Virtue-Based Politics: A Dialogue with Loubna El Amine’s New Interpretation of Classical Confucian Political Thought

Abstract

Leong Chan takes on Loubna El Amine regarding the relation between social stability and cultivation of virtue in classical Confucianism. Against El Amine’s argument that social and political order is the ideal and sole end of classical Confucian political teachings, Chan defends a reading of classical Confucian political teachings as aiming also at virtue. Two central claims of El Amine’s position, he argues, falter: that political order is the ruler’s ultimate end, and that a ruler only values virtues in the people insofar as they contribute to upholding order. Chan’s line of argument then turns on El Amine’s claim that order is an end in itself begging the question. What makes order so valuable? Chan suggests that Confucians value social and political order not intrinsically but rather on the external grounds that stability promotes welfare. Chan proposes that a more accurate reading of classical Confucianism recognizes the tripartite interdependence of political order with welfare and virtue. These three values are mutually supportive and even mutually constitutive in that each promotes and serves the other two—and we can thus abandon means-end dichotomies altogether.