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Thesis Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea

Ji-woo Ryu Fellow
· 6 replies
Virtue & characterAnalyticChineseJapanese & KoreanConfucianismVirtue ethics (modern)ConfuciusKwame GyekyeMencius#comparative-ethics#confucian-ethics#relational-self#role-ethics
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Where it stands

In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification.

Here is the case. Virtue language pictures an individual who has traits, honesty or courage, which travel with her from situation to situation. The early Confucian texts mostly don't talk like that. They talk about what a son owes a father, what a ruler owes his ministers, what a younger brother owes an elder, what friends owe each other. Mencius lists the five relationships as the content of moral teaching. When Duke Jing asks about government, Confucius answers with roles: let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son. On the role-ethics reading defended by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, persons are not independently constituted individuals who then enter relationships; they are, in large part, the relationships.

A student of mine put it better than I can: "I am not the same person with my grandmother as I am with my friends, and I'm not supposed to be." On a virtue reading, that sounds like inconsistency. On a role reading, it is exactly what maturity looks like.

If that is right, then the usual three-way map of consequences, duties and virtues is missing a whole route, and putting Confucius in the virtue box makes the Confucian contribution look like a regional variant of Aristotle when it is a different idea about what a person is.

I know the virtue-ethics readers (Van Norden, Angle and others) have serious replies. Please make them.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Lin Pei-shan

    For Fellow

    I'm with Ji-woo, mostly. The test for me is what happens in a conflict. A virtue ethicist asks which trait the situation calls for. The Confucian texts ask what this relationship requires of me, here, given who I am to this person. The famous filial cases are uncomfortable precisely because the relationship outweighs what an impartial virtue of justice would demand. You can call that a virtue, but you have to stretch the word until it covers almost anything.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Vũ Quốc Bảo

    For Fellow

    A translator's footnote. In Vietnamese you cannot say "I" or "you" without choosing a kinship term: anh, chị, em, cô, chú, con. Every sentence you speak places you in a relationship to the listener. When I translate Confucian passages into French, I have to flatten all of that into "je" and "vous", and suddenly the text reads like advice to free-standing individuals about their traits. Some of the virtue reading, I suspect, is produced by the languages we translate into.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 3

  1. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Against Fellow

    I'll take the other side. The contrast works only if Aristotle is read as more individualist than he is. His human being is a political animal, friendship takes up two whole books of the Ethics, and the virtues are exercised in a city. So "independently constituted individual" is a modern picture, not an Aristotelian one.

    And there is text on the other side in the Analects too. "The gentleman is not a vessel" (2.12) is usually read as saying the junzi is not defined by a single function. Ren, whatever it is, is something Confucius praises or withholds about people across all their roles. That looks like an excellence of the person, not a list of role requirements.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Kwame Asante

    Against Fellow

    From Accra, a warning that applies to both your tradition and mine. Ubuntu is often stated as "a person is a person through other persons", and Menkiti read it strongly: personhood is achieved through community. Gyekye answered with what he called moderate communitarianism, because the strong version leaves no standing for the person who thinks the community is wrong.

    Role ethics faces the same dissenter problem. If I just am my roles, from where do I criticise a role that is failing me? The Confucian texts do have resources: the Analects tells a son to remonstrate gently with his parents. But that resource looks like an independent standard of rightness, which is what the virtue reading says is there all along.

  3. Femke Bosman

    Against Fellow

    Against, from a feminist angle. Historically the role structure included the husband-wife relationship in a very unequal form, and women's obligations were described almost entirely through roles assigned to them. Care ethicists face a similar challenge: if obligations come from relationships, we still need a way to say when a relationship is unjust. Whichever label wins, a role ethics needs that critical standard, and I would want to see where it comes from before calling it the best idea.

    Helpful · 2

Other replies

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    Kenneth and Kwame, I concede more than I expected to. 2.12 is a good text against the pure role reading, and the dissenter problem is real. Where I still stand: the classification should not be decided by which box is easiest to teach. A hybrid "role-sensitive virtue" reading may be the most accurate, but then we should say openly that relationality changes what virtue means, rather than treating it as a footnote.

    Helpful · 1