How a Confucian Perspective Reclaims Moral Substance: An Introduction

Abstract

What does a Confucian perspective bring to applied ethics? To begin with, as these essays show, Confucian moral experience has the promise of breaking free of the sterile and incomplete account of concrete moral problems that has become salient in the West, especially following the Enlightenment. Confucian thought relocates the context of moral reflection from what is taken for granted in contemporary, secular, post-traditional Western moral accounts to a context within which tradition discloses moral norms. In the latter, applied ethics is just that: it is primarily the task of applying an ethics, bringing general and abstract moral principles to bear on particular moral issues. For example, in the shadow of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) account of morality, or, for that matter, the accounts of morality by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), it often appears appropriate to apply a universal moral rule to concrete moral issues. In the process, ethics is bifurcated into general theoretical reflections that stand over against practical conduct, which is dependent on the first from which it takes universal principles, or at least middle-level principles, in order to address concrete cases and circumstances. The idea is that if one could only get the general moral principles right, then all one needs to know is which principles or rules to apply to what concrete issues. The problem is that matters may be the reverse. It may be the concrete that actually guides moral choices, while the abstract is either one-sided and incomplete or at best a general summary of the concrete. Some in the modern West have understood that appeals to abstract moral principles are one-sided and incomplete, indeed inappropriate. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), surely no Confucian, realized that the project of an abstract morality goes aground on the circumstance that abstract moral rationality is not sufficient to supply adequate substantive moral guidance (The Philosophy of Right, §§134–135). The character of the moral life and of concrete moral obligations cannot be derived just from applying universal moral rules to Dao (2010) 9:3–9 DOI 10.1007/s11712-009-9153-6