Irresolvable Value Conflicts in a Conflictual World

Abstract

This chapter reveals that early Confucians saw irresolvable value conflicts as real possibilities. It starts with an overview of the ways in which contemporary scholars have described Confucianism in terms of harmony and the lack of tragedy. It then challenges these narratives by looking at several vignettes that depict moral agents confronting irresolvable value conflicts. This chapter also analyzes the notion of tragedy in an early Confucian worldview to show that early Confucians did not see values as necessarily conflicting with each other, although they accepted the possibility of tragic conflict. This means that early Confucians recognized the complexities of life such that even the highly skilled moral agent (i.e., a sage) could encounter a situation where the values at stake were incapable of being harmonized, but, at the same time, the Confucian moral agent did not see the world as necessitating conflict. The Confucian conflictual world is one of possible incongruity, where minor value conflicts may even be inevitable given the complexities of life, but values in the abstract sense are not thought to be in conflict in and of themselves. In this light, deep value conflicts such as those discussed in this chapter may rarely occur, but the fact that they can occur, and that they can occur for even the most profound people, is significant in forecasting the sentiments people have about the world they live in.