Olberding, Amy, Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person Is That

Abstract

Philosophers dissatisfied with the “moral manual” style of the Analects will find this book a welcome breakthrough in interpreting the text as moral theory. Many have noted the importance of exemplars in the Analects; Olberding provides a reading that draws together narratives of these exemplars and the more general and abstract comments about moral concepts, such as ren or li, into an open-ended exemplarist virtue theory, that she adapts from Linda Zagzebski’s work. The result is an insightful and thought-provoking book. Olberding’s approach is premised “on theory following the lived experience of goodness rather than serving as a precondition for it” (4). Confucius and his students share an admiration for certain exemplars, which provide a pre-theoretical foundation for the moral sensibility of the Analects. Their discussions about the why and how of exemplars and one’s responses to them lead toward moral theory, understood as “an abstract structure that aims to simplify, systematize, and justify our moral beliefs and practices” (6). In Olberding’s account, exemplars are not merely pedagogically useful illustrations or examples of prior moral beliefs or reasoning; such a role would have neither sequential nor conceptual priority. Nor are exemplars in the Analects merely the beginnings of moral reasoning that moves from the particular to the general without conceptually grounding or structuring the resulting theory. Having sequential without conceptual priority does not make the exemplars any less dispensable once the more general reflection of theory is attained. According to Olberding, exemplars in the Analects have both sequential and conceptual priority. In the Analects’s account of goodness and moral improvement, exemplars are indispensable, and the admiration they elicit and the emulation process structure the resulting moral theory of exemplarism. What recommends exemplarism, inter alia, is the way it dispenses with the need to apologize for the Analects’ “silences” about human nature, human flourishing, and in a more complicated manner, ren. Most virtue ethics are founded on some account of Dao (2013) 12:261–265 DOI 10.1007/s11712-013-9321-6