On the ethics of exporting ethics: The right to silence in Japan and the U.S.

Abstract

In The Question of Hu, Jonathan Spence tells the story of a French missionary in China in the eighteenth century, who set out to prove that certain ancient Chinese documents confirmed his idiosyncratic Christian theory of world history. (1) It is the story of a foreigner's shabby and insensitive treatment of the Chinese people encountered in his spiritual quest, and equally of a European unable to reflect on the limitations of his own intellectual cocoon. The missionary failed to exercise two types of reflection--what I shall refer to as double reflection. He failed to discern what something could mean to the Chinese, especially when at variance with his own understanding, and he was unable to contemplate the contestability of his own worldview. These are difficult abilities to cultivate, and most of us fail to some degree. Yet they are indispensable in a world of increasing communication and interdependence across cultures. When people from different ethical traditions confront one another in a practical context, what may we reasonably expect? We are most familiar with encounters in which effective control lies with one or the other party, such as the imposition of values by a dominant power or the appropriation of values by a professional elite. Neither of these involves mutual deliberation. Is deliberation across ethical traditions possible? Since the majority of my students at the Kennedy School of Government are international--with a large group drawn from Confucian countries--the question amounts to asking whether it is possible for me to engage in reasoned disputation with my students, assessing the truth of moral claims and the pros and cons of alternative views. One of the ground rules in my ethics class is that no one is permitted to say simply, This is how we do things in my country. But to what extent do we--can we--succeed in justifying our conduct to one another? If we do not reach agreement on specific principles, can we at least converge on a framework for the identification of acceptable principles? In this essay, I propose to examine a rule or practice in an culture quite antithetical to the comparable U.S. rule or practice, and show that a compelling case can be made for it--compelling, that is, to us. By compelling, I mean that even if we cannot imagine living by it ourselves, we should be able to appreciate its moral force, understanding it as an alternative mode of human flourishing. The comparison itself could constitute (or elicit) a critique of our own practice, but that is not crucial. What matters is not whether we approve of the alien practice but whether we find it morally coherent or intelligible--itself a moral judgment but less demanding than approval. Undergirding this enterprise is a wariness about dividing the world into distinct, unitary, enclosed moral spaces. That view imagines moral traditions to be like exclusive social clubs, in which everyone is a member of one or another. Each club has its own rules and its own standards of interpretation and justification--internal to itself and inaccessible to other clubs. Central concepts illuminate the meaning of morality to those within the club's boundaries but are opaque to those outside. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, claims that the features of the moral life salient to a Confucian are necessarily invisible to an Aristotelian, and vice versa. (2) Yet he concedes that traditions develop over time, so that what could not be said or grasped at one temporal stage becomes available at a later stage. Then the possibility of genuine engagement depends on which stage one is in. Instead of the social club metaphor, I prefer to regard moral traditions like schools--learning environments, each of which makes available the resources for moral understanding and criticism, including self-criticism. (I take moral conformity itself to be a reflective practice that generates criteria for its own assessment. …