
judgment in difficult situations includes finding a way to adequately
recognize and realize the values in play. "Finding a way"
seems much more a matter of imagination and ingenuity rather than
deduction, but the Mencian picture also suggests that we can be guided
by exemplars of wise judgment. Identifying the relevant similarities
and dissimilarities between these exemplars and one's present
situation seems a matter of perception and close attention rather than
deduction from principle.


### 2.6 Xunzi versus Mencius on human nature and the origins of morality



In the *Xing E* ("[Human] Nature is Bad") chapter
(see Hutton 2014 for a translation), Xunzi explicitly opposes his
position on human nature to Mencius's. He asserts that far from
being good, human nature is bad because it includes a love of profit,
envy and hatred, and desires of the eyes and ears that lead to
violence and anarchy. To avoid these consequences of indulging our
spontaneous desires and impulses, it takes *wei* (conscious
activity or deliberate effort), models and teaching, and guidance
through observing ritual and *yi* (standards of righteousness).
Through such efforts, natural emotions and desires are transformed as
a crooked piece of wood is steamed and then straightened upon a press
frame. All rituals and standards of righteousness are *sheng*
(generated, produced) by the sages. These are generated from the
conscious activity of the sages and not from their original nature.
Just as the vessel made by a potter is generated from his conscious
activity and not his original nature, so the sages accumulated their
thoughts and ideas and made a practice of conscious activity and
precedents, thereby generating rituals and standards of
righteousness.



Part of Xunzi's argument against Mencius is that human nature is
not what is produced by conscious activity but rather that which is
already there in human beings independently of conscious activity.
Since it is clear that human beings are not already good but must work
at it, it is clear that human nature cannot be good. When Mencius
expresses the water-metaphor view of the human inclination toward
goodness, Xunzi's criticism has a point. Becoming good does not
seem to be merely a matter of not interfering with what will unfold in
normal circumstances. However, when Mencius expresses the
sprout-metaphor view, the differences between him and Xunzi are more
subtle. On the sprout-metaphor view, effort and reflection must be put
into the project of extending the sprouts to where they should be. It
might be thought that one of the real differences between Mencius and
Xunzi is that the former believes the necessary effort lies in growing
or extending what lies in human nature, whereas the latter believes
that the effort lies in remaking and reshaping what lies in human
nature. Perhaps one believes that we can go "with the
grain" of what we are born with, and the other believes we must
go "against the grain."



Each thinker *emphasizes* one of these opposing directions, but
it is a credit to the subtlety and power of their views that each also
takes into account the direction that the other emphasizes. Mencius
acknowledges that moral development is hindered when a person pays
more attention to the "small" parts of the self that
include desires for sensual and material satisfaction and fails to use
the heart-mind to reflect on the great parts that have normative
priority. In the chapter on rituals, Xunzi identifies natural and
powerful emotional dispositions such as love of one's own kind
that rituals must give expression to and that seem to form more of a
positive basis for moral development. Such natural love is expressed
in love for parents and intense grief upon their deaths, which must be
given appropriate expression in mourning and burial rituals. Thus
Mencius acknowledges that there are natural parts of the self that
must be disciplined and held in check while Xunzi acknowledges that
there are natural parts that are largely congenial to morality in the
sense that they are the natural basis for taking great satisfaction
and contentment in virtue once one has gotten the self-aggrandizing
desires and emotions under control.



Another disagreement between Mencius and Xunzi has to do with
Mencius' claim that human nature contains moral predispositions.
As indicated earlier, such Mencian predispositions appear to contain
moral intuitions (e.g., about what is shameful and right or wrong). On
one plausible interpretation of Mencius, morality is part of the order
imparted to the world by *tian* or heaven. By contrast, Xunzi
seems to rule out the existence of natural predispositions with moral
content when he claims that the sage kings generated ritual principles
and precepts of moral duty. One natural interpretation of
"generated" is "created" or
"invented." On these interpretations of each thinker, the
contrast between Mencius and Xunzi exemplifies the contrast between a
robust moral realism that has moral properties such as rightness
existing independently of human invention and a constructivist
position that makes moral properties dependent on human invention.



The interpretation of Xunzi as a constructivist does not commit
him to a denial of the objectivity of morality or to the denial that
there is a single objectively correct morality. It is possible to see
Xunzi as a constructivist about morality but also as an objectivist
(see Nivison, 1991). On the constructivist interpretation, Xunzi holds
a functional conception of morality, according to which it is invented
to harmonize the interests of individuals and to constrain and
transform the heedless pursuit of short-term gratification for the
sake of promoting the long-term interests of the individual and the
group. Ritual principles and moral precepts are invented to accomplish
such a function, and human nature constrains which of the possible
principles and precepts are better or worse for accomplishing that
function. Xunzi's point about the mourning rituals prescribed by
Confucians being suited to the nature of human love for one's
parents is a case in point.



Xunzi's functional theory of morality bears added interest for
those exploring the possibilities of a naturalistic approach to
morality. One fairly common interpretation of Xunzi's conception
of *tian* or heaven is that it is an order-giving force in the
cosmos that is neutral to whatever human beings have come to regard as
right and good. In fact, a translation that better conveys such a
meaning for '*tian*' is "nature," which
is the translation given by Knoblock's valued translation of the
*Xunzi*. Textual passages that support this interpretation
stress that *tian* operates according to patterns that remain
constant no matter what human beings do or whether they appeal to it
for good fortune (chapter 17). It is the proper task of human beings
to understand what these patterns are in order to take advantage of
them (e.g., so that they may know to plow in the spring, weed in the
summer, harvest in the fall, and store in the winter).



Such a view of the difference between Xunzi and Mencius, however,
depends on interpretations that been disputed in favor of alternative
interpretations. Roger Ames (1991, 2002) defends an interpretation of
Mencius that gives the greatest role in shaping the direction of moral
development to human "creative social intelligence" rather
than *tian* conceived as a force operating independently of
human beings. For a contrasting view, see Irene Bloom (1994, 1997,
2002), who, sometimes in response to Ames, defends a greater role for
biology in her interpretation of Mencius while also leaving an
important role for culture. The *Xunzi* text is also
susceptible to very different interpretations, partly because of the
originality of its synthesis of several streams of thought:
Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and the Jixia Academy. When Xunzi
asserts that *tian* is unresponsive to human supplication and
ritual sacrifice, it looks as if he might be drawing from Daoism (see
below), but when he refers to the *tian*-given faculties human
beings should exercise to solve the problem of conflict, he might be
interpreted as implying that *tian* conferred these faculties
upon human beings for the *purpose* of solving the problem of
conflict and realizing fulfilling human lives together (see Eno 1990;
and Machle, 1993 for an exploration of the rich interpretive
possibilities regarding Xunzi's conception of *tian*).
While it might still be possible to interpret Xunzi as a
constructivist on the origin of morality, this alternative
interpretation might suggest that Xunzi's *tian* had a
blueprint it intended human beings to fulfill. Under alternative
interpretations of Mencius and Xunzi, then, the differences do not
disappear, but they might form even more subtle contrasts (Wong,
2016).



Even some of the theoretical difficulties that Xunzi has are
instructive. In pressing his case against Mencius for the badness of
human nature, he stresses the self-serving drives of human nature.
Unlike Hobbes, he does not accept that human beings are inevitably
motivated by self-interest, and he does not try to base adherence to
moral norms on the basis of self-interest alone. This arguably is a
promising move, given the heavy criticism that can be directed against
the Hobbesian project and subsequent attempts to carry it out its
basic idea (see Gauthier, 1986 for such an attempt; see Vallentyne,
1991 for criticism). Xunzi rather argues that the problems created by
unrestrained self-interest point to the need to transform human
motivation. People can come to love moral virtue and the rites for
their own sakes, and this is necessary, on Xunzi's view, for a
stable solution to the problem of conflict between self-interested
individuals. At times, Xunzi suggests that the intellect can override
the desires arising from the natural emotions, but it remains unclear
as to how self-regarding motivations can become a love of virtue and
the rites simply because the intellect approves of them. The parts of
Xunzi asserting a more complex picture of human motivation suggest a
solution. If human beings are capable of genuine compassion and
concern for others, as the chapter on rites suggests, then the ritual
principles and moral precepts invented by the sage kings have some
motivational leverage for the birth of a love of virtue and rites.
Such a solution draws from what are arguably some of the most
plausible positions of Mencius: that human beings are capable of
altruism and compassion even if they are motivated much of the time by
self-interest; and that moral transformation is a matter of
cultivating and extending a motivational substance that is congenial
to morality (see Wong, 2000).



Mencius and Xunzi, then, offer sophisticated theories that expand the
range of possible ways of understanding moral knowledge, motivation,
and the nature of morality itself. Mencius presents an interesting
conception of the way that we reason by analogy from intuitive
judgments and also a plausible conception of innate predispositions
that are compatible with a major role for learning and upbringing in
the development of character and virtue. Those who are more
naturalistically inclined in their approach to morality (at least
insofar as this involves resisting the idea of a transcendent source
of moral properties) may find the interpretation of Xunzi as offering
a functional conception of morality appealing, especially if it allows
for a degree of objectivity regarding the content of morality.


### 2.7 Confucianism and the situationist problem for virtue ethics



In recent years, Gilbert Harman (1998-99, 1999-2000) and
John Doris (2002) have pointed to the influence of situations over
attitude and behavior as a problem for virtue ethics. Citing empirical
work in social psychology, Harman and Doris claim that the extensive
and surprising influence of situational factors undermines the
commonsense idea that people possess stable character traits that
explain what they do. Some of the classic psychological studies used
in this argument appear to show that ordinary respectable American
citizens will administer dangerous electrical shocks to an innocent
person when urged to do so by an experimenter in a lab coat (Milgram
1974), and that being late for an appointment is the most influential
factor in whether a seminary student will stop and help someone who
seems to be falling ill, even if the appointment is to attend a
lecture on the Good Samaritan (Darley and Batson 1973). Such studies
pose a problem not only for the commonsense conception of character
traits, but also for virtue ethics, which appear to assume the
possibility of achieving stable character traits that are virtues.
Perhaps human beings are inevitably creatures who are influenced by
the situation in which they act and not by any characterlogical
dispositions they bring with them to the situation. If so, it appears
that the ideal of attaining virtues is misguided.



There are good reasons to expect Confucianism to offer some
distinctive resources for dealing with this problem. First, as pointed
out in 2.3, Confucians appreciate the relational nature of human life:
who we are as persons very much includes our social context: the
people with whom we are in relationship and our institutions and
practices. So they are very much in a position to appreciate
situational influences on how human beings think, feel, and act.
Second, they appear to hold something like a conception of virtues as
stable character traits that are resistant to undue situational
influences. As noted in 2.3, and this pertains to the challenge posed
by the Milgram study, the Confucians emphasize the importance of
living according to one's own understanding of what is right and
good even if others do not see it the same way. Third, as noted at the
beginning of this entry, Chinese philosophy in general is
distinguished by a focus on the practical. This is illustrated in the
Confucian case by the tradition of scholar-officials who not only
wrote about and taught the importance of the ethical to the political
life, but strove to enact this importance in their own careers. As a
consequence, they were very much concerned with specifying in
practical terms how one could go about cultivating the virtues in
oneself. Fourth, and this is very much in response to the combination
of the previous points, they describe a long and arduous program of
ethical training to inculcate the virtues.



As Edward Slingerland (2011) has put it, Confucianism is in a good
position to appreciate the "high bar" challenge of
situational influence to the project of cultivating the virtues in
oneself and others. In response to this challenge, their program of
ethical training includes study of the classics (after the ancient
period, the classics came to include, of course, the *Analects*
and the *Mencius*), memorized and rehearsed until they become
fully internalized and embedded in the unconscious patterns of thought
that are so powerful in shaping what we do in everyday life (see
Slingerland 2009). This is one characteristic pattern of Confucian
self-cultivation: one consciously, deliberately and assiduously
undertakes a program that inculcates dispositions to have ethically
appropriate emotional responses and patterns of conduct. The intent is
to make the dispositions for these responses reliable and resistant to
undue situational influence.



Furthermore, the Confucians very much appreciated the power of models
to inspire, to make one want to transcend one's present self
(see Tan, 2005 and Olberding, 2008, 2012, 2016). The psychologist
Jonathan Haidt (2003) has given empirical evidence for an emotion he
calls "elevation," which is something like awe and
admiration upon contemplating the morally admirable. The
*Analects*, in fact, has been read as a record of how a group
of men gathered around a teacher with the power to elevate, and as a
record of how this group created a culture in which goals of
self-transformation were treated as collaborative projects. These
people not only discussed the nature of self-cultivation but enacted
it as a relational process in which they supported one another,
reinforced their common goals, and served as checks on each other in
case they went off the path, the *dao*. They were each
other's situational influences. See Sarkissian, 2010 for the
argument that Confucius shows how one can turn the power of situations
on people's attitudes and behavior toward positive ends; if
situations can influence people, one can through small details of
comportment and attitude be a situational influence on others that
tilts things toward a better course.



Training in ritual, *li*, takes on another dimension of
importance in light of the situationist problem. As noted in section
2.2 Confucian rituals help to express attitudes of respect and
reverence for others that can exist independently of the rituals
themselves, but rituals provide conventionally established, symbolic
ways to express these attitudes toward others. Ritual forms,
therefore, give participants manifold and (just as importantly)
regularly recurring ways to act on and therefore to strengthen the
right attitudes and behavioral dispositions. Given the renewed
appreciation in contemporary psychology for the power of emotions to
influence attitude and behavior, the resource offered by ritual
training should not be ignored by anyone concerned about the problem
of how to resist undue situational influence.



Finally, Confucianism points to the possibility that individuals,
under the right circumstances and encouragement, can enhance their
reflective control of their own emotions and impulses. Mencius'
conversation with King Xuan can be conceived as an attempt to get the
king to nourish his moral sprouts by reflecting on them, to become
aware of what his moral emotions are (such as compassion) and to take
action to grow them. It should be noted that contemporary psychology
is exploring the factors that work into the development of
self-control of one's emotions and impulses (e.g., chapter 3 in
Belsky et al., 2022). See Lieberman (2011) and Creswell (2007) for
studies indicating that meditation focused on cultivating compassion
in oneself can be effective through enhancing one's ability to
identify and gain better control of one's emotions.



Finally, in considering why robust character traits that could qualify
as virtues are so rare, we should consider the perspective that very
much informs the self-cultivation projects of Confucius and his
students. They were very much aware of the lack of virtue as a social
and political condition and not merely as an individual condition that
just happened to be widespread (Hutton 2006 makes this point). There
is a reason why Confucius and Mencius after him sought to have kings
adopt their teachings. If in fact the achievement of robust virtues
requires long and hard training, supported and guided by others who
have taken similar paths before, and if as Mencius 1A7 holds, people
cannot engage in such training until they have the material security
that enables them to take their minds off the sheer task of survival,
then it is no mystery at all why there are no such traits in societies
structured to achieve very different goals. Ironically, the
situationist psychological experiments do not take into account this
underlying relational factor that might deeply influence the ability
of people to form robust virtues, and neither do the philosophical
critics of virtue ethics who rely on the situationist experimental
evidence.


### 2.8 Responsibility and agency in Confucian ethics



In many respects, the ethics associated with the canonical figures of
Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi is about the way people should respond
to one another, and in this sense it is a paradigmatic ethic of
responsibility. Confucian ethics exemplifies, along with most other
ethics, the idea that we must be responsive to, held responsible for,
that which makes us morally valuable. Confucian virtues
of *ren*, *yi*, *li*, and filiality are conceived
to make their possessor trustworthy and reliable responders to the
needs, welfare, and dignity of others. The centrality that Confucian
ethics accords to relationship in what is valuable in human life
results in some distinctive features of its conception of
responsibility. A supreme degree of responsiveness to the needs and
suffering of people is required of exemplary officials. In Mencius
4B29, Yu, legendary for working tirelessly to control the flooding of
the great rivers of China and who later became King, is described as
regarded those drowning as if he had drowned them himself. Ji, who
bore his official responsibilities in a time of famine, regarded those
starving as if he had starved them himself. Xunzi says
that *Tian* gave birth to the people not for the sake of their
lords, but established the lords for the sake of the people (chapter
27). 



The authority of rulers rests on their being given the responsibility
for bringing about the conditions under which their people can live
fulfilling lives and develop their virtue. Recall Mencius' declaration
to King Xuan that if the people do not have a constant means of
livelihood, they will not have the constant minds to set themselves on
developing their virtue, and fall into crime (1A7). If a king allows
such circumstances to afflict his people, if his people commit crimes
to feed themselves and their families, and if the king punishes them,
he will have entrapped them. Mencius' declaration, then, amounts to
distributing a great share of the responsibility for the people's
crimes to their king.



Mencius goes on to propose concrete policies to the king to avoid
entrapping the people: not overtaxing them to fund aggressive wars
against neighboring states, prohibiting close-mesh fishing nets so as
not to catch young fish and turtles, limiting the harvesting of trees
to certain seasons, and planting mulberry trees so that the people
will have silk clothing to wear (1A3, 1A7). Such policies make for
sufficiently fertile soil from which his people's *duan* might
grow. Mencius might here be construed as invoking what has been called
"circumstantial luck" by Thomas Nagel in his classic "Moral Luck"
essay (1976). While we do have control over some of our circumstances,
we have none or very little control over other circumstances that
greatly affect what can we make of ourselves. This is the source of
Nagel's intuition that an arbitrariness of evaluation infects our
judgments of what we tend to hold people to answer for. Some of
us have very unfavorable circumstances in which we choose, yet others
with more favorable circumstances get more credit for their choices.
Interestingly, the only exception Mengzi makes to the rule that those
without a constant means will be unable to have a constant mind is the
class of *shi* Shi , the gentry-scholar class of which
Mengzi himself was a member. In an era of great political turbulence
and disintegrating social order, members of this class were dislodged
from their comfortable niches in the lower aristocracy, but their
knowledge of traditions made them valuable to competing warlord-kings
who wished to replicate the glory of the old kings. This distinct set
of circumstances for the shi made genteel poverty and itinerancy more
favorable, or at least less adverse, circumstances for maintaining a
constant mind than others lower in the social order.



People normally have responsibility to refrain from crime, which
involves their responsibility to respond to the needs of their
potential victims, but that responsibility can be mitigated by the
lack of control they have to avoid severe suffering if they refrain
from crime. Their responsibility is mitigated by the way desperation
focuses the mind on self and those for whom one cares the most. When
governments fail to realize the material conditions under which their
people could devote adequate attention to the development of their
virtue, they share a great deal of the responsibility for the
wrongdoing and harm that results.



Though Xunzi has a very different theory of what happens in the
cultivation of virtue, he too believes that helping individuals to
become competent moral agents is a collective task.
He recounts a story that occurred when Confucius was Minister of
Justice. A father and son had become embroiled in a legal
dispute. Kongzi detained them both but ultimately releases both. When
questioned as to why he let the son go when he should have been
punished for being unfilial, Kongzi questions the permissibility
of killing subordinates when their superiors are at fault: to
fail to teach the people and then judge their crimes is to kill the
innocent; to fail to teach the people and yet hold them responsible
for achieving meritorious works is being cruel; it is only when one
stops these practices that it is permissible to apply
punishments (chapter 28, see translation by Hutton 2014: 319).
However, if the material conditions sufficient for the focusing
of one's attention on moral virtue are present, and if others capable
of pointing the way toward learning are available to be followed, then
it is up to the individual to put in the effort (see Mencius 6A9 and
Jiang 2002). 



Lack of control over the conditions under which one becomes a
responsible moral agent, as discussed above, can result in mitigation
of personal responsibility. However, it is also possible to become
responsible for what is not under one's control. This can happen
because others who commit a moral wrong stand in special relationship
to oneself. In addition, such others can enter so deeply into
one's identity that one cannot repudiate what they do without
disowning part of the self. In the text *Kongzi Jiayu*
(Kong Zi Jia Yu  *The School Sayings of
Confucius*, 37.4 - see Other Internet Resources), a story is told
of the time Kongzi refrains from denouncing the unseemly conduct of an
old friend and does not distance himself from it or his friend. In
explaining this, Kongzi says that family members never lose that which
makes them family and old friends never lose that which makes them old
friends. Deep and lasting friendship can make us partly responsible
for the misconduct of our friends (see Ing 2017 for an illuminating
discussion of this passage).



Such consequences for the allotment of responsibility stem from the
moral centrality given to relationship in Confucian ethics, but are
not peculiar to Confucian ethics. Margaret Urban Walker (1993) has
observed that moral agents who accept responsibility for circumstances
beyond their control and who therefore "recognize their vulnerability
to fortune are primed for dependability of humanly invaluable sorts"
and "won't fail us even under the blows of bad fortune or odd turns of
fate which might otherwise prompt denial or opportunism" (1993,
25-26).



Agency, then, can be distributed among a larger group of people and is
not limited to the agent who directly chooses the action in question;
it is distributed among those who can some significant degree of
control over the conditions under which the direct agent chooses.
Others can share responsibility through having a relevant relationship
to the direct agent. A significant degree of responsibility is
retained by the direct agent, however, especially if the conditions
(such as a constant means of livelihood and the presence of reliable
teachers and models) favorable to the development of agency are
present. Then responsibility is conceived to rest on the individual to
exercise their heart-mind. In Mencius' case, the individual needs to
exercise the heart-mind's capacity to think about the importance of
developing the moral *duan* within; in Xunzi's case,
the individual needs to reflect on what qualities of character and
what kinds of cooperative relationships with others would provide
the greatest, and most stable satisfaction of desire. In each case,
there is an internal normative hierarchywithin the person that should
be established, with the heart-mind as the leader or commander of the
rest of the person. The heart-mind directs how the person should
cultivate the self and conduct itself in relation to others. This
hierarchy corresponds to the meritocratic order that Confucians
believe should obtain in state and society: the most virtuous and
most able (those who have developed their heart-minds the most) should
have the most authority to govern. We shall see how
the *Zhuangzi* (section 4.2) in particular poses a
striking critique of both forms of hierarchy.


### 2.9 Neo-Confucian theories of morality and their grounding in a cosmology



Zhu Xi (1130-1200) reinterpreted ethical themes inherited from
the classical thinkers and grounded them in a cosmology and
metaphysics that had absorbed the influence of Buddhism, particularly
as it transformed in its interaction with Daoism when entering China
(see the chapters on Zhu Xi and Wang Yang Ming in Ivanhoe, 1993 for
the neo-Confucian reaction Buddhism and Daoism). Zhu established the
Confucian canon that served as a basis for the Chinese public service
examination, including the *Analects* and *Mencius*,
along with the *Great Learning* (*Da Xue*) and
*Doctrine of the Mean* (*Zhong Yong*). In fact, he had
his greatest influence through the commentaries he wrote on these
texts (see Gardner, 2003 for a discussion of the influence of Zhu
Xi's reading of the *Analects*). Zhu affirmed the Mencian
theme that human nature is good, with greater emphasis on that vein of
thought in the *Mencius* that stresses that goodness is
internal to human beings and will develop in the absence of
interference. This reading of Mencius is unsurprising given the
influence of Buddhism on the Neo-Confucians, and it meant the demotion
of Xunzi within the influential Neo-Confucian reading of the
tradition. Much of Zhu's metaphysics centers on the relation
between *li* Li  (not *li* Li  as
ritual but as principle or pattern or the fit and coherence between
things) and *qi* (the material force or energy stuff from which
objects emerge and return at the end of their existence). How Zhu Xi
conceived this relation is a matter of interpretive debate. Some view
him as holding a dualistic metaphysics in analogy to the way that
Plato's distinction between the Forms and the sensible world is
often taken to embody a metaphysical dualism (Fung, 1948, chapter 25).
However, others interpret Zhu's *li* not as ontologically
prior to *qi* but rather as being a pattern or deep structure
that is immanent within and expressed by *qi* and delineates
the range and possibilities of *qi*'s transformations
(Graham, 1986; Thompson, 1988; Angle and Tiwald, 2017; Liu, 2018).
Others have noted that *li* appears to have both subjective and
objective aspects: it lays down the lines along which everything moves
in a way that is independent of personal desires; but on the other
hand, it is related to the pattern of one's profoundest
responses to things (see Angle, 2009, for an attempt to reconcile
these aspects). With regard to *qi*, Zhu Xi held that even
though goodness is within human nature, individuals differed with
respect to their native endowment of energy stuff, and that this,
together with differences in their family and social circumstances,
affected the development of their good natures (Angle and Tiwald,
2017; Liu, 2018).



Zhu Xi saw one's self-cultivation as a matter of apprehending
the *li* of one's own mind, largely through meditation
practice, and, at the same time, investigating the *li* or
patterns of things not only as revealed in texts such as the
*Analects* but as embodied in concrete situations, including
the patterns in relationships between persons. Both kinds of
activities must be conducted with *jing*, which in Zhu's
thought means respectful attention. Zhu is sometimes characterized as
a kind of scholastic, but he emphasized study of the texts in
conjunction with acting, with observing *li* as principle,
pattern, or coherence in external situations and relationships, and
realizing the correspondence between the *li* of one's
own mind and the *li* of texts and of situations and
relationships. Apprehending *li* in a concrete situation in
order to respond appropriately to it was not a simple matter of
absorbing generalizations from texts and applying it to the situation,
but rather a matter of bringing to bear a mind that has been
cultivated by meditation and by study of the texts and by observing
and acting in previous situations. Such a mind can take into account
relevant ethical considerations and is disciplined in attending to the
situation (see the chapter on Zhu Xi in Ivanhoe, 1993; and Gardner,
1990).



The other Neo-Confucian whose influence rivals that of Zhu Xi is Wang
Yang Ming (1472-1529). Wang saw Zhu's emphasis on the
investigation of patterns in external things as overly scholastic and
leading to abstract speculation rather than practical guidance. He
rejected what he saw to be the intellectualization of personal
realization, and identified the mind with *li*. This means that
the dispositions to judge properly the appropriate action in various
situations constitute the mind's original pure state.
*Li* is not to be sought as a pattern residing in an
independently existing external world but is embodied in judgments of
the mind. This seems to commit Wang to an identification of the world
with the experienced world and to a denial of a mind-independent
world, but an alternative interpretation is that the structure of the
world is mind-dependent while the world itself is not (Liu, 2018).
Wang's version of the Mencian theme that human nature is good is
even more innatist than Zhu Xi's (see Ivanhoe, 1990, for a
comparison of Mencius and Wang Yang Ming). Original goodness does not
need completion through learning about the external world. Then why
aren't all people fully good? Why are some very bad?
Wang's answer is that selfish desires cloud the sun of the
complete and perfect moral mind, and that the task of human beings is
to eliminate selfish desires and recover that mind (Chan, 1963,
sections 21, 62).



One of Wang's better-known themes is the unity of knowledge and
action. There can be no gap between knowing what to do and doing it.
Genuine knowledge is necessarily practical. Selfish desires and
emotions get in the way of achieving genuine knowledge. One way of
understanding this identification is to take knowledge as a knowing
how to act that is expressed in acting. One expresses one's
knowing how to ride a bicycle by riding, not by articulating
propositions about how to ride a bicycle that one might not be able to
act upon. Furthermore, knowledge is particularist and
context-sensitive in nature and is expressed in intuitive reactions to
the present moment. Knowing how to ride a bicycle is continually
reacting by shifting one's body first this way and then that way
to the changing center of gravity of one's body in tandem with
the bicycle. The moral life, on Wang's view, is like that rather
than applying a static set of generalizations one learns before
encountering the situations in which one needs to act. Notice also
that the kinesthetic sensations blend seamlessly with the bodily
responses to those sensations that help one to go forward and keep
one's balance on a bicycle. In genuine moral knowledge,
perception of the situation at hand blends seamlessly with the right
response to it.



In emphasizing that the ultimate ideal is a kind of spontaneous and
intuitive perceiving of the situation and the right response to it,
Wang Yang Ming joins with Zhu Xi. However, this does not mean that
there were not important dissenting voices. Dai Zhen defended an
ethical ideal in which deliberative reflection on the right thing to
do continues to play an important role and not just at stages in which
one is a considerable distance from realizing the ideal. Dai
particularly emphasizes the necessity for imagining the effects of
one's actions on others, which might help one better share their
sorrows and joys. Whereas Zhu equated spontaneous and non-conscious
identification with others as a reflection of the wholeheartedness of
one's motivations, Dai counters that needing to deliberate over
the right thing to do is compatible with a wholehearted acting on
one's judgment when one arrives at it. Dai is inclined to give
desires for the self a legitimate place in ethical reflection because
he holds that one's valuing of relationships can be strengthened
when one understands that the other's flourishing is tied up
with one's own (see Tiwald 2010, 2011a, 2011b).


### 2.10 Confucianism and gender



Many contemporary philosophers who have seriously undertaken the study
of Confucian ethics have concluded that it remains a
"live" philosophy with insights of continuing relevance. A
full defense of this claim requires not only identifying what is
valuable in Confucian ethics but also addressing moral evils and
liabilities that have long been associated with it (the same should be
said of Aristotle and his views of women and slaves, or Kant, and his
views of women or people of African descent). For example, Confucian
ethics might be seen as providing a needed emphasis on the central
value of relationship in most, if not all, human lives that are worth
living. In response to the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is
not worth living, the Confucian might be on at least equal footing in
saying that an isolated life is not worth living. Yet the Confucian is
also required to examine what sorts of relationships should have this
high status. Does Confucianism require family relationships that are
patriarchal, with the husband and father exercising authority over
wife and children in ways that would inevitably offend values of
equality and autonomy?



A recurring theme in the more recent literature on this subject is
that views of women in the early period of Confucianism were
relatively positive compared to the views adopted later. Raphals
(1998) has extracted from the literature of the Warring States Period
(during which Confucius lived) and the later Han Dynasty portraits of
women who were active and sometimes very effective participants in
their societies. For example, the "Collected Life Stories of
Women" (*Lienu zhuan*) depicts women as having the same
intellectual virtues as men, providing strategy and counsel to their
rulers, husbands, fathers and sons, excelling in logic and argument,
and presenting sagely wisdom. Nylan reads classical Chinese texts as
talking "with almost stunning clarity of the power for good and
evil that women bring to politics" (2000, 212), and she
concludes that "[o]ur stereotypes of ancient China do not come
so much from ... [these texts] as from relatively recent sources,
the Neo-Confucians and the May Fourth reformers" (2000, 213). At
the same time, it must be said that the powerful women of ancient
China were almost always excluded from official positions of power and
authority.



Sin Yee Chan (2000) presents a portrait consistent with Raphals'
and Nylan's from looking at the *Analects* and the
*Mencius*. It is assumed in those texts that the proper roles
for women lie in the inner, domestic sphere, and for men the outer,
public sphere. This distinction, argues Chan, is functional and
conceived as obtaining between complementary roles, not between women
and men conceived as inferior and superior. But the consignment of
women to the inner sphere does exclude them from one of the most
central aspirations of the *junzi*, which is to serve in public
office. It also excludes them from receiving the education that is a
preparation for office. At the same time, there is no attempt to
justify the exclusion of women from this aspiration, and no argument
given in these texts that they possess lesser capabilities for
achieving that aspiration, no conception of women as having inferior
capacities for the development of strategic intelligence, moral
wisdom, or self-discipline.



The inference is to the possibility of a version of Confucian ethics
that fully acknowledges the capabilities of women to become
*junzi* and that supports opportunities for them to achieve
that ideal. Some who are sympathetic to this line of development for
Confucian ethics have argued for its significant affinities with some
strains of feminist thought. Consider *ren* in its meaning as
the particular virtue of care for others. Chenyang Li (1994) has
argued that there are important similarities between this central
Confucian virtue and the feminist ethic of care articulated by Carol
Gilligan (1982) and Nell Noddings (1984). Furthermore, both Confucian
and feminist care ethics have conceptions of ethical reasoning that
emphasize contextualized reasoning about moral problems rather than
deducing solutions top-down from high general principles. Li
acknowledges the patriarchal form that Confucian ethics came to take
on, but stresses that in a contemporary dialogue between these two
ethics, each could have something to contribute to the other.



Rosenlee (2014; also see 2007) addresses a criticism of care ethics of
either the Confucian or Western feminist sort that has come from some
feminist quarters, which is that care is a value pressed upon women so
that they might be subordinate helpmates to men. While she
acknowledges that the value has functioned in this way, she questions
whether women should cease caring when "vulnerability and
interdependency characterize human existence" (2013, 318).
Shouldn't they rather insist that men share equitably the task
of caring? Rosenlee defends the Confucian value of filiality or
*xiao* as the root of moral character, starting the project of
caring with addressing the vulnerability of the child, then through
the stages where a child reciprocates care for parents, and getting
extended beyond the family.



Kupperman (2000) holds that Confucian ethics could benefit from
adopting the feminist recognition that many social roles and the
rituals that support them need to be reformed and perhaps re-invented
in some cases, given the limiting and inhibiting effect they have on
the life projects women have chosen or could have chosen for
themselves (Meyers, 1989). He reads the classical Confucian texts as
adopting a much more conservative and respectful attitude towards
traditional social roles and rituals, and while he has a degree of
sympathy for this attitude (there can be good reasons why things are
old enough to be traditional), he concludes that Confucian ethics, if
it is to fully support opportunities for development of women's
capabilities, must prepare to be radicalized with respect to at least
some of the roles and rituals it has defended (see Neville 2017 for
the argument that Confucianism is up to the task of seeing the need
for new or radically revised rituals in this regard).



The issue of the Confucian orientation to tradition is itself a matter
of contested interpretation. While the Confucian attitude is
uncontroversially "conservative" in holding that there is
much wisdom and guidance to be recovered from the past, some lean
toward the more extreme Mohist interpretation that Confucians accept
tradition simply because it is tradition (e.g., Hansen, 1992), while
others view the Confucian attitude as a discerning and critical
attitude toward tradition, citing passages such as *Analects*
3.15 in which Confucius says that his own persistent questioning at
the Grand Temple is itself an act of *li* or proper observance
of ritual (see Alan Chan, 2000). Further, and most importantly,
Confucius was a pivotal figure in turning the meaning of
"*junzi*" from a person of noble blood to a person
of moral nobility who could come from any background.



To retrieve one's cultural inheritance is itself a complex,
contested task, given the internal diversity of belief and practice
that is characteristic of any vibrant tradition. In her account of how
Chinese thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
approached the task of bringing to bear Western thought to the reform
of their own society, Jenco (2015) points out that a crucial part of
their task was to identify what their own cultural inheritance was,
such that it could be brought into relation to a present and future
that involved possibly profound transformation. She points out that
"Confucius offered one of the earliest accounts of how an
orientation to a particular past could be both deliberate and
transformative rather than merely descriptive of an established
identity," and that his conception of the Zhou inheritance was
but "one of many possible lineages created when the present was
sutured to that particular past" (Jenco, 2015, 57). Tan (2004,
82) makes a similar point in claiming that the Confucian "legacy
is successfully transmitted only when the past is revitalized, so that
it is embodied in the different experience of the present. Confucius
considers one who "revitalizes the old to realize the new
(*wengu er zhixin*)" worthy of being a teacher (Analects
2.11)." Those engaged in transforming Confucian ethics in
relation to women can view their task as a project of the kind Jenco
and Tan are describing.


### 2.11Confucianism and liberal democracy



The relationship between Confucian ethics and liberal democratic
values has received vigorous and diverse discussion starting from the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This discussion has
centered on three kinds of tension: Confucian perfectionism versus
pluralism in the recognition of what constitutes a good and worthwhile
human life; the Confucian value of social harmony versus individual
rights; and the Confucian value of meritocracy versus the grounding of
a government's legitimacy in its acceptance by the governed.



Joseph Chan (2014) has classified Confucian ethics, along with much of
ancient Greek ethics, as perfectionist in structure. Many of the
central ethical judgments in Confucianism have to do what what it is
to live a good human life, and the virtues it takes to live such a
life. As indicated earlier, the Confucian conception of a good human
life is centered around relationships--within the family, within
friendship, and also within a society in which one aspires to serve a
government by advancing the mission of securing the material and moral
welfare of the people. From the standpoint of a contemporary liberal
democratic theory, one might question how much room this leaves people
to choose among a plurality of reasonable conceptions of the good
life. Certainly, many contemporary Americans and Europeans would not
place so central an emphasis on family relationship and on filiality
as Confucians do. Chan (2000, 2014) proposes to defuse this tension
through advocating a moderate Confucian perfectionism that refrains
from promoting a comprehensive view of how people ought to live. The
liberal argument that conceptions of the good life are too
controversial to be promoted by the state does not apply, he argues,
to some important constituents of the Confucian conception of how to
live--prudential goods and goods necessary for agency. Such goods,
when separated from a comprehensive conception that orders and
prioritizes them into a particular way of life, can be promoted in
piecemeal fashion through non-coercive methods in the context of
particular issues, and justifications can be given on the basis of
common ground and compromise.



Kim (2016) argues that Chan's version of moderate Confucian
perfectionism does not leave enough that is distinctively Confucian.
Filiality as traditionally understood is tightly associated with a
patrilineal family/clan structure and with rituals that express gender
hierarchy, which is why it is the greatest failure of filiality to
fail to produce a male heir who will continue the male family line and
who will conduct the ceremonies of ancestor worship. On the other
hand, if one does leave enough that is distinctively and traditionally
Confucian, Kim argues, one will not have a perfectionism that is
moderate enough to be compatible with the pluralistic, diverse
character of contemporary East Asian societies. Kim proposes the
alternative he calls "public reason Confucianism," which
sets traditional Confucianism and the democratic values of popular
sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political
participation in dialogue with each other. The two sides must
accommodate to each other. In practice, it seems that the most glaring
inequalities accepted under traditional Confucianism, including gender
inequalities that support women's unequal standing as citizens,
must go, though traditionalist Confucian associations retain a degree
of autonomy to run their affairs and to retain "moderate
inequalities" when these do not have vital public implications
(2016, 164). One of the challenges Kim may have to address is whether
in the dialogue between traditional Confucianism and democratic values
there emerges something that is coherent and still distinctively
Confucian. The previously discussed commentators on Confucianism and
gender equality illustrate how it might be argued that gender equality
is more compatible with Confucian values than they are usually thought
to be. They also raise the issue of what "traditional"
Confucianism really is, whether it is one thing, and whether it has
not always been constantly changing.



Angle (2012) addresses the tension between perfectionism and pluralism
about the good life by developing an argument he finds in the
twentieth century Confucian Mou Zongsan. Mou holds that politics must
ultimately be based on moral values but is concerned about the
excesses of governments trying to promote particular conceptions of
virtue and the good life. Given the difficulties of achieving ethical
insight, even among the most accomplished of human beings, it is
necessary to separate to some degree political values from ethical
value. Even a political leader who is a sage must engage in
"self restriction" (*ziwo kanxian*). In practice,
Angle explains, self-restriction means putting in place democratic
institutions and the recognition of human rights. This not only sets
up guardrails to keep political leaders from going badly off track,
but also provides citizens the opportunity to participation in public
life that is needed to advance their own ethical insight and further
realize good character.



Tan (2003) argues that Confucian methods for encouraging the
realization of virtues are non-coercive because its conception of the
good life is process-oriented and fallibilistic, and its conception of
personhood is social and relational. Human beings become persons
through processes of relationship with each other, by contributing to
each other's ethical growth. What growth amounts to is something
that can be meaningfully judged only within the particular
circumstances and the processes that have led up to the present. A
figure such as Confucius has authority not just because of who he is
but because others respond to him with spontaneous acceptance,
admiration, and emulation. Since Tan holds that these Confucian
conceptions are eminently plausible, she argues that not only is
Confucianism compatible with democracy, but that democracy needs to
incorporate the insights of Confucianism. In the Western tradition,
she finds in John Dewey a thinker who is sympathetic to these
insights.



In section 2.3, it was suggested that Confucianism posits a
fundamental harmony between individual and group interests, and that
there are ways in which Confucianism values autonomy and ways it does
not. These points have ramifications for the issue of whether
Confucianism can recognize individual rights. Given the way that
individual and group interests are conceived as mutually dependent and
interwoven, Confucianism cannot recognize rights on the grounds that
the individual's interests inevitably conflict with group
interests. Furthermore, Confucians might have a legitimate concern
that an emphasis on individual rights, as things that can be claimed
against the group, tends to encourage people to think of their
interests as incompatible with the interests of others.



These considerations should hold some weight for Confucians, but so do
some other considerations that support protections for individuals.
Confucianism can recognize that individuals do not always accurately
perceive or act on the fundamental compatibility between individual
and group interests. Rights might be necessary in case relationships
irretrievably break down and individuals need to be protected. Joseph
Chan (1999, 2014) has made this very point for rights as
"fallback" mechanisms. One might go further than Chan does
and give rights a more prominent place if one expects regular
misfiring on attempts to reconcile individual and group interests
(e.g., see Fan 2010, Wong 2004). If in fact it can be a difficult
matter to tell how to promote fundamental harmony between
people's interests, and if political leaders tend to have their
judgment about this matter compromised by the influence of some of
their own personal interests and by the sheer fact of holding power
(there is evidence that one becomes less sensitive to other
people's interests the longer one holds power over them), there
may be good reason to recognize rights to free speech that can be used
by citizens to call office holders to account and to make their own
interests more salient. Providing these protections under the heading
of rights may help to protect citizens when the content of their
speech concerns the wrongful or misconceived conduct and policies of
an office holder (Wong, 2004).



Angle's argument, inspired by Mou Zongsan's idea of
self-restriction, has a similar logic of pointing to human fallibility
as a warrant for rights. A more positive justification for rights
might be rooted in Confucian values. As mentioned earlier, Angle
(2012) argues that participation in public affairs is necessary for
advancing the cultivation of one's character. Kim (2016) argues
for equal rights of political participation based in the Mencian view
that all human beings have the moral sprouts within their nature. What
kept Mencius from recognizing an equal right to participation is his
commitment to the sage-king paradigm of government, but such an
arrangement is a non-starter for even contemporary East Asian
societies with a substantial Confucian heritage.



Indeed, if one goes back to the classical Confucian notion of harmony
discussed in section 2.3, there is a basis for ensuring room for a
diversity of viewpoints. Harmony is not sameness of viewpoint but
makes use of diversity of viewpoint. In *Analects* 9.30,
Confucius states the inevitability of what we today might call
"reasonable disagreement:" "The Master said,
"You can study with some, and yet not necessarily walk the same
path (*dao*); you can walk the same path as some, and yet not
necessarily take your stand with them; you can take your stand with
them, and yet not necessarily weigh things up in the same way"
(translation from Ames and Rosemont, 2010).



Positive arguments for rights based on the goal of promoting the
common good emerged in Chinese thought soon after it encountered the
idea of rights from the West in the nineteenth century. For example,
it was argued that individuals ought to have a range of freedom of
expression and action so that they can contribute more richly and
originally to the welfare of Chinese society. Chinese thinkers such as
Liang Qichao and Japanese thinkers such as Kato affirmed both the
legitimacy of the individual's desires and the necessity to
harmonize individual and group desires (see Angle and Svensson, 2001;
Angle, 2002). Emphasis on the former would be the relatively new
element in a contemporary Confucianism, but 1B6 of the
*Mencius* provides a striking anticipation of this element.
Here King Xuan tells Mencius that his ability to be a true king for
his people is thwarted by his desires for wealth and for sex. Mencius
replies that if the King accords the common people the same privileges
for wealth and sex, there would be no problem in becoming a true king.
Xunzi (see section 2.6) conceives of morality as a way of harmonizing
the desires of individuals so that destructive conflict is replaced by
productive harmony, and this gives the satisfaction of desire a
central role in his version of Confucian ethics. Later on in the
tradition, Dai Zhen defended the legitimacy of self-interested desire
as long as it is tempered by a proper concern for others (see Tiwald,
2011a; and section 2.8). Rosemont (1991, 2004) has argued that
"second-generation""positive" rights to
education and economic security are better grounded in the Chinese
tradition than they have been in the West. Such grounding might have
very deep roots in Confucian thought, specifically what Chan calls the
"service" conception of government, or the idea that
government finds its only warrant in protecting and advancing the
welfare of the people.



The above arguments on behalf of recognizing rights within a Confucian
framework provide resources for addressing the worry that rights
undermine social harmony. Achieving harmony is a continuous process of
adjusting to inevitable differences even among reasonable individuals.
Providing a forum for the airing of differences can positively
contribute to a better and more inclusive view of the common good.
Rights need not be justified in a way that opposes them to the common
good but can in fact be construed as necessary for its realization.
This might present a somewhat different conception of rights that does
not treat them as "trumps" but as based on substantial
moral considerations that must be taken into account but do not
necessarily override all other moral considerations. Greene (2021) has
argued that the American legal tradition is an outlier (even among
developed democracies) in regarding rights in the former way and that
it would be better off adopting something like the latter way.



It might be argued that however much Confucianism evolves, it would be
difficult to conceive of it without the idea that the wisest, most
virtuous and competent should rule. Meritocracy is not in outright
contradiction with popular sovereignty. One might hold that people
should vote for those best equipped to promote the common good, for
example, and one might further argue that in contemporary
circumstances, Confucians have other reasons to take on board
democratic institutions of citizen participation. Inspiration for the
idea of combining legitimacy founded on popular election and
legitimacy founded on merit originally came from a proposal by the
influential contemporary Confucian Jiang Qing (2012). However, his
proposal includes a third legislative chamber consisting of those
representing the cultural and religious heritage of China, which most
others have not included.



Joseph Chan (2014) has argued that Confucianism may do well to
incorporate democratic electoral institutions to hold political
leaders accountable to the common good. Accordingly, he proposes that
there should be a democratically elected legislative chamber in a
Confucian moderately perfectionist government. However, as democratic
institutions are known not to necessarily result in the selection of
the wisest, most virtuous and competent, Chan proposes a second
legislative chamber to be paired with the first, the members of this
second being chosen on the basis of demonstrated merit, in terms of
virtue and competence, as chosen by those who have had the opportunity
to observe them in action, such as colleagues and experienced
journalists. Chan's overriding Confucian concern is moral
education throughout the whole society in virtues such as respect,
reverence, trustworthiness, sincerity, beneficence, civility, and the
common good. In fact, the primary function of the second chamber, in
his view, is to advance this educative goal.



Daniel Bell (2006) and Tongdong Bai (2013, 2015) have proposed that
one legislative chamber be comprised of elected representatives and
the other by those selected on the basis of exams and previous
performance in office. Bell and Bai are more pessimistic than Chan is
about the prospects for modern democratic citizenry to make good
choices. Bai points out that the ancient Greeks had slaves that made
it possible for them to fully participate in the Assembly, and they
belonged to a small city state, not a large society with many complex
issues that require specialized knowledge to handle, and not one that
gives rise to enormous inequalities that undermine the sense of a
common good. Bell (2015) points out the negligible impact of any
individual's vote in large democracies, and the time and effort
required to become better informed about complex issues requiring
specialized knowledge. Even if individuals had the time and motivation
to to be more informed, they are subject to a wide array of cognitive
biases that they are liable to get little help in correcting.



In later work Bell (2015) proposes a "vertical" model in
which democratic elections are instituted at the local level but the
top national leaders are selected on the basis of merit. at the
intermediate levels, experimentation with democracy can take place,
and if successful can be tried in other places or on an expanded
basis. He let go of the bicameral proposal because he became convinced
that the democratically elected chamber would eventually dominate.
Bell argues that democracy works best at the local level where voters
are more likely to know the virtue and ability of the leaders they
select. The issues are relatively straightforward and easier to
understand. It is easier to generate a sense of community at that
level. At the highest levels of government, the issues are much more
complex. Bell is well aware of problems for realizing the ideal of
virtuous and able leaders. There is corruption and ossification of an
elite who are likely to come from and select colleagues from a narrow
set of social, economic and educational backgrounds. Even if these
problems could be addressed through institutional reform, there is in
the end a need to legitimize conferring so much power and prestige on
an elite who might not be that different from others in society who
choose different vocations. Bell concludes that democracy (perhaps in
the form of a popular referendum on the vertical model) might be
necessary for the legitimacy of a political meritocracy, even in a
country with a Confucian heritage such as China.



One common characteristic of the contemporary writing on Confucianism,
rights and democracy is its relative openness to alternatives. There
is less of a tendency to assume that a single model of government is
right for all societies, even all large contemporary societies, or
even all large, developed countries. At the same time, there is
openness to learning from the experience of other societies. There is
more awareness of the continuing nature of the debate and the
inconclusiveness of history's verdict thus far.


## 3. Mohist Ethics


### 3.1 A consequentialist ethic, but what kind?



The Mohists constituted a philosophical school founded by Mozi, who
was roughly contemporaneous with Confucius. Not much is known about
him, but a reasonable speculation is that Mozi came from an artisan
background. The text bearing his name contains purported quotations
from Mozi, but it is manifestly the contribution of different persons
over a substantial period of time. The text advocates a
consequentialist ethic that requires concern and acting for the
benefit of all. Those who made the earliest contributions to
the *Mozi* had a conception of benefit that is very
concrete and relatively narrow, limited to material goods to
satisfy the basic needs of all (e.g., enough food, shelter and warm
clothing), sufficient population, and social order. As will be
discussed later, however, this earliest conception may have included
relational virtues such as filiality. Later Mohists seem to have
broadened their conception to something like a a preference
satisfaction criterion using pleasure and displeasure as indicators
(See Stephens' 2021 argument for such an interpretation of the
later Mohists; for a translation, see Fraser 2020: Books 40-3 A
26-27).



The *Mozi* is quite explicit in its consequentialism. It names
three *fa* or standards for judging the viability of beliefs
and theories (see Fraser 2020, Book 35). One standard is of
usefulness. In applying this standard, one assesses the viability of a
belief or theory according to the beneficial or harmful consequences
of acting on it. Another standard is that of consulting the origin,
which is the historical record on the actions of the sage-kings. One
determines whether the belief or theory being judged accords with
those actions. The third standard is looking at evidence provided by
the eyes and ears of the people. This seems to refer to observations
that garner some degree of intersubjective consensus. Each standard is
presented as if its validity might be independent from the others, but
there are indications that the standard of usefulness is the most
basic one. For one thing, consulting the record of the
sage-kings' actions hardly seems to be a good idea in Mohist
terms given the Mohist objection to valuing tradition for its own
sake, *unless* these actions are good guides because they
produced good results, a historical judgment that was commonly
accepted by otherwise disputing philosophical schools. Furthermore,
arguments given in the *Mozi* that are purportedly based on
intersubjective observation seem extremely dubious, e.g., that ghosts
exist because stories are told about them very often. In fact, the
possibility that ghosts do not exist is explicitly admitted (Fraser
2020, Book 31), but sacrifices to spirits are justified on the grounds
that they produce good effects among the living. Ghosts in general are
put to good use in the text: their primary activity is to avenge
themselves upon the living persons who have done them wrong. The
standard of usefulness guides application of the other standards. Even
what seems to be the attempted justification of the standard of
usefulness by reference to the will of *tian* or Heaven
(Fraser, Book 26) has a circularity to it. We are to promote benefits
and avoid harms because that is the will of Heaven, and Heaven's
will is to be relied upon because it is the wisest and noblest of all
agents. But what could be the criterion for a being's being wise
and noble exception the promotion of benefits and avoidance of harms?
Furthermore, the will of Heaven is demonstrated by the fact that
wrongdoers are punished and the virtuous rewarded. Again, the evidence
seems highly selective and is guided by the very standard of
usefulness that it is seeemingly being justified.



A crucial issue in the interpretation of Mohism is what kind of
concern for all it requires. As indicated earlier, Mencius interpreted
the Mohist advocacy of *jian ai* to be advocacy of equal or
impartial care for all, but some of the more important contemporary
scholarship of Mohism has problematized this interpretation. Three
books in the *Mozi* text (Fraser 2020, Books 14, 15, and 16)
all bear the title of "*Jian Ai*" (translated by
Fraser as "Inclusive Care"). These books differ somewhat in
content, perhaps suggesting an evolution in Mohist thought over time
corresponding to the order of the chapters (see Defoort, 2005-6).
People who do nothing to benefit others if they are not related to
them in the right way, or even harm them, are contrasted with those
who act according to *jian ai*. In the later two books, we are
told to care for others as we care for ourselves, to view others as we
view ourselves, or to be for others as we are for ourselves. Such
formulations might reasonably be taken to require equality or
impartiality of care. Perhaps this is why Mencius interpreted Mozi as
requiring denial of one's parents (*Mencius* 3B9).



However, the *jian ai* books consistently count among the
failures to care for others failures of filiality between fathers and
sons. They correspondingly count among the benefits of acting
according to *jian ai* the realization of relational virtues
such as filiality. Furthermore, the words used to say that we are to
care for others "as" we care for ourselves, to view others
"as" we view ourselves, and to be for others
"as" we are for ourselves, are *ruo* and
*you*, which can be used to mean equality of relationship or
merely similarity of relationship (see Chiu 2013; Fraser 2016). Chiu
(2013) concludes that *jian ai* means only caring for everyone
with no requirement in equality of care. Fraser (2016), on the other
hand, points to passages in later chapters of the *Mozi* (in
the section called the "*Mo Bian*" or "Mohist
Dialectics;" see Fraser, 2016: 171) that support the equal or
impartial caring interpretation.



Further complicating the situation is the necessity to distinguish
*jian ai* as a prescription for the attitude to take toward
others and a prescription for conduct toward them. To have equal care
as an attitude does not entail acting toward others in the same way.
Indeed, the limited nature of the mental and physical resources
available to the individual agent seems to necessitate some degree of
inequality of action toward others. This may be at least partly why
the *jian ai* books are relatively modest in their
prescriptions for how individuals are to benefit others, even though
there is some expansion of requirement in the later chapters. In fact
even the latter prescriptions do not seem incompatible with what might
be prescribed in the way of conduct by Confucian care with
distinctions: refraining from harming others, engaging in
relationships of mutual aid, and contributing to the support of those
least able to care for themselves and who lack families able to
protect them. Thus the Mohists may eventually have come to the view
that a division of moral labor is suitable for most people. Most can
satisfy the duties of righteousness (*yi*) through refraining
from harming others, devoting more of their resources to benefiting
those in traditional relationships with them such as family, engaging
in mutual aid in somewhat larger groups such as the village, being
prepared to contribute along with others to the support and protection
of the most needy, and being loyal to those charged with seeing to the
benefit of much larger groups. This picture fits with Mozi's
express concern (in book 8 on promoting the worthy) that social
conflict comes from each person having and acting on their own
conception of what is right. To avoid conflict a strict nested
hierarchy of authority must be instituted: the Son of Heaven rules
over the entire country with the help of ministers, and the country is
divided into states, which are further divided into fiefdoms, and so
on. Each social unit has members who are required to report their
views to a superior on what is right and wrong, and the superior's
word on what is right is final (though one may remonstrate with a
superior if one believes them wrong), and each unit must report to the
superior of the next larger unit containing it. The Son of Heaven is
accountable to Heaven, *Tian*, a more clearly and consistently
anthropomorphized deity than the Confucian *Tian*, and whose
will is that people benefit and not harm one another.



Honoring the relational virtues of family may be justified on the
grounds that it is part of a social division of labor that most
efficiently contributes to the benefit of all. It may also be, as
Fraser (2016: 146) has suggested, that the Mohist conception of
benefit (*li*) includes the realization of such virtues as
goods in themselves. On either construal or both, since the possible
justifications are not inconsistent with another, Mohists may not have
advocated as demanding an ethic as may appear from the text's
statements of what *jian ai* is. Even if one interprets the
attitudinal component as requiring equal or impartial care, the
conduct component might consist of only a moderately demanding norms
for benefiting others.



Heaven is treated as a kind of model for human beings. In one of the
books on Heaven's will, Mozi is quoted as saying that he treats
the will of Heaven as a wheelwright holds to his compass and a
carpenter his square. That Heaven is taken as a direct model in this
way is significant for the question of whether *jian ai* taken
in its attitudinal component means equal concern or merely concern
that can vary in degree. Heaven's will is not known through
revelation or scripture but rather in how it acts. According to the
text, it benefits and nourishes everyone; it rewards those who aid
others and punishes those who harm others. It provides life and
sustenance to rich and poor, noble and low, kin and nonkin; it created
the regular and constant pattern of the seasons and weather that makes
all these broadly distributed benefits possible. If Heaven's
will is taken as a model for the attitude one should have toward
others, then impartiality of attitude seems to be the
prescription.



Heaven also can serve as a model for conduct, such that one might not
only benefit all in the sense of conforming to norms that would
generally benefit everyone if enough people do their part, but also
directly try to benefit as many people as possible, especially if one
is in a position of means and influence. In the 16th book, King Wen is
extolled as having exemplified the practice of *jian ai.* His
practice was like the illumination of the sun and the moon, showing no
favoritism to any direction or region. King Wen here exemplifies what
can be a more demanding virtue than righteousness, which is
benevolence (in the Mohist text this probably the best translation of
*ren*). Fraser points out that in some of the later books of
the *Mozi* that feature dialogues between Mozi and others, an
ideal of sagehood emerges that is much more demanding than the
prescriptions issued for everyone in the *jian ai* books. In
chapter 49, righteousness is characterized as lying largely in helping
others (Fraser 2016: 150). More radically, book 47 quotes Mozi as
advocating the elimination of happiness, anger, joy, sorrow, likes and
dislikes and dedicating oneself solely to benevolence and
righteousness. Thus there might have been an evolution towards this
more demanding ideal late in the Mohist movement, but perhaps, as
Fraser (2016: 151) suggests, this ideal was treated as applicable only
to the most devoted of Mohists.



This greater complexity associated with what it means to care for all
might be a feature of any consequentialist ethic that takes seriously
the idea of equal or impartial concern. Even if care as an attitude
does not necessarily require trying to directly promote the benefit of
all, the more capacity one has to promote the welfare of large numbers
of people, the more one may (or should) feel bound to do so. Even if
one acknowledges relationships such as those one finds in good
families to have value in themselves, one might also be moved by the
recognition that these things are valuable to everyone. One might come
to feel bound by the acknowledgment that one would be doing the most
good by helping the greater number to fulfill their basic needs and to
achieve those relationships, even if this drains the mental and
physical resources one has to put into one's own
relationships.



It is perhaps no accident that similar ambiguities are displayed in
Western forms of consequentialism. There are very demanding forms of
consequentialism, exemplified by Peter Singer's argument for
strong duties to contribute to famine relief (Singer, 1972). These
forms typically focus on the good an individual could do on their own,
regardless of whether others act similarly. When combined with the
idea that others are no less morally important than oneself, these
forms tend to justify very strong duties on the part of those with
relatively plentiful resources to aid others. On the other hand, there
are forms of consequentialism that construe the individual's
duties in terms of a generally applicable set of norms, the
desirability of which is determined by the consequences of everyone or
nearly everyone accepting them. Such forms of consequentialism, (e.g.,
for rule consequentialism, see Hooker 2000), tend to confirm more
modest demands on the individual to aid others. Consequentialism may
tend to oscillate between the pole of doing's best in directly
acting on equal concern for all others on the one hand and on the
other hand acknowledging both practical and psychological limitations
on the ability of (at least) most people to do so.


### 3.2 Comparisons with Confucian ethics



How, then, does Mohist ethics differ from Confucian ethics in the end?
Because Confucian care with distinctions requires the extension of
care to nonkin, and because Mohists by and large prescribed a modestly
demanding form of *jian ai* as applied to conduct toward
others, there is not as dramatic a practical difference as one might
first think between Confucian and Mohist ethics. Confucians accept
that there are plural sources of moral duty, and that conflicts
between the reasons provided by these sources must be dealt with
through the discretion and weighing of judgment. While Mohists appear
to put forward a monistic source of duty--promoting benefits and
avoiding harms, a plausible reading of the Mozi has it including
plural sources of benefit, e.g., food and filiality. They may also
have to resort to discretion and weighing of judgment when there are
conflicts between plural goods. Mohists might attach more weight to
the value of doing good for the most people when it comes into
conflict with loyalty to kin, but there is no explicit position on
this question in the *Mozi*.



There are certainly differences between the two ethics on the value of
ritual and musical performance. Of course, many Confucians might be
unhappy with the Mohist portrayal of their tradition as insisting on
extravagantly expensive performances. But the difference over the
value of ritual and music has even deeper roots than the issue of how
much of a society's material resources should be expended to
stage them. Confucians tend to view the moral life as not only service
to others but as fulfilling one's own humanity. This feature of
Confucian ethics, which it shares with classical Greek virtue ethics,
distances it from Mohism.



Furthermore, as pointed out earlier, the Confucian conception of a
humanly fulfilling way of life has aesthetic and emotionally
expressive dimensions that set it further apart from Mohism. The focus
on ritual and music exemplifies a deep concern for graceful and
skillful enactments of concern and respect for others. To express
these attitudes in a fitting and beautiful way is intrinsically
valuable. The practice of ritual and music is also conceived as
crucial for cultivation of one's desires and emotional
dispositions. For Confucius and Xunzi, such practice constituted
training of one's desires and emotional dispositions, ways of
restraining a stubborn and undue concern for the self. While Mencius
does not emphasize such a function for the practice of ritual and
music, he does conceive of moral cultivation as nurturing the inborn
emotional sensibilities that find fulfillment in relationship to
others. He recognizes the danger of overfeeding the small part of the
self that takes pleasure in eating and drinking. This need to shape
and train the self stands in contrast with the aforementioned Mohist
assumption that the main cause of social conflict is the variety of
different conceptions of what is right that individuals tend to have.
There is no indication in this Mohist diagnosis that there is any
special difficulty in getting oneself or others to try to do what one
thinks is right.


## 4. Daoist Ethics


### 4.1 Ethical perspectives drawn from the *Daodejing*: the "soft" style of action and social primitivism



In the *Daodejing* (the text is associated with Laozi and is
thought to have originated sometime in the period of
6th-3rd century B.C.E.) and *Zhuangzi* (a
text associated with the historical Zhuangzi who lived in the
4th century B.C.E.) the focus shifts from the human social
world to the cosmos, in which that human world often appears to be
tiny and insignificant or even comically and absurdly self-important.
It may seem that such a distanced and detached perspective has no
ethical content or implications, but that is to assume an overly
narrow vision of the ethical. In its own way, Daoism addresses as much
as Confucianism does questions as to how one ought to live one's
life. Daoist ethics emphasizes appropriate responsiveness to the
broader world that shapes and enfolds the human social world.



The nature of the vision of the broader world is open to dispute. A
traditional interpretation of the *Daodejing* is that it
conveys a metaphysical vision of the *dao* as the source of all
things, and that this source is specially associated in nonbeing and
emptiness as contrasted with being, perhaps suggesting that the
*dao* is an indeterminate ontological ground in which the
myriad individual things are incipient. Some contemporary commentators
hold that the traditional interpretation is an imposition on the text
of later metaphysical concerns (Hansen, 1992; LaFargue, 1992). Others
hew closer to the traditional interpretation, citing passages such as
those in chapter 4, 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*).



However that issue is resolved, it is apparent that a certain
conception of the patterns of nature is embedded in the text and
informs its ethical recommendations. Consider the characterizations of
natural processes as falling into one or another of opposites: there
is the active, aggressive, hard, and the male, on the one hand; and
there is the passive, yielding, soft, and female, on the other hand
(later these forces were much more explicitly associated with
*yang* and *yin*). Conventional "knowledge"
and "wisdom" dichotomizes processes into one or another of
these categories and values the first over the second. The
*Daodejing* extols the efficacy of the second. Whereas the
first is associated with strength, the second, it is often said,
possesses a deeper, underlying strength as demonstrated by water
overcoming the hard and unyielding (chapter 78). Hence a
"soft" style of action, *wu wei* (literally,
"nonaction" but less misleadingly translated as effortless
action) is recommended, even as a style of ruling. For example,
chapter 66 says that one who desires to rule must in his words humble
himself before the people, and that one who desires to lead the people
must in his person follow them. Chapter 75 says that rulers eat up too
much in taxes and therefore people are hungry. Rulers are too fond of
action and therefore the people are difficult to govern. Setting too
much store on life makes people treat death lightly. The last point
brings out the related theme that striving after something often
produces the opposite of the intended result. One of the more
prominent themes in the *Daodejing* is the rejection of
moralism: a preoccupation with and striving to become good or
virtuous. Chapter 19 says to exterminate *ren* and discard
*yi* (righteousness or rectitude), and the people will recover
filial love.



One crucial ambiguity of the text is whether the "soft"
*wu wei* style of action is meant consistently to be extolled
over the "hard" style (as Lau claims in his introduction
to his translation of the *Daodejing*, 1963), or whether the
reversal of valuation is merely a heuristic device meant to correct a
common human tendency to err in the direction of consistently valuing
the hard style (LaFargue, 1992). The second alternative is consistent
with a theme plausibly attributed to the text: that all dichotomies
and all valuations based on them are unreliable in the end, even
evaluations that are reversals of the conventionally accepted ones.
Prescriptions to follow the "soft" style, taken as
exceptionless generalizations, are no more reliable than the
conventional wisdom to follow the "hard" style. On the
other hand, many of the prescriptions in the *Daodejing* seem
premised on the conception of there being genuine human needs that are
simple and few in number, and that desires going beyond these needs
are the source of trouble and conflict. Prescriptions for the ruler
seem to be aimed at bringing about a reversion to a kind of
primitivist state of society where no "improvements" are
sought or desired. Carried to its logical limit, this primitivism
implies the existence of a natural goodness with which human beings
ought to become attuned. Indeed, the first of the three treasures of
chapter 67 is *ci* or compassion. The ethics of the
*Daodejing* is in these respects less radical and iconoclastic
than some of its anti-moralistic language might suggest. If we are not
to strive after goodness, it is there nevertheless as something that
we must recover.


### 4.2 Ethical perspectives from *Zhuangzi*: skeptical questioning, attunement to the grain of things, inclusion, acceptance and freedom



On this point the *Zhuangzi* often sounds a much more skeptical
note. In the second (*Qi Wu Lun* "Equalizing All
Things") chapter of that text, the following questions go
unanswered: "How do I know that to take pleasure in life is not
a delusion? How do I know that we who hate death are not exiles since
childhood who have forgotten the way home?" (translation from
Graham, 1989, 59; see also the translation from Ziporyn, 2009). The
human pretension to know what is true and important is lampooned by
comparing it to the pretension of the cicada and turtle dove to know
by their own experiences of flight the possibilities of how high
creatures can fly. There is no vision of a primitivist utopia here
either. Rather, the dominant attitude towards the possibility of
large-scale social change for the better is pessimism. It is a
dangerous task for the idealist to undertake, and one that will
probably end badly for the idealist because rulers don't like to
be lectured on their failings. On this matter, the *Zhuangzi*
not only diverges from the primitivist Utopian strain in the
*Daodejing* but also more forcefully from the earnest and
ever-striving idealism of the Confucians. In the fourth (*Ren Jian
Shi* "The Human World") chapter, a pessimistic
Confucius (who here seems to be speaking on behalf of Zhuangzi) tells
his idealistic student Yan Hui that he will probably get himself
killed trying to change the ways of a callous and violent ruler.
Further, some passages in this story can be read as implying that Yan
Hui's deeper motivation is to gain praise for his own virtue.
That Yan Hui might be characterized in this way is especially
significant, because the Confucian tradition regards his motivations
as being especially pure. The implication might be that the Confucian
idealistic project is continually and inevitably self-undermining:
people can sense the self-aggrandizing motivations behind the noble
talk and react negatively (see Chong, 2016).



At the same time, it is significant that in this story Confucius does
not reject Yan Hui's idealistic project altogether, but suggests
another way of proceeding. If he insists on trying, Yan Hui must
refrain from formulating plans and goals. Such preconceptions will
only interfere with seeing the ruler as he is and how he must be dealt
with (there is a grain, then, unique to each human being to which one
must become attuned to deal with him or her). So Yan Hui must prepare
not with plans but by fasting and emptying his mind, so that he can
listen to the ruler not only with his ears and mind, but also with his
*qi* or vital energies. Such advice might in contemporary
terms be construed as advice to cultivate one's ability to tune into
what is going on with other people through one's gut intuitions, which
on a neuroscientic level might correspond to the idea that human
beings make practical decisions with the aid of bodily or "somatic
markers" which record the positive or negative valence of outcomes
ensuing from certain types of actions (Damsio
1994). Elsewhere in the text, there are happier references
to activities that involve attunement to the grain of whatever is at
hand. These forms of activity are presented as supremely satisfying.
The most prominent example is that of Cook Ding in the third
(*Yangsheng Zhu* "The Primacy of Nourishing Life")
chapter, the cook who is able to wield his knife so skillfully in
cutting up oxen that it flows without a nick through the spaces within
the joints. Cook Ding has gotten past the stage where he sees with his
eyes while cutting the ox; instead his *qi* or vital energies
move freely to where they must go. The kind of phenomenology to which
the *Zhuangzi* refers is one in which there is no
self-conscious guiding of one's actions but rather a complete
absorption with the matter of hand. The efficacy and effortlessness of
such activities might appear to suggest privileged veridical access to
the situation and material at hand, but a less extreme interpretation
is available.



Complete absorption in the matter at hand seems to involve the ability
to keep one's desires from interfering with one's
attention. The *Daodejing* contains epigrams about the
desirability of being desireless, but first chapter (*Xiao Yao You
"*Wandering Far and Unfettered" of the *Zhuangzi*
includes an entertaining story that conveys this lesson. Huizi tries
to figure out what to do with the shells of some huge gourds he had
grown. He tried using them as water dippers and water containers, but
they are too large and heavy for those purposes. Not being able to
discover a purpose for them, he smashes them to pieces. Zhuangzi
chides his friend for having underbrush in his head and not realizing
that he could have lashed the gourds together to make a raft for
floating about on the lakes and the rivers. A recurrent theme
throughout the first chapter is that we are ruled by our
preconceptions of the uses of things, which keeps us from being able
to recognize the usefulness of the "useless." When
performing skill activities such as Cook Ding's, preoccupation
with the "uses" of these activities can interfere with our
ability to perform them well. Woodcarver Qing (chapter 19 *Da
Sheng* "Fathoming Life" of the *Zhuangzi*) makes
marvelous bellstands. When he goes to make one, he fasts in order to
still his mind. As he fasts, the distracting thoughts of
congratulation and reward melt away, honors and salary, blame and
praise, skill and clumsiness, even his awareness of having a body and
limbs. Only when he is able to focus does he go into the forest to
observe the nature of the wood, and only then does he have a complete
vision of the bellstand.



Interpretations of the *Zhuangzi* tend to give primacy either
to the skeptical passages or to the passages suggesting special access
to the grain of things. On the first option, Zhuangzi simply
appreciates the many perspectives on the world one could have, the
many ways of dividing the world up by sets of distinctions, none of
which can be shown in a non-question-begging manner to be superior to
the others (Hansen, 1992, 2003; see also Chong, 2016). On the second
option, Zhuangzi is often taken to hold in a kind of ineffable and
nonconceptual access to the world, an access that makes possible the
efficacy of activities such as Cook Ding's (Ivanhoe, 1996; Roth
1999, 2000). A third possibility is that the text demonstrates a kind
of continuing dialectic between skepticism and the conviction that one
has genuine knowledge, and that the dialectic has no envisioned end.
The dialectic includes a stage of skeptical questioning of whatever
one's current beliefs are, but the aim is not merely to
undermine but to reveal something about the way the world that is
occluded by one's current beliefs. However, one is not allowed
to rest content with the new beliefs but is led to question their
comprehensiveness and adequacy precisely because they are suspected of
occluding still something else about the world (Wong, 2005).



The third possibility does not subscribe to ineffable and
nonconceptual access to the world, nor does it expouse a dogmatic
skepticism that declares that no knowledge is possible. It is arguably
consistent with some of the latest thinking about human
perception--that it operates through selecting an extremely small
portion of sensory input from the world and that is is both
a bottom-up and top-down process in which that input is interpreted
according to what we already believe about the world and is used as a
basis for predicting what will be experienced in the near future. If
there are discrepancies in our predictions we may be led to revise our
prior beliefs and make new predictions to be tested (Clark 2016). This
process is highly fallible because of necessary selectiveness in
the sensory input to which we attend and because of tendencies toward
biased interpretation of that input in the service of our prior
cognitive commitments. Confucius' advice to Yan Hui to "fast" his mind
does not have to be construed as cultivating an ineffable and
unmediated access to the world but rather as meditative practice
that might unseat those commitments in favor of alternative
perspectives on the world. These alternatives might better fit
incoming sensory input or prompt us to take in a different range
of input.



Such an interpretation aligns with apparent advocacy in the second
chapter of going with the "present this" instead of sticking with a
fixed perspective on the world, constituted by a set of
distinctions between 'this' and 'that',
'right' and 'wrong.' Confucians are described
as having their set of 'this's and 'that's,
'right's and 'wrong's, which are diametrically
opposed to the 'this's and 'that's and
'right's and 'wrong's of the Mohists, such
that the 'this' of the Confucians is
the 'that' of Mohists, the 'right' of
Confucians being the 'wrong' of Confucians. Instead of
rigidly applying any single perspective in the face of present
experience that does not fit it very well, the sage is described as
finding a "present this." When the *Zhuangzi* is
construed as delivering such a message, it can be situated as taking
to the ultimate a theme that is found in much if not all classical
Chinese philosophy, one that Goldin (2005a) calls the "primacy of the
situation" and Valmisa calls "adaptive agency" (2021). This theme,
while not necessarily dismissing the relevance of general rules as
guidelines for action, tends to view the particulars of the situation
at hand as the ultimate ground for judging the appropriateness of
action. In the *Analects* and the *Mencius*, for
example, this theme is reflected in its conception
of *yi* or rightness as appropriateness to the
situation, though clearly the *Zhuangzi* is much
closer to a kind of radically particularist view of what is
appropriate. 



However one might try to reconcile the tension between the skeptical
questioning and the claims to special knowledge, the stories about
skill activities such as Cook Ding's arguably exemplify certain
kinds of activities that human beings across cultures and historical
periods have experienced to their great satisfaction. These activities
involve the mastery of the many sub-activities that constitute a
complex activity with goals that challenge abilities of the agent. The
activities of master musicians (e.g., the technique of fingering on a
flute), artistic performers (e.g., the placement of the toes in the
pirouette of a dancer) and athletes (e.g., bringing the bat through
the optimal plane while swinging it to hit a baseball) correspond
rather closely to Cook Ding's mastery of the sub-activities of
cutting through the ox. In all these activities the agent does not
need to pay conscious attention to performance of the sub-activities,
and this enables attention to be focused on matters that escape the
apprentice. Just as Cook Ding's skill in the motor execution of
the motions of cutting allows him to fully focus on where the joints
and spaces are, the flutist is able to concentrate on the music as she
is making it and not her fingering technique (see Csikszentmihalyi,
1990 for a study of such activities).



One interesting and realistic detail in the cook's story
challenges the reading of the skill stories as extolling the
possibility of nonconceptual access to the grain of things. The cook
says that whenever he comes to a complicated place in the ox, he sizes
up the difficulties, tell himself to watch out and be careful, keeps
his eyes on what he's doing, works very slowly, and moves the
knife with the greatest subtlety until the pieces fall away. Clearly
there is conceptualization going on here, and in fact it is
implausible to deny that the whole activity is being guided by a
conceptualized goal! There is a difference between self-conscious
conceptualization of experience and the application of concepts
without awareness of applying them. One mustn't confuse the
latter with nonconceptualized experience. While there may be some way
of squaring this part of the story with the interpretation that
nonconceptual experience is celebrated in the *Zhuangzi*, the
virtue of the story is that it is realistic and captures aspects of
supremely skilled activities that are part of the experience of many
people. Insofar as the *Zhuangzi* recommends such activities as
part of a good life, it very much presents an ethic. When taken
together with Confucius' initial advice to Yan Hui to listen not only
with his ears and not only with his mind but also with
his *qi* 



It also presents an ethic in supporting the idea of inclusiveness and
acceptance. Here skeptical questioning of what we think we know,
especially what we think we know about people and who is good and has
something to offer to us are questioned in the chapter featuring
stigmatized individuals, often with feet amputated (a common criminal
punishment of the time), who turn out to be masters drawing as many
students as Confucius. The *Zhuangzi* also urges identification
and acceptance of the whole and of any and all of the changes that its
creatures undergo. We should not be so sure that life is great and
death is evil, and accept everything that comes our way, marveling at
the possibility that upon our death we might be made into a
fly's foreleg the next time around. The *Zhuangzi*, like
the *Daodejing*, calls upon human beings to identify with the
whole of the cosmos and its transformations, and such identification
involves acceptance, even celebration of death and loss, because in
dying one participates in the next transformation of the cosmos and
becomes something else to marvel at, such as a fly's foreleg.
Such a call may hold deep appeal, especially for those who cannot see
any form of monotheism as a viable object for belief and yet desire
some sort of spiritual connection that stretches beyond the merely
human community.



However, such a call also raises challenging questions about human
possibility. Can human beings really accept the loss of their selves
and their loved ones with the kind of equanimity that identification
with the whole requires? The *Zhuangzi* presents stories that
represent different possibilities for conceiving of the nature of this
equanimity. In the stories of the four masters, death is accepted
without the slightest shiver. In the story of the death of
Zhuangzi's wife, a more complex emotional story is told, whereby
Zhuangzi first feels her loss but comes to accept it as yet another
transformation. This story suggests that one may retain one's
attachments to particular people and yet maintain resilience in the
face of their loss because of one's identification with the
whole (Wong 2006; see Becker, 1998 for an discussion of resilience in
the face of loss in the context of developing a contemporary
Stoicism). But how is such identification psychologically possible? In
the *Zhuangzi*, it seems based on a spirit of restless and
joyful exploration of the richness of the cosmos. In the end, it
embodies the emotion that is perhaps most fundamental to philosophy,
and that is wonder.



Another implication could be drawn from the values found in the
foundational texts that is not found in these texts but emerges in the
contemporary context. The *Zhuangzi*'s lampooning of
human pretension and arrogance, together with call to identify with
the whole and with the nonhuman parts of nature, has appealed to those
seeking philosophical perspectives within which to frame an
environmental ethic (see Girardot, Miller, and Liu, 2001). A Daoist
perspective offers both an alternative to an instrumentalist approach
that would ground an environmental ethic solely in the idea that it
defeats human beings' interests to foul their own environment
and to an intrinsic value approach that would ground duties to nature
solely in a value that it possesses apart from its relation to human
beings. A Daoist approach might point to the way that the human traits
are conditioned by and responses to the nonhuman environment, such
that these traits cannot be specified independently of the
environment. In other words the Daoist self is not a substantial
independent existence but a relational one whose boundaries extend
into the conventionally nonhuman, and from a Daoist perspective that
is reconstructed to be oriented toward the problem of the environment,
we would do well to acknowledge the ways in which whatever we value in
ourselves is connected to the nonhuman (Hourdequin and Wong, 2005;
Hassoun and Wong, 2015). Treating the environment correctly is not
purely a matter of satisfying conventional human interests such as
conserving resources for our future consumption, nor need it be a
matter of recognizing a value that the environment has in complete
independence of its impact on us. It can be a matter of recognizing
that who we are cannot be cleanly separated from the nonhuman
environment. Moreover, there is much to be gained from being open to
the transformation of our interests if we remain open to new sources
of satisfaction in the nonhuman environment that currently escape our
conceptions of the "useful" (recall Huizi and the
gourds).



None of this shows that the composers of the classical Daoist texts
*had* an environmental ethic. Goldin (2005b) points out that
China does not have a very good history of concern for degradation or
overuse of the environment and that the Daoist texts express no
concern about such matters. As Goldin points out, the Chinese ancients
simply had nothing comparable to our environmental problems. It is
possible to find, however, fundamental attitudes toward the human
relationship with nature that in our own time might seem a more
promising basis for an environmental ethic. These attitudes embody a
different relationship with nature that is not governed by the
imperative of ceaseless consumption and the drive to colonize nature
(see Jonathan Chan, 2009; and Miller, 2017 for further discussion of
how Daoism might provide resources for dealing with the contemporary
environmental crisis).



Within the ancient Chinese tradition,
the *Zhuangzi* is taken to be highly
unusual for its celebration of individual freedom. This
shows in the text's frequent characterization of social and moral
norms as constraining and controlling the individual, as motivating
small-minded condemnation of those who deviate from them. It also
shows in the text's rejection of the ideal of social and political
service as dangerous to the individual. Jiang (2021) sees the text as
offering two visions of freedom as counters to such constraint:
freedom within the human lifeworld of social relationships; and
freedom beyond the human lifeworld. The first is metaphorically
illustrated by Cook Ding's effortless, supremely responsive,
navigation through the joints and spaces of the ox he is cutting up.
One can navigate around social constraints instead of being restricted
by them. More literally, freedom within the human lifeworld is
exemplified in the text by friends who enjoy and accept one another
but refrain from unwanted interference with each other's affairs. The
second is to identify with and embrace the inevitable processes of
change and transformation, including death and the loss of what is
most treasured within the human lifeworld. There are limits to the two
kinds of freedom Jiang finds in the text: neither, in his view
includes the kind of freedom that can be accomplished as a social and
political value through challenging and changing the norms and
institutions that unduly constrain the individual.



Lai (2020) distinguishes a third kind of freedom she sees in
the *Zhuangzi*: freedom in
working *with* constraints. On her account, one can
cultivate the skills needed to match one's capabilities to act with
the situation at hand, which of course includes whatever might be
regarded as social constraints. But to act by working *with*
constraints is primarily to respond to the situation, which leaves
open the question of whether one acts *within* the
constraints, *beyond* them, or in some other way, perhaps even
*undermining* them. This way of construing Zhuangian freedom
is compatible with the above discussion of the way the text
might be seen as encouraging the freeing of oneself from rigid
preconceptions of how to understand the world and to be open to other
ways of understanding one's situation and to other ways of responding
to it. Valmisa (2021) explicitly connects what she sees as social and
political implications of Zhuangian freedom with the possibility of
expanding one's capabilities to efficaciously deal with constraints
and to creatively imagine new possibilities. This possibility of a
social and political construal of Zhuangzian values matches Chong's
(2016) perspective on the *Zhuangzi* as including a
basic equality among all human beings that is inclusive in spirit and
opposed to set hierarchical rankings of human beings in terms of
unequal worth. This matches up with the Zhuangian critique of
Confucian hierarchies, not only for society and state, but advocating
for the individual an egalitarian conception of the parts of a
person that puts the heart-mind in conversation with the rest of the
body rather than in command (see the entry on
 mind (heart-mind) in Chinese philosophy).


## 5. Legalism (*Fajia*)



Thinkers grouped under what is known in China as the *Fajia*
Fa Jia  or *Fa* tradition are usually known in
the West as "Legalists." This is misleading in that while the term
*fa* can mean law, it can also include standards, norms,
models, and methods (see Goldin 2005c, and the entry on 
 legalism in Chinese philosophy).
 The English term is also misleading if taken to refer to thinkers who
shared in common a cohesive set of doctrines when in fact the thinkers
grouped under the name have a fairly diverse set of
ideas. Nevertheless, there are some themes that are reasonably
associated with some of the most prominent thinkers. One theme is
perhaps best introduced as the opposite reaction to *Analects*
2.3, in which Confucius says that guiding the people by edicts and
keeping them in line with punishments will keep them out of trouble
but will give them no sense of shame; guiding them by virtue and
keeping them in line with the rites will not only give them a sense of
shame but enable them to reform themselves. In the most prominent
*Fajia* text, the *Hanfeizi* (Hanfei lived during the
3rd century B.C.E. For a translation, see Watson 2003), the
people are characterized as far too swayed by their material interests
to be guided by a sense of shame. People must be guided by clear
edicts and strong punishments. Furthermore, rulers must be wary of
their ambitious ministers and take care not to reveal their own likes
and dislikes so as not to be manipulated by their scheming
subordinates. As to rulers themselves, it is a mistake to found
government on the presumption that they are or can become virtuous.
While exceptionally good and exceptionally evil rulers have existed,
the vast majority of rulers have been mediocre. Governments must be
structured so that it can run satisfactorily, because that is what
rulers will be like almost always.



The Confucians held that the remedy to China's turmoil and chaos
lay in wise and morally excellent rulers--that moral excellence
would ripple downwards from the top and create harmony and prosperity.
The *Daodejing* upholds a vision of an original harmony that
human beings once had, a way that consisted in living in accord with
the natural grain of things, and that involves seeking only what one
truly needs, not in multiplying useless desires that only agitate and
ultimately make us unhappy. Many in
the *Fa* tradition reject moral and spiritual
transformation, of either the Confucian or Laoist kind, as the
solution to China's troubles. Most human beings will remain
unlovely beings to the end, and governmental structures must be
designed for such beings. Hanfei recommended a highly centralized
government in which the ruler retains firm control of the "two
handles" of government: punishment and favor (chapter 7). By
making sure he always has his own hands on these handles, the ruler
remains in firm control of his ministers. If a minister proposes a way
to get something done, measure his performance on whether he gets it
done in the way he says he will. If not, punish him. The ruler is to
hold his officials strictly to the definitions of their role
responsibilities, so that they are punished not only when they fail to
perform some of those assigned responsibilities but also when they do
more than their assigned responsibilities.



Some of the most interesting parts of the text consist of arguments
supporting the necessity of governmental structure and the folly of
depending on the character of rulers. It's not just that virtue
is a rare thing. Even if it appears in a ruler, it is not by itself
sufficient for achieving a good society. The "Five Vermin"
chapter (49) does not dispute an assumption that is commonly held
across Chinese philosophical schools--that the sage-kings of
ancient times were virtuous and ruled over a harmonious and prosperous
society. It disputes, however, that their virtue was the primary cause
of this golden age. What about those kings in more recent times who
were *ren* and *yi*, benevolent and righteous, and who
got wiped out for their trouble? Virtue by itself is not the
explanation of success or failure. The explanation has much more to do
with the scarcity of goods in relation to the number of people. It
further has to do with whether the right sort of structure of roles
with attendant powers and privileges is put into place. This structure
can optimize the effectiveness of, and limit the damage done by,
people who are not especially virtuous or extraordinarily able.



Confucians can give replies to such arguments. In answer to the
argument that virtue is too rare a thing to depend upon, the most
obvious reply is that they never promised virtue would be easy.
Indeed, the canonical texts all stress the difficulty of achieving
full virtue. Mencius in particular conceives of moral development as
extending the natural beginnings of virtue to situations where they
ought to extend but do not currently extend. Confucians might also
object that good results will follow from the kind of structure
described in the *Hanfeizi* only if persons of good-enough
character staff it. The *Hanfeizi* sometimes implicitly
acknowledges this point and integrates it with a reasonable stress on
structure and impersonal administration. In chapter 6 there is
discussion of what is necessary to compensate for a mediocre ruler:
getting able people with the right motives to serve that ruler.
Institute laws and regulations specifying how these people are
selected: not on the basis of reputation alone, since that will give
people an incentive to curry favor with their associates and
subordinates and disregard the ruler; not on the basis of cliques,
since that will motivate people only to establish connections rather
than acquire the qualifications to perform in office. Specify the
qualifications clearly in laws and regulations, appoint, promote, and
dismiss strictly according to these specifications. The law, not the
ruler's personal views, must form the basis for these actions.
In chapter 43, consideration is given to the suggestion that those who
take heads in battle should be rewarded with desirable offices. This
is rejected in cases where the office requires wisdom and ability
rather than courage. In the end, one wonders whether a good number of
such persons of right motive, competence, courage, wisdom and ability
are enough, given the highly centralized nature of the government
recommended in the *Hanfeizi*. A lot depends on the ruler who
wields the "two handles" of government. Taken in moderate
doses, *Hanfeizi* arguably provides a needed corrective to the
Confucian emphasis on character. Structure can be designed with an eye
to the realistic possibilities for mediocre and bad rulers. The
Confucian emphasis on discretion in judgment is obviously subject to
abuse that can be checked by structures that provide a degree of
impersonal administration and consistent application of relatively
clear laws and regulations. The American legal experience seems to
show, however, that no set of laws can interpret itself with an eye to
complex situations that are unforeseeable when laws are framed.
Ultimately, stable character and wise discretion are needed.



The strongest challenge that Legalism raises to virtue ethics is not
that stable virtues are impossible to achieve, but that they are not
realistic possibilities for most persons, and that therefore lofty
virtue ideals cannot provide the basis for a large-scale social ethic.
Even if these ideals are directed only at an elite that is then
expected to lead the rest of the people, the question arises as to
what influence this elite can have on the rest if the majority do not
have some attraction to virtue. It is dubious, however, that the
solution lies in seeking to make character irrelevant. For a more
extensive discussion of the *Fajia* thinkers,
see the entry on
 legalism in Chinese philosophy, 


## 6. Chinese Buddhist Ethics



Buddhism is not indigenous to China, and it has a long and rich
tradition of thought and practice in India and in areas other than
China. This brief section will focus on ethical aspects of the most
distinctive form of Buddhism that developed once it was introduced to
China: Chan Buddhism, or as it came to be known later in Japan, Zen.
It should be noted, however, that prominent forms of Chinese Buddhism
also include Tiantai and Huayan. All three forms of Chinese Buddhism
developed in interaction with indigenous Chinese thought, especially
Daoism. Chan developed partly as a response to the perception of some
Chinese Buddhists that Tiantai and Huayan had developed in overly
scholastic directions with proliferating metaphysical distinctions and
doctrines that hinder rather than aid Enlightenment.



The immediate focus of Buddhist ethics is the problem of suffering,
and a conception of the self is at the heart of the Buddhist response
to that problem. The self is conceived as a floating collection of
various psychophysical reactions and responses with no fixed center or
unchanging ego entity. The usual human conception of self as a fixed
and unchanging center is 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. Human suffering ultimately stems from a concern
for the existence and pleasures and pains of the kind of self that
never existed in the first place. Recognition of the impermanence of
the self can lead to release or mitigation of suffering, but the
recognition cannot merely be intellectual. It must involve
transformation of one's desires. The belief on some abstract
level, for example, that there are no permanent selves is a belief
that can co-exist with having and acting on intense desires to avoid
death, as if death were some evil befalling some underlying
'I'. Similarly, the intellectual recognition that none of
the "things" of ordinary life are fixed and separate
entities, anymore than the self is, can lead to recognition of all of
life as an interdependent whole and to the practical attitude of
compassion for all of life. But if the latter recognition is again
merely intellectual, one can still have and act on intensely
self-regarding desires at severe cost to others. In both cases a
transformation of desire is what is required in order to go beyond the
merely intellectual and to achieve true Enlightenment and meaningful
recognition of one's true nature as impermanent and as
interdependent with all other things.



Recall the practical focus and the closeness to pre-theoretical
experience that are distinctive of indigenous Chinese philosophy.
These traits interacted with Buddhism as it was introduced into China.
The 'Chan' in "Chan Buddhism" comes from the
Sanskrit '*dhyana*' which means meditation. Though
meditation practice is not the only practice employed in Chan, its
central role does illustrate the focus on achieving transformation of
one's desires through experience of the self and the world. This
kind of transformation is different than reaching intellectual
conviction through textual study and understanding of argumentation,
and also different than escape from the world of suffering through
obliteration of one's consciousness as an individual being.
Chinese Buddhism in the form of Chan was especially influential in
putting forward this conception of Enlightenment as lived in this
world rather than escaping from it.



Daoism in particular has themes that make it especially appropriate
for interaction with Buddhism. Recall the theme that one must keep
desires from interfering with one's attention to the matter at
hand. Correspondingly, a major theme in Chan is that all forms of
striving, especially the very striving for Enlightenment, interfere
with attention to one's true nature (Hui Neng, 638-713,
*Platform Scripture*). Hence the reason for the otherwise
puzzlingly harsh reactions of Chan masters to the earnest strivings of
their students to reach Enlightenment (Yi Xuan, d. 866, *The
Recorded Conversations of Linji Yi Xuan*) especially if such
strivings have any tinge of the academic or doctrinal about them
(Huang Po, d. 850, *The Transmission of Mind*). Recall also the
theme in *Daodejing* concerning the *dao* as the source
of the myriad things. The Buddha's insight into the nature of
the many things brought him to recognize the Many as also the One.
Finally, recall the skeptical theme in Daoism about the limits of
conceptualization. The Buddha's insight into the Many as also
the One does not mean that the Many are really only One, but rather
Many and Once at once, and if we have difficulty making sense of that,
it is founded in the limits of our conceptualization. Finally, there
is the same possibility for ambiguity as to whether there is some
ineffable and nonconceptual access to an ultimate reality or whether
there is skeptical question that goes all the way down (or all the way
up?). In the *Zhuangzi* this ambiguity is quite apparent. And
though Chan is usually taken to affirm a foundation in ineffable
access (Kasulis, 1986), there are those who argue that a thoroughgoing
skepticism is truer to its spirit (Wright, 1998).



Since the self is a bundle of changing psychological and physical
attributes whose boundaries are conventionally established, and since
its attributes exist only in relation to other things outside its
conventionally established boundaries, it ought to dampen its
self-regarding cares and concerns and widen the boundaries of its
concerns to embrace all life. This Buddhist reasoning certainly is an
interesting way to ground impersonal concern, and it may appeal to
those of us who see little plausibility in the idea of Cartesian
substances as fixed ego entities. On the other hand, it's not clear
that a metaphysical deconstruction of an essential self assures that
care for all others is normatively required. Further, this reasoning
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
particular others such as friends and family members. Buddhism is
especially well known for its advocacy of detachment, not only from
material possessions, worldly power and status, but also from
particular people and communities. For example, in Ashvaghosha's
poem on "Nanda the Fair," the Buddha explains to Nanda
that delusion alone ties one person to another (Conze, 1959, 110). The
argument is that a family is like a group of travelers at an inn who
come together for a while and then part. No one belongs to anyone
else. A family is held together only as sand is held in a clenched
fist. A number of Neo-Confucians, such as the Cheng brothers and Zhu
Xi, harshly accused Buddhists of selfishness while not quite squaring
that accusation with the ideal of the Boddhisattvas in Mahayana
Buddhism, who delay their entrance into Nirvana, their final release
from suffering, until all beings are liberated from suffering. What
the neo-Confucians might have been saying is that the real appeal of
Buddhism is to the selfish impulse to save oneself, regardless of what
their doctrines say. 



Buddhist traditions are diverse, long-lived, and philosophically
sophisticated in addressing these questions. Worries about the
desirability and realistic possibility of assuming the kind of
detached attitude the Buddhists upheld are similar to worries
raised by Daoist identification with the cosmos. As the discussion of
Zhuangzi and wife suggests, it may be possible to distinguish as an
alternative to the pure and complete detachment exemplified in
Ashvagosha another kind that is consistent with emotional involvement
with others for as long as they are given to us.