The Routledge Companion to Ethics

John Skorupski, John Skorupski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136964213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The Routledge Companion to Ethics is an outstanding survey of the whole field of ethics by a distinguished international team of contributors. Over 60 chapters are divided into six clear sections:

• the history of ethics
• meta-ethics
• perspectives from outside ethics
• ethical perspectives
• morality
• debates in ethics.

The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of ethics, including chapters on Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, and ethical thinking in China, India and the Arabic tradition. The second part covers the domain of meta-ethics. The third part covers important challenges to ethics from the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociobiology and economics. The fourth and fifth sections cover competing theories of ethics and the nature of morality respectively, with entries on consequentialism, Kantian morality, virtue ethics, relativism, evil, and responsibility amongst many others. A comprehensive final section includes the most important topics and controversies in applied ethics, such as rights, justice and distribution, the end of life, the environment, poverty, war and terrorism.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics is a superb resource for anyone interested in the subject, whether in philosophy or related disciplines such as politics, education, or law. Fully indexed and cross-referenced, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, it is ideal for those coming to the field of ethics for the first time as well as readers already familiar with the subject.

PART I HISTORY

DOI: 10.4324/9780203850701-1

1 ETHICAL THOUGHT IN CHINA

Yang Xiao

DOI: 10.4324/9780203850701-2

Chinese ethical thought has a long history; it goes back to the time of Confucius (551–479 bce), which was around the time of Socrates (469–399 bce). In a brief chapter like this, it is obviously impossible to do justice to the richness, complexity, and heterogeneity of such a long tradition. Instead of trying to cover all the aspects of it, I focus on the early period (551–221 bce), which is the founding era of Chinese philosophy. More specifically, I focus on the four main schools of thought and their founding texts: Confucianism (the Analects, the Mencius, and the Xunzi), Mohism (the Mozi), Daoism (the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi), and Legalism (the Book of Lord Shang). There are two reasons for this choice. First, Chinese philosophers from later periods often had to present their own thoughts in the guise of commentaries on these founding texts; they spoke about them as well as through them. Second, this choice reflects the fact that early China is still the most scrutinized period of the history of Chinese philosophy by scholars in the English-speaking world, and that most of the important texts from this period have been translated into English.

It must be borne in mind that the early period lasted for about 300 years, which may still be too long for such a brief chapter to cover. My goal is not to provide an encyclopedic coverage or standard chronological account of ethical thought in early China. Rather, I want to identify important and revealing common features and themes of the content, style, and structure of ethical thought in this period that have reverberated throughout the history of Chinese philosophy, and have uniquely defined and characterized the tradition as a whole. In other words, this will not be a historian’s, but rather a philosopher’s, take on the history of Chinese ethical thought.

In this chapter I use terms such as “Chinese philosophy,” “Chinese philosophers,” and “Chinese ethics,” which some scholars may and problematic. There has been an ongoing debate about whether there is “Chinese philosophy” (Defoort 2001 and 2006). Some scholars have argued that Confucianism is not a “philosophy” (Eno 1990), that there is no such thing as “Chinese ethics” (Mollgaard 2005), and that Confucius is not a “philosopher of ethics” and has no “normative ethical theory” (Hansen 1992). This is obviously a complicated issue. The reality is that in China we can find both normative ethical theory and ethical practices such as self-cultivation through spiritual exercise. In what follows, I first address the unique problem of style in Chinese ethics; I then discuss the structure of the normative ethical theories of the four main schools of thought. I end with a discussion of the idea of philosophy as spiritual exercise, as well as a brief conclusion.

The problem of style in Chinese ethical thought

One main reason that Chinese philosophical texts are difficult to understand is our unfamiliarity with their styles. For example, when a contemporary reader picks up a copy of the Analects, she might and it very easy to understand the literal meaning of Confucius’ short, aphorism-like utterances; however, she might still be baffled because she does not know what Confucius is doing with his utterances.

In his theory of interpretation, Davidson argues that an utterance always has at least three dimensions. Besides its “literal meaning,” which is given by a truth-conditional semantics, it also has its “force” (what the speaker is doing with it, whether the speaker intends it to be an assertion, a joke, a warning, an instruction, and so on), as well as its “ulterior non-linguistic purpose” (why the speaker is saying what he says, what effects the speaker wants to have on what audience, and so on) (Davidson 1984a, b, 1993). We may say that the literal meaning is the “content” of an utterance, and the force and purpose are the “style” of the utterance. This theory might help us understand that whenever we do not understand an early Chinese text it is often not because the author is an “oriental mystic,” but rather because we do not know enough about the historical background to understand what the author is trying to do. We as scholars often misunderstand Chinese philosophers because of our projected expectations about what they must have been trying to accomplish; as Bernard Williams puts it, “a stylistic problem in the deepest sense of ‘style’ … is to discover what you are really trying to do” (Williams 1993: xviii–xix).

We now know a great deal about the historical background of early Chinese philosophy (Hsu 1965; Lewis 1990; Pines 2002; Lloyd and Sivin 2002; von Falkenhausen 2006); the most important aspect might be that the early philosophers were primarily trying to solve practical problems in the real world that seemed to be governed only by force and violence. To get a concrete sense of how extremely violent their time was, here are some revealing statistics. Confucius, the most important Confucian philosopher, lived around the end of the Spring and Autumn period (722–464 bce); during the 258 years of the period, there were 1,219 wars, with only 38 peaceful years in between (Hsu 1965: 66). All of the other philosophers discussed in this chapter lived during the Warring States period that lasted for 242 years (463–221 bce), during which there had been 474 wars, and only 89 peaceful years (Hsu 1965: 64; also see Lewis 1990). Although there were fewer wars during the Warring States period, they were much longer and intense, and with much higher casualties. As we shall see, this fact has an important impact on how the early Chinese philosophers construct their ethical theories.

However, this turbulent time was also the golden years of early Chinese philosophy. Confucian philosophers such as Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi, the philosopher Mozi (the founder of Mohism), Daoist philosophers such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, and Legalist philosophers such as Shen Buhai, Shang Yang, Shen Dao, and Hanfeizi all lived through great political uncertainties and the brutalities of warfare, and their philosophies, especially their ethics, were profoundly shaped by this shared experience. We can and passages in these thinkers’ work that show how they were traumatized by the wars and the sufferings of the people, and it should not come as a surprise that almost all of them saw themselves as “political agents and social reformers” (von Falkenhausen 2006: 11). They traveled from state to state, seeking positions with rulers, such as political advisers, strategists, and, ideally, high-ranking officials. One of the central problems they were obsessed with was the following: What must be done in order to bring peace, order, stability, and unity to the chaotic and violent world? Their solution to the practical problems of their time is a whole package, in which individual, familial, social, economic, political, legal, and moral factors were seamlessly interwoven. In fact, they did not have a distinction between ethics and politics, as we do today. They seemed to take for granted that questions about how one ought to act, feel, and live cannot be answered without addressing questions about what a good society ought to be like. This is why the terms “ethics” and “moral philosophy” should be understood in their broadest sense in this chapter, which includes “political philosophy” as well as “legal philosophy.”

The structure of Chinese ethical theories

There are various ways to characterize the structure of an ethical theory. It seems that one way to characterize Chinese ethical theories is to articulate at least three components:

• (a) A part that deals with a theory of the good or teleology which indicates what goals or ends one ought to pursue, as well as ideals one ought to imitate or actualize (Skorupski 1999).
• (b) A part that provides an account of the factors that determine the moral status of an action (or a policy, an institution, a practice, etc.). They are roughly what Shelly Kagan calls “evaluational factors” or “normative factors” (Kagan 1998). For instance, if one takes the consequences of an action as the only normative factor to determine its moral status, one would be a “factoral consequentialist.”
• (c) A part that gives justifications for its normative claims. It often involves a theory of the good, a theory of agency and practical reasoning, or a theory of human nature. This part consists of the “foundation” of an ethical theory (Kagan 1998). It can be read as addressing what Christine Korsgaard calls the “normative question” (Korsgaard 1996). For instance, if one justifies a policy (an action, an institution) by arguing that it is the best or necessary means to the realization of an ideal society, one would be a “foundational consequentialist.”

In the next four sections, I discuss the ethical theory of each of the four schools of thought according to the following sequence. First, I discuss (a) its theory of the good on the level of the state, as well as on the level of the individual. Second, I discuss (b) its account of normative factors. Third, I discuss (c) how it justifies its normative claims.

More specifically, when I discuss (b), I pay attention to two issues: First, how it defines virtuous actions, whether it is “evaluational internalist” or “evaluational externalist” (Driver 2001: 68) – that is, whether a virtuous action is defined in terms of factors internal to the agent, such as belief, intention, desire, emotion, and disposition (hence an internalist), or in terms of factors external to the agent, such as the consequence (hence an externalist). We shall use “internalism” as a shorthand for “evaluational internalism” in the rest of this chapter; one should not confuse it with a very different view also labeled “internalism,” which can be found in the debate regarding whether reason for action must be internal or not. Second, I shall pay special attention to the issue of whether an ethical theory is “deontological” in the sense that it regards “constraints” (the moral barriers to the promotion of the good) as an evaluational factor (Kagan 1998).

Confucian ethical theory

Let us start with Confucianism (Schwartz 1985: 56–134, 255–320; Graham 1989: 9–33, 107–32, 235–67). The Confucians, most famously Confucius (551–479 bce) (Van Norden 2002), Mencius (385–312 bce) (Shun 1997; Liu and Ivanhoe 2002), and Xunzi (310–219 bce) (Klein and Ivanhoe 2000), have a theory of the good on the level of the state, as well as the level of the individual. With regard to the state, they believe that it is important for a state to have external goods, such as being orderly, prosperous, having an extensive territory, and a vast population. However, the Confucians believe that an ideal state must have “moral character” in the sense that the state should have no other end than the perfection of human relationships and the cultivation of virtues of the individual, and that the morality of the state must be the same as the morality of the individual. This is arguably the most important feature of Confucian ethics, which the Legalists such as Hanfei would eventually reject by arguing that private and public morality ought to be different, and that Confucian virtues could actually be public vices. The Confucian ideal society that everyone ought to pursue should have at least the following moral characteristics:

• (1) Every one follows social rules and rituals (li) that govern every aspect of life in the ideal society (Analects 1.15, 6.27, 8.2, see Lau 1998; Xunzi 10.13, see Knoblock 1988).
• (2) Everyone in the ideal society has social roles and practical identities that come with special obligations; for instance, a son must have filial piety (xiao) towards his father (Analects 1.2, 1.11, 2.5–8, 13.18, 17.21), an official must have loyalty (zhong) towards his or her ruler (3.19), and a ruler must have benevolence (ren) towards his or her people (Mencius 1A4, 1A7, 1B5, see Lau 2005; Xunzi 10.13). A junzi (virtuous person, or gentleman scholar-official) must have a comprehensive set of virtues, such as ren (humanity, benevolence, or empathy), yi (justice, righteousness), li (social rules and rituals internalized as deep dispositions), zhi (practical wisdom), xin (trust), yong (courage), and shu (reciprocity, or the golden rule internalized as a deep disposition).
• (3) “Benevolent politics” (ren-zheng) is practiced when the state adopts just and benevolent policies regarding the distribution of external goods, as well as policies that may be characterized as “universal altruism” in the sense that a virtuous person cares about everyone in the world, including both those who are near and dear and those who are strangers, especially the weak and the poor (Mencius 1A4, 1A7, 1B5).
• (4) “Virtue-based politics” is practiced when the ruler wins the allegiance and trust of the people not through laws or coercion, but through the transformative power of virtuous actions (Analects 2.1, 2.19, 2.20, 12.7, 12.17, 12.18, 12.19, 13.4, 13.6, 12.18, 14.41; Mencius 2A3, 3A2, 4A20, 7A12–14).
• (5) The unification of the various states in China is not achieved through force and violence, but through the transformative power of virtue (Mencius 2A3; 4B16, 7B13, 7B32; Xunzi 9.9, 9.19a, 10.13, 18.2).

The central idea here is that it is not enough for a state to be strong and prosperous; it must have moral character, such as justice and benevolence – virtues intimately connected with politics. I shall use the term “virtue politics” (de-zheng) in a broad sense to refer to the Confucian ethical-political program as a whole.

On the level of the individual, the Confucians also have a theory of external goods. The external goods include wealth, power, fame, and worldly success. They claim that these external goods are not under one’s control, but rather are allotted by fate or Heaven, and they have no intrinsic value, hence one should not be concerned with them (Analects 12.5, 14.35; Mencius 1B14, 5A6, 5A8, 6A16–17, 7A3, 7A42, 7B24). Furthermore, one’s actions should not be motivated by the desire to obtain these external goods (Analects 2.18, 15.32, 19.7, 15.32). In sharp contrast to external goods, “virtue,” “will,” and “true happiness” are not subject to luck, and are under the agent’s control (Analects 7.30, 9.31, 9.26, 6.11). Virtuous persons take pleasure in doing virtuous actions, even when they live in poverty (Analects 6.11).

In general, the Confucians are “internalists” in the sense that they define virtuous actions in terms of factors internal to the agent, such as the agent’s intentions, motives, emotions, or deep dispositions, rather than defining them in terms of factors external to the agent, such as external goods or consequences. Among all the Confucians, Mencius might be the most persistent advocate for an internalist definition of virtuous actions. For example, in Mencius, we and an “expressivist” definition of benevolent actions, which is that an action is benevolent if it is a natural and spontaneous expression of one’s deep dispositions of compassion for the people (Xiao 2006b). The deep disposition of compassion is what Mencius calls the “heart that cannot bear to see the suffering of others” (2A6):

The reason why I say that everyone has the heart that c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• PART I History
• PART II Meta–ethics
• PART III Ideas and Methods From Outside Ethics
• PART IV Perspectives in Ethics
• Part V Morality
• PART VI Debates in Ethics
• Index