Abstract
This chapter explores the advantages and disadvantages of viewing the Analects through the lens of contemporary moral theory. It begins with methodological questions that center around whether the ways that philosophers—both East and West—have sought to use Western categories to interpret the Analects result in a troubling privileging of Western perspectives. In answering this question, it is helpful to distinguish between two scholarly modes: the interpretive and the dialogical. Categories not derived from the Analects itself are relevant to the philosophical interpretation of the text only insofar as a case can be made that they contribute to a better understanding of the text than is available without them (or via alternative categories). Philosophical dialogue, on the other hand, may have primary aims that are different from the best understanding of a given source text. The chapter then turns to detailed considerations of Kantian deontology, which Sinophone scholarship on the text has tended to stress; virtue ethics, which is more prominent in Anglophone secondary literature; and role ethics, which has emerged as a potential alternative to both deontology and virtue ethics. These discussions reveal that Sinophone and Anglophone philosophers are starting to engage one another, which is helping to spur the related (though not identical) process of dialogue between Western and Chinese philosophical traditions. Concern about an unhealthy hegemony of Western categories is by no means a thing of the past, but we are beginning to see glimpses of a future that is pluralistic, open, and global.
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Notes
- 1.
For further discussion of this large question in terms that complement those of the present chapter, see Olberding 2011, especially Ch. 1.
- 2.
See Defoort and Ge 2005 and the essays collected in that journal issue (as well as the two following issues).
- 3.
One example of such an effort to peel away layers of “philosophical” readings—although doing so in part to contribute to a more pluralistic future philosophy—is Denecke 2010.
- 4.
I have found Stephen Walker’s conference presentations and blog posts on this subject (for example, see http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/zhuangzi-and-the-possibility-of-philosophical-culture/) to be very stimulating. I accept that there is an overall difference of tone and method between early Chinese and Greek discourses, though of course there is wide variation within each, including many non-eristic Greek texts and many Warring States and later Chinese texts that engage in explicit argument and even pay explicit attention to the methods of argument. See also Van Norden 2007: 10–15, 59–64 and Denecke 2010.
- 5.
- 6.
For example, in Analects 9:14, Confucius says that he wants to dwell among the Yi people outside the Chinese heartland, which leads someone to ask him: “But they are uncouth; how will you manage?” Confucius responds, “If a gentleman were to dwell among them, what uncouthness would there be?” The implication seems to be that Confucian virtue is not limited by borders or culture, but applies and can spread wherever the virtuous gentleman should go. For further discussion, see Angle 2013.
- 7.
See Zhao 2008 on whether Confucianism can successfully be “universal” instead of “local” knowledge (Zhao 2008: 175); and also Bai 2010, arguing that we can read early Confucianism as accepting the universal openness of political philosophy, as versus the particularist focus encouraged by Jiang Qing’s viewing Confucianism (that is, rujiao) through the lens of religion.
- 8.
- 9.
Both on this specific point, and more generally concerning the topic of this section, I have found Wang 2005 to be very helpful.
- 10.
I mention some of the philosophers involved in these debates in the “Virtue ethics” section, below.
- 11.
- 12.
David Elstein has reminded me that key Chinese developers of the deontological reading believe that Confucianism in fact surpasses Kant in key ways, and so it is somewhat misleading to label their views as “Kantian.” This is an excellent point that I have taken to heart. As Elstein emphasized, since we see virtue ethics as broader than Aristotle (see below), shouldn’t we see deontology as broader than Kant?
- 13.
The essay was published serially over several months. For some fascinating background to Liang’s essay, including the degree to which he both drew on but also deviated from prior Japanese interpretation and translation of Kant, see K. Huang 2004.
- 14.
Quoted in Chan 2011: 36–37, slightly modified.
- 15.
- 16.
Translations from the Analects in this chapter are ultimately my responsibility, but I have based my renderings closely on those in Brooks and Brooks 1998.
- 17.
The balance of this paragraph draws on material in Angle 2012: Ch. 7.
- 18.
Above, in “The terrain of the moral”, I noted that MacIntyre and Gary Watson have both argued that while virtue ethics is a form of teleological ethics, it is not a maximizing teleology in which moral nobility is reducible to some other form of goodness. They would thus resist Lee’s move from “heterogeneous” to “deontological.”
- 19.
See Lee 2013. Analects 4.12, which also invokes li in a negative light, is subject to the same ambiguity. The last line of 4.2, “zhizhe li ren 知者利仁,” has been interpreted in many different ways; I note that Ames and Rosemont’s reading, “wise persons flourish in [ren],” offers support for Lee’s approach, since it connects li to a general notion of flourishing (Ames and Rosemont 1998: 89). Perhaps the best support in Book 4 of the Analects for the idea of heterogeneous values comes from 4.5, which recognizes that “wealth and honor” have value, but says that if a superior person cannot gain them whilst following the Way, he will not abide them.
- 20.
For a rebuttal of Roetz’s position from someone in the virtue ethics camp, see P. J. Ivanhoe’s argument in note 31, below.
- 21.
See my discussion of whether there are “absolute prohibitions” in Mengzi (Angle 2010).
- 22.
- 23.
See Anscombe 1958, Murdoch 1970, Foot 1978, McDowell 1979, MacIntyre 1981, and Nussbaum 1990. This list is by no means exhaustive; other important early contributions include Wallace 1978 and Pincoffs 1986. It is worth noting that, as discussed in “The terrain of the moral” above, Nussbaum explicitly rejects the label “virtue ethics” (Nussbaum 1999).
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
As can be seen from his glowing back-cover endorsement, MacIntyre was also clearly aware of the book. This is perhaps an apt moment to mention MacIntyre’s fairly extensive engagement with Confucian ethics—as seen in MacIntyre 1991, 2004a, b—although some claims that he makes in his systematic treatments of virtue ethics such as MacIntyre 1999, in which Confucianism makes no appearance, show that the influence of Confucianism has not gone as deep as one might have hoped.
- 28.
This is more implicit than explicit in Ivanhoe’s dissertation (published as Ivanhoe 1990), though it is explicit in that work’s revised second edition (Ivanhoe 2002: ix, 2n5, 9). The theme of virtue is also central to Ivanhoe 2000 (the first edition of which was published in 1993). See also Wilson 2002 and Slingerland 2001, both of which will be discussed further below. The most mature statement of Van Norden’s position is Van Norden 2007, on which see below.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
Another version of the best explanation argument can be seen in Ivanhoe’s argument that Roetz’s Kantian interpretation fails because (1) his insistence that the Analects contains universal ethical claims can be accounted for in other ways, and (2) there is no evidence of a relationship between reason and morality in the Analects like that insisted on by Kant: “We look in vain for an analysis of moral maxims, autonomy, or freedom” (Ivanhoe 2002: 9).
- 32.
By now a large literature on this subject has developed; one important source of the discussion is Sherman 1997.
- 33.
He puts this in terms of a continuum from “moderate” to “radical” virtue ethics (Van Norden 2007: 29–36).
- 34.
Lee Ming-huei argues rather convincingly that Shen’s critique of the contemporary implications of deontological moral theories is based on a mere caricature of Kantianism (Lee 2005: 107).
- 35.
For example, Sim says, “ethics for both [Confucius and Aristotle] centers on character” (Sim 2007: 134); for his part, Yu begins his first chapter by saying, “For both ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, the central question is about what the good life is or what kind of person one should be. More strikingly, both ethics answer this central question by focusing on virtue…” (Yu 2007: 24).
- 36.
For some of the debate, see the book symposia printed in Dao 8:3 (2009, on Sim’s book) and Dao 10:3 (2011, on Yu’s book).
- 37.
The Analects is critical to both Sim’s and Yu’s comparative projects, but both also draw on other early texts to fill out certain issues that are treated sparingly, if at all, in the Analects itself.
- 38.
- 39.
In the preface to his 2011 book on Confucian role ethics, Ames notes that Rosemont began developing the idea of Confucian role ethics as early as a 1991 essay that drew a contrast between the “rights-bearing individuals” of Western moral theories and the “role-bearing persons” on Confucian ethics (Ames 2011: xv). As far as I know, though, Ames and Rosemont only began using the term “role ethics” in print in Rosemont and Ames 2009. Another parallel approach to using the category of “role ethics” to understand Confucianism emerges in the work of A. T. Nuyen, whose “Confucian Ethics as Role-Based Ethics” was published in 2007. He draws in part on earlier work of Ames and Hall on the Confucian self (Nuyen 2007: 317), but develops his role-ethical structure quite independently. (Ames also seems unaware of Nuyen’s work on role ethics; it is not cited in Ames 2011.) I will comment in a moment on one or two differences between Nuyen and Ames and Rosemont, but reserve discussion of the biggest difference—namely, that Nuyen sees considerable similarity between the structure of Confucian role ethics and certain Western ethical theories that he labels “social ethics”—for the essay’s concluding section.
- 40.
It also bears noting that in a fascinating series of blog posts, William Haines has argued that “in most respects, Aristotle accepted Confucian role ethics as Ames and Rosemont describe [it]” (Haines 2012).
- 41.
Elsewhere I have noted an important difference between virtuous perceptions of Coherence in Neo-Confucian virtue ethics and virtuous reactions within Francis Hutcheson’s sentimentalist virtue ethics. Since Hutcheson believed that virtue leads one to judge “that action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers”, subsequent thinkers were able to set aside the perceptual aspect of his theory and attempt directly to calculate the greatest happiness (Hutcheson 2006: 74). “Be efficacious” is like “Follow Coherence” in not being amenable to such re-casting as an independent principle. See Angle 2009: 58–59.
- 42.
In A. T. Nuyen’s version of role ethics (see note 39, above), the distinction between a good and bad occupier of a role is determined by how well a given individual fulfills the obligations associated with the given role. He writes, “to be in a role is to be under a set of obligations” (Nuyen 2007: 317). These obligations are determined by social expectations, which for key roles are “encoded in the rites, li.” As Nuyen recognizes, this approach raises serious concerns about relativism, but he seeks to deflate these by endorsing a “soft relativism” according to which both societal morality (in this case, the Confucian combination of virtues and “strict moral rules”) and the social context on which it is based (primarily, the li or rituals) are able to “evolve together in a kind of Rawlsian ‘reflective equilibrium’” (Nuyen 2007: 328).
- 43.
Two interpretive options that have been explored with respect to Mengzi are consequentialism (see Im 1999, 2011, and the argument against a consequentialist reading in Wang 2005) and moral sense theory (see J. Huang 1994 and the rebuttals in Lee 1990: 37–38 and Lee 2013, as well as Liu 2003). Another important approach that has received some attention is care ethics; see Li 1994 and Tao 2000.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
In general, Ames and Rosemont do not write about ways that they have learned from, much less hope to contribute to, Aristotelian theory. The following sentence is a partial exception: “In fact, it is Aristotle’s sustained and often unsuccessful struggle to balance and coordinate the conflicting demands of partiality and impartiality, of first philosophy and particular context, that serves as an object lesson and shows a way forward for us” (Ames and Rosemont 2011: 34, emphasis added). The primary idea here seems to be that Aristotle is a negative example, showing why his approach is to be avoided.
- 47.
For some initial suggestions about how care ethics and Confucian ethics might be able to learn from one another, see the references cited in note 43. In Tan 2004, Sor-hoon Tan masterfully shows ways in which Confucian and Deweyan political theories can inform and enhance one another; with this as a point of departure, it is plausible to think that similar results might emerge from a dialogue in the area of morality. Nuyen argues that his version of role ethics (see notes 39 and 42 above) bears considerable similarity to a trend in Western ethical thinking that he labels “social ethics,” including such figures as Charles Taylor, Dorothy Emmet, P. F. Strawson, Marion Smiley, and Larry May. I agree that there are various overlaps between Nuyen’s theory and those of these Western figures, although his discussion is too brief to be more than suggestive. For references, see Nuyen 2007: 322–325.
- 48.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Amy Olberding for her tremendous work on this volume and for comments on this chapter. Thanks, too, to David Elstein and Sean Walsh for providing very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of the chapter.
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Angle, S.C. (2014). The Analects and Moral Theory. In: Olberding, A. (eds) Dao Companion to the Analects. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7113-0_12
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