Virtue Ethics and Confucianism

Stephen Angle, Michael Slote

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134068180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume presents the fruits of an extended dialogue among American and Chinese philosophers concerning the relations between virtue ethics and the Confucian tradition. Based on recent advances in English-language scholarship on and translation of Confucian philosophy, the book demonstrates that cross-tradition stimulus, challenge, and learning are now eminently possible. Anyone interested in the role of virtue in contemporary moral philosophy, in Chinese thought, or in the future possibilities for cross-tradition philosophizing will find much to engage with in the twenty essays collected here.

1 Introduction

Stephen C. Angle and Michael Slote

This volume presents the fruits of an extended dialogue among American and Chinese philosophers concerning the relations between virtue ethics and the Confucian tradition. Based on recent advances in English-language scholarship on and translation of Confucian philosophy, as well as on corresponding advances in the familiarity of Chinese scholars of Confucianism with current Western philosophical trends, the book demonstrates that cross-tradition stimulus, challenge, and learning are now eminently possible. This Introduction will speak of some major themes that lie behind and are exemplified in the present volume, and of the potential pitfalls, but also the likely intellectual promise, of the present sort of cross-traditional enterprise.

Context

Virtue ethics dominated the ethical landscape of Western “classical antiquity,” that is, of ancient Greece and Rome; but during much of the period of “modern philosophy” in the West, virtue ethics has been dead or dormant, and it is only in the last half-century that interest in virtue ethics began to revive. The original impetus to that revival was G. E. M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,” an article that appeared in the journal Philosophy in 1958 and that expressed dismay about and even contempt for the utilitarian and Kantian moral philosophies that were then dominating the scene in theoretical ethics. Anscombe called for a return to Aristotelian moral psychology and Aristotelianism more generally, and that call did not go unheeded. It helped to crystallize discontent with the reigning Kantian and utilitarian approaches to ethics and led, not surprisingly, to a new interest in trying to develop contemporary ethics along Aristotelian lines.

Initially, that interest was anti-theoretical—as the theoretical character of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics were blamed for the deficiencies of those approaches. But Aristotle himself was a theorist rather than an anti-theorist, and eventually forms of contemporary virtue ethics appeared that viewed themselves as theoretical alternatives to utilitarianism and Kantianism. In this process the emphasis shifted from an exclusive focus on Aristotelian ideas and methods to include other figures in the history of virtue ethics: Plato, the Stoics, Nietzsche, and, especially, Hume. This was part of the general emphasis on history and historical figures that one finds in almost all recent moral philosophy, but in the case of virtue ethics, what developed in particular was two incipient traditions of contemporary virtue-ethical thinking: the older and more dominant one stressing the insights we can gain from working with Aristotle, the other and recently strengthening one emphasizing what can be done with ideas originating with Hume and the other British moral sentimentalists.

Equally important for the dialogue that this volume represents are important developments in the study of Confucianism in the West that now enable U.S.-trained philosophers to engage seriously with Confucianism. Two issues are particularly significant. First, over the last several decades, a few pioneering scholars have been able to teach Confucian texts and ideas within the framework of U.S. philosophy departments. They and their students have explored various aspects of the Confucian tradition while at the same time being cognizant of styles of reasoning and salient theoretical concerns within contemporary Western philosophy. The result has been a developing body of English-language literature that shows the fruits of viewing Confucian texts through some of the lenses of contemporary philosophy. A second and related trend has been the production, by many of these same scholars and their students, of translations that are scholarly and philosophically informed. For many of the key early Confucian texts, we now have multiple translations whose different strengths complement one another. The combination of a burgeoning secondary literature and quality translations seems to have passed a critical threshold, such that philosophers without Chinese-language background can now access the Confucian tradition in a serious way.

In 2008, the two of us directed an NEH Summer Seminar at Wesleyan University called “Traditions Into Dialogue: Confucianism and Contemporary Virtue Ethics.” We placed primary emphasis on the development of Aristotelian and Humean virtue-ethical theorizing in relation to Confucian philosophy. There are important resemblances between Aristotle’s virtue-ethical views and views to be found in Confucianism, but the same can also be said about Humean virtue ethics and other views that can be found within the Confucian tradition. (There are reasons to think that comparative work with Stoic, Platonic, or Nietzschean thought may be fruitful as well, but so far this has been less-well explored.) The idea for a seminar on the relation between Confucian thought and Western virtue ethics originated with Stephen Angle, and on the recommendation of Roger Ames, he contacted Michael Slote about the possibility of applying to the NEH to do a joint Summer Seminar for American academics. We agreed about approaching the NEH, and the NEH in turn rewarded our efforts by agreeing to fund the seminar and offering additional money for a conference, involving both Chinese and American philosophers, to be held subsequently in Beijing.

The seminar took place during the summer of 2008 with fifteen participants from American colleges and universities. Some of the time was spent getting ourselves on the same page in regard to the nature and variety and traditions of virtue ethics; but the largest part of our efforts was devoted to reading classics of Confucian and neo-Confucian ethics and attempting to understand them both for their own sake and in relation to ideas that have been developed, either historically or more recently, in Western virtue ethics. Seminar participants began thinking about possible topics on which to write papers for the conference in Beijing that was being planned for a later date—and that would also involve participation from the Chinese end.

To set the stage for the conference, let us take a step back and look both at “Confucianism” and at philosophy in China today. The tradition of thought and practice stemming from Confucius (551–479 BCE) is rich and complex. It can plausibly be divided into at least five phases of development, including the classical era (from Confucius’s lifetime until the Qin unification in 221 BCE); Han Dynasty and thereafter (two highlights are a focus on institutions and on a broad cosmological vision; 200 BCE–1000 CE); the “Neo-Confucian” revival that is centered on the Song and Ming dynasties (including significant exchange with Buddhism, resulting in a more complex metaphysics and epistemology; 1000 CE–1648 CE); the Qing dynasty reaction to Neo-Confucianism and early encounters with Western thought (1648–1911); and the modern/contemporary period of “New Confucianism,” which is ongoing. Our seminar focused on the classical and Neo-Confucian periods, both because these have been the most influential and because they have been the most studied (and translated) in the West. Clearly, though, the broader Confucian tradition offers many other opportunities for lines of comparison and engagement.

In contrast to the Confucian tradition, explicit concern in China with something categorized as “philosophy” (or with “zhexue,” the neologism coined to translate “philosophy”) has been much briefer. Chinese intellectuals began to talk about “Chinese philosophy” around the turn of the twentieth century; this concept took on a more concrete meaning with the publication of the first histories of “Chinese philosophy” by Hu Shi in 1919 and by Feng Youlan in 1934. In a sense, then, we can see the work of these pathbreaking Chinese scholars as helping to lay the groundwork for our comparative endeavor. Today, specialists in Confucianism (and other Chinese traditions) can be found on the staffs of philosophy departments throughout China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea, alongside colleagues who teach Plato, phenomenology, Marx, analytic philosophy of language, and so on. However, things are not quite so simple as this picture makes it appear. The category of “Chinese philosophy” is actually quite controversial in China today, and at the present time, Chinese scholars trained in Chinese traditions rarely engage in significant comparative endeavors. This latter fact is partly a reflection of the kind of (historically and philologically focused) training that these scholars have received, but underlying both this and the controversy surrounding the category of “Chinese philosophy” are some important concerns that we believe must be taken seriously if an endeavor like ours is to have a constructive result outside the somewhat parochial limits of the U.S. philosophical scene.

The concerns have two complementary aspects. On the one hand, viewing Confucianism as “philosophy”—and viewing Confucian ethics as “virtue eth-ics”—can seem to privilege a historically contingent Western way of categorizing the world. Indeed, it might seem to make Confucian moral teachings in all their complexity into one sub-type of Western morality—and a relatively minor one (until recently) at that. The other side of this concern is that when one construes Confucianism as “philosophy,” one loses out on many other important aspects of the tradition, and one may also misunderstand even those aspects on which one focuses. Some examples of what may be lost are the “practical” character of Confucianism (including both concrete moral education and broader policy objectives) and its spiritual dimension. Critics of the “Chinese philosophy” category charge that by shoehorning Confucianism into categories like “ethics,” “metaphysics,” “epistemology,” and so on, one turns it into something unrecognizable and of little relevance to Chinese culture.¹

We offer three distinct responses to these challenges. First, nothing in our approach nor in those of the authors collected in this volume suggests that Confucianism must or should be understood solely as “philosophy.” The exact configuration of practice and theory that has made up “Confucianism” has varied over the centuries; its future today is very much contested. Our contention is that in all these phases it is both interpretively valuable and philosophically rewarding to view at least some of the relevant theorizing as “philosophy,” and to think about it in connection with other traditions of philosophy.² Second, while some of the contributors to this volume are primarily engaged in an interpretive exercise, for others the goal of creative, constructive philosophizing is at least as important. No matter whether one is American or Chinese, as philosophers we must be cognizant of new realities, and critical of limitations in past philosophical efforts. To some degree, then, viewing Confucianism as philosophy (and as virtue ethics) can be seen as an effort to make philosophical progress. Finally, we share with some of the critics of “Chinese philosophy” a sense that professional philosophy as it is currently practiced may be narrower than is wise, and narrower than philosophy has been in the past. In Pierre Hadot’s memorable phrase, Hellenistic Western philosophy was “a way of life”(Hadot 1995). Contemporary Western philosophy is certainly not. One strength of virtue ethics, though, is the connections that it encourages to serious work in the human sciences (like psychology) and to practical efforts of school teachers and educational policy makers concerning moral education. This response suggests that even with regard to critics of our enterprise, there is ample room for us to learn from one another—a theme to which we shall return below.

The conference occurred in May of 2010, and on the American side involved papers given by ten of the original fifteen attendees of the Summer Seminar and by a number of other scholars from the United States. As a result of earlier planning and a Chinese-language Workshop on contemporary Virtue Ethics at Tsinghua University in Beijing that we both organized and attended, many philosophers from China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) also gave papers during the conference, and the American organizers—Angle and Slote—then sought out papers that had been given at the conference for inclusion in an English-language volume of such papers. (Those helping to organize things from the Chinese end are also hoping to put together a Chinese-language volume of original and translated papers from the 2010 conference.) The results of that process are visible in the present book.

Mutual Learning

The presupposition of our 2008 Summer Seminar was that Western, and in particular American, virtue ethicists would be able to learn something interesting from studying Confucianism: that ideas gleaned from studying some of the classics of Confucian philosophy would be useful or helpful to Western virtue ethicists in the(ir) doing of virtue ethics. This hope and belief was partly encouraged by the fact that so much Confucian thinking seems virtue-ethical or close to virtue-ethical in character, but in studying the Confucian classics one also finds many particular instances of ideas that can be helpful to the Western virtue ethicist. Let us mention one example.

The Confucians stressed moral humility in a way that traditional Aristotelian-ism never did. If someone harms you, retaliation or punishment shouldn’t be the first thing one thinks of, and various Confucian texts tell us to consider, rather, whether we ourselves may not be (somewhat) at fault for what is being done to us. Perhaps we have hurt or insulted the person who hurts us in ways we have previously ignored and perhaps we ought to immediately consider or worry about what we have done to the person who has decided to harm us.³ Such advice exemplifies a kind of moral humility that Aristotelianism never encouraged. Aristotelian-ism treats proper pride as a virtue and leaves no room for the just-mentioned form of Confucian humility (which differs from the Christian kind in ways we needn’t enter into here). But, as Jerome Schneewind has noted in his paper “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” the fact that the virtuous Aristotelian individual was supposed to have no reason to defer or even listen to other people’s (putatively mistaken) moral views meant that Aristotelianism wasn’t well suited to dealing with the kinds of mutual concession and tolerance that are essential to the functioning of modern-day (religiously or ethnically) pluralistic societies (Schneewind 1990). Schneewind argues that this helps to explain why Aristotelianism went into eclipse in modern circumstances, but if that is so, then contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics needs to find a way of dealing with this issue without giving up on its own essential Aristotelianism.

Humility in the Confucian manner may well be helpful toward that end, so it would seem that contemporary Aristotelianism has reason to learn or even borrow from Confucian thought. But, interestingly, contemporary Humean virtue ethics may have less of a problem here because of the emphasis that Hume placed and it places on empathy. Empathy means seeing things from the other’s point of view, and when the Confucian asks us to consider whether we have harmed or insulted the person who has harmed or hurt us, they are in effect asking us to consider things from that other person’s point of view. So Confucian moral humility has much in common with the empathy that Humean or, more generally, sentimentalist virtue ethics recommends to us, and this alliance, as it were, may be useful both to the Humean virtue ethicist who rejects Aristotelianism and to the contemporary or new Confucian thinker who seeks a more universal support for ideas that have their historically original place in Confucian thought.

And this, in turn, indicates a way in which contemporary Chinese/Confucian philosophers can learn from Western thought. Chinese thinkers seem to have latched on to the notion or phenomenon of empathy long before this happened in the West: arguably, Cheng Hao, Wang Yangming, and even perhaps Mengzi had the notion long before Hume first described empathy in fairly modern terms. But we in the West have subsequently worked on empathy. Our psychologists of moral learning stress its importance in the development of altruism and have studied how empathy varies in strength with various degrees and kinds of relationship to or with those in need of our empathy. In addition, some Western ethicists have stressed the importance of empathy to understanding basic moral distinctions and to motivating morally good or acceptable behavior. But the Chinese, who originated the study of empathy, haven’t yet taken much advantage of what ethical argument and psychological studies in the West have shown or suggested about the moral importance of empathy, and doing so might very well enrich the possibilities for ongoing Confucian ethical thought.

So far, the kind of learning from one another that we have described is in keeping with what Angle has called “rooted global philosophy,” which means to work within a particular live philosophical tradition, but to do so in a way that is open to stimulus and insights from other philosophical traditions (Angle 2009a, 6). For example, the “roots” of some of our contributors lie primarily within contemporary Aristotelianism and contemporary moral philosophy and extend ultimately to Aristotle himself. Others are clearly rooted in the Confucian tradition and are exploring ways that the language and argument of contemporary virtue ethics might be productive from their Confucian vantage point. We should note, though, that the question of rootedness and of distinct traditions of inquiry is not always so clear. For example, Jiyuan Yu is Chinese, educated in both China and the U.S., and much of his scholarship has focused on ancient Greek philosophy. Yet he also explores and reflects on Confucianism, and in his article here relates both Greek and Chinese philosophy to current trends in Western moral philosophy. A complementary example is Bryan Van Norden, educated in the U.S. but a specialist in ancient Confucianism, who here offers us thoughts on how Confucianism and Aristotelianism might contribute to one another in a contemporary context. Are these (and other) projects best understood as rooted in a particular tradition?

Our suggestion is to consider that in addition to the possibilities of enrichment that exist both for Confucianism and for Western virtue ethics on the basis of what each individually can borrow or assimilate from the other, there is also the possibil-ity—in the light of what we know about these similar but historically separate tra-ditions—of occupying a theoretical position that remains uncommitted to either one, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Debating the Scope and Applicability of ‘Virtue’ and “Virtue Ethics”
• Part II Happiness, Luck, and Ultimate Goals
• Part III Practicality, Justification, and Action Guidance
• Part IV Moral Psychology and Particular Virtues
• Notes
• References
• Index