圖書描述
The essays collected in this volume establish Confucian role ethics as a term of art in the contemporary ethical discourse. The holistic philosophy presented here is grounded in the primacy of relationality and a narrative understanding of person, and is a challenge to a foundational liberal individualism that has defined persons as discrete, autonomous, rational, free, and often self-interested agents. Confucian role ethics begins from a relationally constituted conception of person, takes family roles and relations as the entry point for developing moral competence, invokes moral imagination and the growth in relations that it can inspire as the substance of human morality, and entails a human-centered, atheistic religiousness that stands in sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions.
《倫理的重塑：當代社會的新道德視野》 導言：時代的呼喚與倫理的睏境 在二十一世紀的今天，我們正身處一個前所未有的技術爆炸、全球化加速、以及社會結構深刻變遷的時代。舊有的道德規範在快速流動的現實麵前顯得搖搖欲墜，傳統的倫理學框架——無論是根植於義務論的堅硬規則，還是基於後果論的靈活計算——似乎都難以完全捕捉和應對當代社會所麵臨的復雜性與模糊性。從人工智能的崛起對人類主體性的挑戰，到氣候變化對跨代際責任的拷問；從數字隱私的侵蝕對個人自主權的威脅，到身份政治的多元化對社會凝聚力的考驗，我們迫切需要一種更具彈性、更貼近人類實踐的道德視野。 本書旨在提供一次深刻的倫理學探索之旅，它不試圖提供一個放之四海而皆準的終極答案，而是緻力於構建一個審視當代道德睏境的全新分析工具和實踐框架。我們相信，真正的道德生活並非僅僅是對既定規則的服從，而是在不斷變化的情境中，通過培養特定的內在品質和關係導嚮的智慧，實現人與人、人與世界和諧共存的過程。 第一部分：超越規則與結果——對主流倫理學的批判性反思 本書的開篇聚焦於對二十世紀占據主導地位的兩大倫理思潮——康德式的義務論與功利主義的後果論——進行細緻的剖析與批判。我們承認這些理論在曆史上為確立普遍性道德原則所作齣的巨大貢獻，但同時也指齣瞭它們在麵對復雜實踐時的局限性。 一、 規則的僵化與情境的消解： 義務論的強大在於其對普遍性原則的堅持，然而，當麵對“兩難睏境”——例如，在必須做齣選擇的衝突性義務麵前——純粹的規則往往顯得無能為力，甚至導緻不近人情的僵硬裁決。本書探討瞭這種機械化應用可能如何扼殺道德直覺和對特殊情境的敏感性。 二、 效用的計算與價值的扁平化： 後果論，尤其在現代形式中，試圖用量化的方式來衡量幸福或福利的總和。我們深入剖析瞭“計算的悖論”：人類經驗的豐富性和復雜性是否真的可以通過單一的效用指標來衡量？這種過度依賴預測和量化的傾嚮，是否會使得那些難以量化的價值（如尊嚴、意義、忠誠）在道德權衡中被係統性地邊緣化？ 三、 主體性的碎片化： 我們進一步討論瞭當代社會對“理性主體”的預設如何與其他經驗現實産生脫節。在後現代思潮的影響下，統一、自主、自洽的道德行為主體形象受到瞭挑戰。我們需要一種更貼近真實人類經驗的倫理學，它能容納情感、脆弱性、以及主體間性的復雜性。 第二部分：實踐中的美德與能力——重拾“人之為德”的維度 在對主流框架進行審視之後，本書將視角轉嚮那些關注“行為者”而非僅僅是“行為”的倫理傳統，並試圖將其現代化、係統化，以應對當代挑戰。 四、 適應性與完善性： 本部分的核心是探討“德性”（Virtues）在當代實踐中的意義。德性不再被視為一種靜態的、與生俱來的特質，而是一種需要在特定社會-曆史脈絡中不斷學習、培養和實踐的“能力”（Capacities）。我們引入瞭“道德敏銳性”（Moral Sensitivity）的概念，強調一個人識彆和迴應道德情境的能力，這遠超齣瞭僅僅理解規則的能力。 五、 智慧的實踐性與情境判斷： 亞裏士多德所強調的“實踐智慧”（Phronesis）在本書中獲得瞭新的闡釋。在信息爆炸和不確定性彌漫的時代，實踐智慧體現為一種在不完備信息下進行高質量判斷的能力。這種智慧不是抽象的知識，而是通過大量的實踐、反思和與他人的互動中沉澱下來的、關於“此刻應如何行事”的直覺與判斷力的結閤。我們考察瞭這種智慧在醫學倫理、商業決策和公共政策製定中的體現。 六、 關係場域中的道德養成： 道德的發生地並非孤立的個人內心，而是人與人相互聯係的網絡中。本書強調瞭社群、製度和文化環境對個體道德形成的關鍵作用。我們探討瞭如何設計“道德支持性環境”，使人們能夠在日常互動中自然而然地培養齣諸如責任感、同情心和公正感。 第三部分：構建麵嚮未來的倫理生態 本書的後半部分將理論探索具體化，聚焦於當代最具挑戰性的幾個領域，展示如何運用這種以實踐和關係為核心的倫理視野來指導行動。 七、 技術倫理的深層介入： 麵對算法偏見、數據倫理和超人類主義的議題，僅僅依賴“用戶隱私保護”或“技術中立”的論調已顯不足。我們主張，技術的設計者和使用者必須內化一種關於“人類福祉的整體觀”，審視技術在多大程度上會侵蝕或增強人類的實踐能力和復雜關係。這要求技術人員不僅是工程師，更要是審慎的道德規劃師。 八、 全球化下的跨文化責任： 麵對全球性的環境危機和經濟不平等，傳統的民族國傢框架下的義務論顯得力不從心。本書提齣，跨文化語境下的道德實踐依賴於一種“謙遜的傾聽”——即承認自身道德視角的有限性，並努力理解他者的生活世界，從而在差異中尋找可以共同承擔的、麵嚮未來的責任基礎。 九、 倫理學的公共角色： 最終，本書呼籲倫理學走齣學院的象牙塔，迴歸其作為社會“良知”的公共角色。這要求倫理學傢不僅要進行精密的概念分析，更要具備將深刻的道德洞察轉化為清晰、有力且具有說服力的公共話語的能力，從而引導公眾對復雜議題進行有深度的反思和建設性的對話。 結語：邁嚮持續的道德探詢 《倫理的重塑》並非一本提供靜態答案的教科書，而是一份邀請函——邀請讀者參與到一場持續的、充滿挑戰的道德探詢之中。它倡導的道德生活是一種動態的、關係性的、且始終指嚮“如何更好地存在於這個世界”的實踐。在這個意義上，真正的道德成熟，是學會帶著智慧和同情心，去應對每一個獨特而無法預知的明天。
著者信息
作者簡介
Henry Rosemont Jr.
Dr. Henry Rosemont Jr. is George B. & Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at Brown University.
Roger T. Ames
Dr. Roger T. Ames is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i, and Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University.
Henry Rosemont Jr.
Dr. Henry Rosemont Jr. is George B. & Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at Brown University.
Roger T. Ames
Dr. Roger T. Ames is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i, and Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University.
圖書目錄
Introduction
Henry Rosemont, Jr. / Roger T. Ames
On Translation & Interpretation (With Special Reference to Classical Chinese)
Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Rights-Bearing Individuals and Role-Bearing Persons
Henry Rosemont, Jr. / Roger T. Ames
Family Reverence (xiao) as the Source of Consummatory Conduct (ren)
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Family Reverence (xiao 孝) in the Analects: Confucian Role Ethics and the Dynamics of Intergenerational Transmission
Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Travelling through Time with Family and Culture: Confucian Meditations
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Were the Early Confucians Virtuous?
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
From Kupperman’s Character Ethics to Confucian Role Ethics: Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again
Roger T. Ames
Travelling Together with Gravitas: The Intergenerational Transmission of Confucian Culture
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Henry Rosemont, Jr. / Roger T. Ames
On Translation & Interpretation (With Special Reference to Classical Chinese)
Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Rights-Bearing Individuals and Role-Bearing Persons
Henry Rosemont, Jr. / Roger T. Ames
Family Reverence (xiao) as the Source of Consummatory Conduct (ren)
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Family Reverence (xiao 孝) in the Analects: Confucian Role Ethics and the Dynamics of Intergenerational Transmission
Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Travelling through Time with Family and Culture: Confucian Meditations
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
Were the Early Confucians Virtuous?
Roger T. Ames / Henry Rosemont, Jr.
From Kupperman’s Character Ethics to Confucian Role Ethics: Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again
Roger T. Ames
Travelling Together with Gravitas: The Intergenerational Transmission of Confucian Culture
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
圖書序言
Introduction(Extract)
It is indisputable that there is much wrong with the world today. Many people of good will think the problems are basically political and economic, but both of us believe that the politics and economics are embedded in a conceptual framework of moralities grounded in one type of foundational individualism or another, none of which are even capable of addressing those problems any longer, much less contribute to their solutions. Thus we believe that new moralities are needed (containing some very old elements), with intellectual and psychological resources that more closely resemble the hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations of actual people than the deracinated individuals who currently populate our patterns of moral thinking. For us, a role ethics largely inspired by the canons of classical Confucian philosophy, suitably modified for our modern sensibilities, presents one such conceptual framework for grounding a morality appropriate for the present day. And more than that, such a role ethic can appeal to what are referred to as liberals and conservatives alike, with room as well for both the faithful and the skeptics, proffering as it does a vision of the good life for human beings that can provide useful guidelines for addressing our political, economic, environmental – and perhaps even spiritual – problems, in a more cooperative manner, without any necessary theological grounding.
That we are all social creatures, strongly influenced by the others with whom we interact, has been acknowledged broadly by philosophers of all persuasions. But within our classical and modern discourse, there are reasons why this social dimension has been marginalized and rarely seen as being of the essence of our humanity at the moral and political (and ontological) level. On this view, our social selves cannot be of compelling worth because our concrete circumstances are in an important sense accidental in that we have exercised no control over them – that is, we are not responsible for who our parents are, the native languages we speak, our ethnicity, and so forth. Consequently, what does give human beings their primary worth, their dignity, their integrity, and their value – and what must command the respect of all – is their ability to act purposively and to exercise their capacity for self-determination, that is, their autonomy. And of course, in order for human beings to be truly autonomous, they must neither be coerced nor governed by instinct or passion. That is, they must be free and rational in the choices that they make. But this view of human beings is not the only one that can accord dignity and respect to everyone.
The Genesis of Confucian Role Ethics
We both came to Confucian role ethics as an alternative to autonomous individualism through our study of classical Confucian texts, and then later when we worked closely together over a number of years on Confucian translation and interpretation projects. The concept of role ethics had its genesis in a paper Rosemont wrote in 1991 for a Festschrift in honor of Herbert Fingarette wherein he suggested that seeing the Chinese as flesh and blood role-bearers rather than potential candidates to be abstract rights-holders might give Western-trained philosophers a better background for reading early Confucian texts. Ames then began to work with the idea for developing an ethics of roles in some depth, contextualizing it within the centrality of family as the governing metaphor in Chinese culture. Rosemont then picked up on Ames’s discussions of family in his search for an appropriate English vocabulary to describe such a morality since it was without counterpart in the history of Western ethics. And Rosemont further addressed his cudgel to retrofit the Chinese lexicon and thereby allow the early Confucians to speak more clearly and faithfully in their own voices while at the same time expressing views applicable to our present conditions. Ames developed the notion of paranomasia to explain how the Chinese lexicon makes its meaning, and Rosemont moved from thinking of concepts and words to think more of concept-clusters, especially, but not confined to terms central for philosophers, especially as they are seen as definitive of ethics, politics and religion. It is largely against this background of the three shared interrelated themes – role ethics, family, and language/translation – that our collaborative efforts are best understood: two textual translations (the Analects of Confucius and the Chinese Classic of Family Reverence), our joint articles, and two separately authored books, Ames’s Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011) and Rosemont’s Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family and Religion (2015).
At first we attempted to articulate Confucian role ethics somewhat unreflectively in terms that could conceivably be descriptive of free, autonomous individual selves as well as role-bearers – even though we became increasingly suspicious of the former – especially as we embarked upon our translation of the Analects. Our suspicions were confirmed fairly quickly after we began the work, encountering two major difficulties: (1) while passages in the text pertaining to the conduct of human beings as role-bearers abound, we could find none that describe the activities of these role-bearing persons in terms of freedom or autonomy, and very few in which any of the participants are not discussed in terms of close relationships to others; and (2) as we continued to think about and develop the notion of role ethics, and began to speak of human “beings” as always “becoming,” we found less work for the concept of the free, autonomous, and rationally choosing individual self to do, or even to be. Instead, it increasingly seemed to us that describing the proper performances of persons in their various roles and the appropriate attitude expressed in such roles in their relationship to others with whom they are engaged, sufficed to articulate an ethics that seemed both to give the greatest consistency and coherence to the text, and also to conform to our own everyday experience much better than those abstract accounts reflected in the writings of the heroes of Western moral philosophy, past and present.
By the time we came to translate the Chinese Classic of Family Reverence, we were willing to jettison the concept of the free and autonomous individual altogether for several reasons. First, we became increasingly puzzled when trying to make clear sense of what it would mean to be a free and autonomous individual self – apart from the habits of an old psychology – supported in our growing doubts by much recent work in the neurosciences and social psychology, as well as in philosophy. Second, we were able to begin work with both the Chinese and English languages to try to capture the vision of Confucius as we saw it without doing violence to the text, and to explicate more generally what an ethics of roles might be like.
Third, we came to the philosophical position, and began arguing for the idea that an insistence on the paramouncy of individual freedom in ethical and political theories – and instantiated in democratic societies – was purchased at the expense of equality and social justice, as libertarians have been (unintentionally) making increasingly clear, especially in the U.S. Consequently, we found that all moral arguments for equality and social justice grounded in the concept of individual freedom could be met by counter arguments equally moral. Moreover, although our interpreting the Analects as a role ethics met with some initial skepticism, we have not been persuaded by any of the critiques of what might be wrong with our translations of the text or our interpretations of it, and that has held for our Chinese Classic of Family Reverence efforts as well. Further, if we are correct in our claim that championing the freedom and autonomy of individuals has come at the expense of social justice, then clearly we would not be doing the early Confucians any favors by attributing a concept of autonomous individualism to them.
And finally, a fourth reason for abandoning the fiction of the autonomous individual is that it seemed increasingly to be the case that all of the important good work done by deontological, consequentialist, or virtue ethics based on individualism could also be captured by an ethics of roles, and hence Confucius did not have to be seen as a marginal, second-class moral philosopher. The concept of human beings as free, autonomous individuals could thus be dispensed with by one pass of Ockham’s razor.
Believing that every society worth living in must be characterized by a robust sense of social justice and a fair measure of economic equality, we have thus been led in recent work to abandon altogether every ethical theory grounded in what we have come to call a default “foundational individualism” that would include care ethics, Marxism, and the communal anarchism of Peter Kropotkin no less than the strictly individualist version of Max Stirner, and almost all other philosophers in between, otherwise as disparate as Rousseau, Rawls, Sandel, Mac-Intyre, Susan Okin, and Charles Taylor. If we are correct that all ethics and politics grounded in the freedom and autonomy of individuals hinders significantly the achievement of social justice in a society, and if many of the horrors confronting the world today have the social injustices of poverty and inequality as their root cause, then, to repeat, it becomes clear to us that we do no favors to the early Confucians to ascribe to them an individualist foundation to their thinking, for they then can have little to say about solving contemporary world problems, and we would be reduced to reading the Analects for its antiquarian interest.
We may be wrong in some or all of these beliefs. It may be the case that there is an ethics and politics grounded in individualism that can indeed claim the moral high ground for social justice and wealth redistribution, and we would urge those colleagues so persuaded to continue to attempt to develop their ideas. But because we believe that foundational individualism is a major cause of our contemporary malaise we are not optimistic that any theory accepting it can contribute to its cure; thus far we have not seen any plausible candidates, and until we do, we will continue to push the envelope for an ethics and politics grounded in the roles lived by interrelated persons, whose sole constant is change.
Why not Autonomous Individualism?
The need for us to pursue what we might alternatively call a narrative notion of person arises from the fact that the concept of the autonomous individual underlying modern moral and political philosophy has come to have at least four pernicious effects. First, it enables libertarian capitalists, growing in their numbers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, to claim moral purchase in justifying an unfettered human freedom as the basis and ultimate source of political justice, and on that basis, to then reject any conception of justice that retards such freedom as fundamentally immoral. The notion of the individual so defined thus continues to provide a moral basis for a more or less laissez-faire global free market capitalist economy that is compounding exponentially the gross inequities in human well-being within, between, and beyond modern nation states. And as long as the conservatives, liberals, communitarians, and socialists alike all continue to ground their objections to libertarianism in their own version of the same autonomous individual, the libertarian will always be able to counter their challenges and remain above moral reproach.
The second related reason that the concept of the autonomous individual is pernicious is its monopoly on the consciousness of Western intellectuals. The foundational individual is entrenched at a depth that makes it almost impossible for us to see any alternative to an individualism so defined except that of a more or less faceless collectivism in a decidedly post-Marxist era. It has become extraordinarily difficult within our political and ethical discourse to view human beings (including ourselves, of course) in any way other than as free, autonomous, and rational (and usually self-interested) individuals, making it equally difficult to act on any other basis. Indeed, the assumption that the essential characteristics and actions of human beings are best understood by regarding them as fundamentally free, autonomous, and rational individuals has in the sense of brooking no alternatives, become a default, uncritical ideology. And from this ideological perspective, social relations and actions will be seen as justifiable – that is, as being just – only to the extent that they are agreed to by individuals so described.
Thus, within this ideology, community is not the natural state of and for human beings, but only the artificial construct of otherwise discrete individuals. And again within this contractarian ideology, while procedure and retribution play a dominant if not definitive role in our regnant conceptions of justice, any effort to pursue social justice that challenges personal autonomy becomes contentiously dismissed as European “socialism,” and any gesture made in the direction of restorative justice will likely be perceived as undeserving of such a description. And so long as this ideology of the individual holds us in its orbit, it will be impossible to be objective or impartial in evaluating any conception of justice or of any notion of the human being that underlies such a concept of justice that has the temerity to take issue with autonomous individualism.
A third corollary of foundational individualism is that ironically, it does not make good on its promises. Stated simply, acting to advance one’s own selfinterest at the expense of others seldom serves those same interests, and acting altruistically to serve the interests of others at one’s own expense in the end gives the other very little. Drinking a fine bottle of wine by oneself is not as enjoyable as sharing it with good friends, and to the extent the self-abnegation is entailed by altruism, the “other” receives only diminishing returns. We will see in a Confucian conception of the relationally constituted conception of a person, a good teacher and a good student can only emerge together, and your welfare and the welfare of you neighbor are coterminous and mutually entailing. The fourth pernicious effect of an entrenched individualism and perhaps its most visible detriment is that there is an aura of the self-fulfilling prophecy that haloes this ideology: The more we have come to see ourselves as autonomous individuals contracting with others in service to our own self-interests, the more we have come to act as, and ultimately, to become just such individuals. The degree of angst, alienation, and violence that has become characteristic of contemporary urban living is a direct consequence of our dysfunctional families and our failure to transform mere associated living into communities of shared values and interests.
Why Confucian Role Ethics?
The starting point is simple. In Confucian role ethics, association is a fact. We do not live our lives inside our skins. Everything we do – physically, psychologically, socially – is resolutely transactional and collaborative. And the roles we live are simply the way in which this fact of association is further stipulated and specified. Confucian role ethics appeals to specific roles for stipulating the forms that association take within lives lived in family and community – that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, but once stipulated, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. One is a good or bad spouse, and a good or bad teacher. Whereas mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of this associative condition as the highest human achievement.
Confucian role ethics has a holistic and compelling vision of the moral life that is grounded in and is responsible to our empirical experience. First, Confucian role ethics would insist on the primacy of vital relationships, and would preclude any notion of final individuality. Personal discreteness is a conceptual abstraction and strict autonomy a misleading fiction; association is a fact. And giving up the notion of a superordinate “self,” far from surrendering one’s personal uniqueness, in fact, nhances it. That is, the “natural kinds” talk that usually stands behind claims about a shared human nature and a concomitant essential self mitigates the degree of difference we find in a Confucian notion of person where person is constituted by a dynamic manifold of always specific relations.
Secondly, Confucian role ethics resists the uncritical substance ontology underlying a conception of agency that requires a separation between the agent of conduct and the conduct itself. The notion of ren仁that is central to Confucian role ethics entails no such agency/action dichotomy. Ren requires a narrative rather than an analytic understanding of person. And ren is cultivated by correlating one’s own conduct with those models close at hand rather than by acting in concert with some abstract moral principles. It is for this reason that it is often unclear whether ren denotes a consummate person or the conduct of such a person, or like its cognate ren人, whether the referent is singular or plural. Ren is an open-ended generalization made off of particular historical accomplishments of consummate conduct rather than referencing some innate and essential element that is characteristic of all members of the set called human “beings.” Indeed, ren is a gerundive notion – a verbal noun – that is descriptive of consummate “person-ing.”
Thirdly, Confucian role ethicists appreciate the dramatic role that body has as integral to achieving personal identity and consummate conduct – the body as the root or trunk through which human conduct, being nourished and grown, becomes refulgent. It is no coincidence that the simplified graph for body體is體 – that is, quite literally, the graphic denotation of the root and stem of a person. The body – always a collaboration between person and world, between organism and environment – is at once carnal and vital, seen and lived, receptive and responsive. Not only does the world shape the body, but through our bodily sensorium we structure, conceptualize, and theorize our world of experience. Indeed, it is because the body is the medium through which our ancestors and their culture live on in us that keeping one’s body intact has been the first among the several precepts of family reverence (xiao 孝).
Fourthly, Confucian role ethics emphasizes the vital role that the process of moral imagination plays in consummate thinking and living. In Confucian role ethics, it is our educated imagination that, drawing upon all of our human resources, defers action until we can conjure forth the full range of possibilities that allows for optimal growth in our relationships. And said plainly, it is this growth in relationships that is the very substance of morality.
And finally, Confucian role ethics does not compete with virtue ethics or any other ethical theory but is rather a vision of the moral life that resists the theoretical/practical divide. When we read the Confucian canons, the expectation is that while we certainly can appropriate a cluster of terms that enable a critical reflection on our conduct, we ought, more fundamentally, to be inspired by the exhortations and the models of the cultural heroes to become better people.
It is indisputable that there is much wrong with the world today. Many people of good will think the problems are basically political and economic, but both of us believe that the politics and economics are embedded in a conceptual framework of moralities grounded in one type of foundational individualism or another, none of which are even capable of addressing those problems any longer, much less contribute to their solutions. Thus we believe that new moralities are needed (containing some very old elements), with intellectual and psychological resources that more closely resemble the hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations of actual people than the deracinated individuals who currently populate our patterns of moral thinking. For us, a role ethics largely inspired by the canons of classical Confucian philosophy, suitably modified for our modern sensibilities, presents one such conceptual framework for grounding a morality appropriate for the present day. And more than that, such a role ethic can appeal to what are referred to as liberals and conservatives alike, with room as well for both the faithful and the skeptics, proffering as it does a vision of the good life for human beings that can provide useful guidelines for addressing our political, economic, environmental – and perhaps even spiritual – problems, in a more cooperative manner, without any necessary theological grounding.
That we are all social creatures, strongly influenced by the others with whom we interact, has been acknowledged broadly by philosophers of all persuasions. But within our classical and modern discourse, there are reasons why this social dimension has been marginalized and rarely seen as being of the essence of our humanity at the moral and political (and ontological) level. On this view, our social selves cannot be of compelling worth because our concrete circumstances are in an important sense accidental in that we have exercised no control over them – that is, we are not responsible for who our parents are, the native languages we speak, our ethnicity, and so forth. Consequently, what does give human beings their primary worth, their dignity, their integrity, and their value – and what must command the respect of all – is their ability to act purposively and to exercise their capacity for self-determination, that is, their autonomy. And of course, in order for human beings to be truly autonomous, they must neither be coerced nor governed by instinct or passion. That is, they must be free and rational in the choices that they make. But this view of human beings is not the only one that can accord dignity and respect to everyone.
The Genesis of Confucian Role Ethics
We both came to Confucian role ethics as an alternative to autonomous individualism through our study of classical Confucian texts, and then later when we worked closely together over a number of years on Confucian translation and interpretation projects. The concept of role ethics had its genesis in a paper Rosemont wrote in 1991 for a Festschrift in honor of Herbert Fingarette wherein he suggested that seeing the Chinese as flesh and blood role-bearers rather than potential candidates to be abstract rights-holders might give Western-trained philosophers a better background for reading early Confucian texts. Ames then began to work with the idea for developing an ethics of roles in some depth, contextualizing it within the centrality of family as the governing metaphor in Chinese culture. Rosemont then picked up on Ames’s discussions of family in his search for an appropriate English vocabulary to describe such a morality since it was without counterpart in the history of Western ethics. And Rosemont further addressed his cudgel to retrofit the Chinese lexicon and thereby allow the early Confucians to speak more clearly and faithfully in their own voices while at the same time expressing views applicable to our present conditions. Ames developed the notion of paranomasia to explain how the Chinese lexicon makes its meaning, and Rosemont moved from thinking of concepts and words to think more of concept-clusters, especially, but not confined to terms central for philosophers, especially as they are seen as definitive of ethics, politics and religion. It is largely against this background of the three shared interrelated themes – role ethics, family, and language/translation – that our collaborative efforts are best understood: two textual translations (the Analects of Confucius and the Chinese Classic of Family Reverence), our joint articles, and two separately authored books, Ames’s Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011) and Rosemont’s Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family and Religion (2015).
At first we attempted to articulate Confucian role ethics somewhat unreflectively in terms that could conceivably be descriptive of free, autonomous individual selves as well as role-bearers – even though we became increasingly suspicious of the former – especially as we embarked upon our translation of the Analects. Our suspicions were confirmed fairly quickly after we began the work, encountering two major difficulties: (1) while passages in the text pertaining to the conduct of human beings as role-bearers abound, we could find none that describe the activities of these role-bearing persons in terms of freedom or autonomy, and very few in which any of the participants are not discussed in terms of close relationships to others; and (2) as we continued to think about and develop the notion of role ethics, and began to speak of human “beings” as always “becoming,” we found less work for the concept of the free, autonomous, and rationally choosing individual self to do, or even to be. Instead, it increasingly seemed to us that describing the proper performances of persons in their various roles and the appropriate attitude expressed in such roles in their relationship to others with whom they are engaged, sufficed to articulate an ethics that seemed both to give the greatest consistency and coherence to the text, and also to conform to our own everyday experience much better than those abstract accounts reflected in the writings of the heroes of Western moral philosophy, past and present.
By the time we came to translate the Chinese Classic of Family Reverence, we were willing to jettison the concept of the free and autonomous individual altogether for several reasons. First, we became increasingly puzzled when trying to make clear sense of what it would mean to be a free and autonomous individual self – apart from the habits of an old psychology – supported in our growing doubts by much recent work in the neurosciences and social psychology, as well as in philosophy. Second, we were able to begin work with both the Chinese and English languages to try to capture the vision of Confucius as we saw it without doing violence to the text, and to explicate more generally what an ethics of roles might be like.
Third, we came to the philosophical position, and began arguing for the idea that an insistence on the paramouncy of individual freedom in ethical and political theories – and instantiated in democratic societies – was purchased at the expense of equality and social justice, as libertarians have been (unintentionally) making increasingly clear, especially in the U.S. Consequently, we found that all moral arguments for equality and social justice grounded in the concept of individual freedom could be met by counter arguments equally moral. Moreover, although our interpreting the Analects as a role ethics met with some initial skepticism, we have not been persuaded by any of the critiques of what might be wrong with our translations of the text or our interpretations of it, and that has held for our Chinese Classic of Family Reverence efforts as well. Further, if we are correct in our claim that championing the freedom and autonomy of individuals has come at the expense of social justice, then clearly we would not be doing the early Confucians any favors by attributing a concept of autonomous individualism to them.
And finally, a fourth reason for abandoning the fiction of the autonomous individual is that it seemed increasingly to be the case that all of the important good work done by deontological, consequentialist, or virtue ethics based on individualism could also be captured by an ethics of roles, and hence Confucius did not have to be seen as a marginal, second-class moral philosopher. The concept of human beings as free, autonomous individuals could thus be dispensed with by one pass of Ockham’s razor.
Believing that every society worth living in must be characterized by a robust sense of social justice and a fair measure of economic equality, we have thus been led in recent work to abandon altogether every ethical theory grounded in what we have come to call a default “foundational individualism” that would include care ethics, Marxism, and the communal anarchism of Peter Kropotkin no less than the strictly individualist version of Max Stirner, and almost all other philosophers in between, otherwise as disparate as Rousseau, Rawls, Sandel, Mac-Intyre, Susan Okin, and Charles Taylor. If we are correct that all ethics and politics grounded in the freedom and autonomy of individuals hinders significantly the achievement of social justice in a society, and if many of the horrors confronting the world today have the social injustices of poverty and inequality as their root cause, then, to repeat, it becomes clear to us that we do no favors to the early Confucians to ascribe to them an individualist foundation to their thinking, for they then can have little to say about solving contemporary world problems, and we would be reduced to reading the Analects for its antiquarian interest.
We may be wrong in some or all of these beliefs. It may be the case that there is an ethics and politics grounded in individualism that can indeed claim the moral high ground for social justice and wealth redistribution, and we would urge those colleagues so persuaded to continue to attempt to develop their ideas. But because we believe that foundational individualism is a major cause of our contemporary malaise we are not optimistic that any theory accepting it can contribute to its cure; thus far we have not seen any plausible candidates, and until we do, we will continue to push the envelope for an ethics and politics grounded in the roles lived by interrelated persons, whose sole constant is change.
Why not Autonomous Individualism?
The need for us to pursue what we might alternatively call a narrative notion of person arises from the fact that the concept of the autonomous individual underlying modern moral and political philosophy has come to have at least four pernicious effects. First, it enables libertarian capitalists, growing in their numbers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, to claim moral purchase in justifying an unfettered human freedom as the basis and ultimate source of political justice, and on that basis, to then reject any conception of justice that retards such freedom as fundamentally immoral. The notion of the individual so defined thus continues to provide a moral basis for a more or less laissez-faire global free market capitalist economy that is compounding exponentially the gross inequities in human well-being within, between, and beyond modern nation states. And as long as the conservatives, liberals, communitarians, and socialists alike all continue to ground their objections to libertarianism in their own version of the same autonomous individual, the libertarian will always be able to counter their challenges and remain above moral reproach.
The second related reason that the concept of the autonomous individual is pernicious is its monopoly on the consciousness of Western intellectuals. The foundational individual is entrenched at a depth that makes it almost impossible for us to see any alternative to an individualism so defined except that of a more or less faceless collectivism in a decidedly post-Marxist era. It has become extraordinarily difficult within our political and ethical discourse to view human beings (including ourselves, of course) in any way other than as free, autonomous, and rational (and usually self-interested) individuals, making it equally difficult to act on any other basis. Indeed, the assumption that the essential characteristics and actions of human beings are best understood by regarding them as fundamentally free, autonomous, and rational individuals has in the sense of brooking no alternatives, become a default, uncritical ideology. And from this ideological perspective, social relations and actions will be seen as justifiable – that is, as being just – only to the extent that they are agreed to by individuals so described.
Thus, within this ideology, community is not the natural state of and for human beings, but only the artificial construct of otherwise discrete individuals. And again within this contractarian ideology, while procedure and retribution play a dominant if not definitive role in our regnant conceptions of justice, any effort to pursue social justice that challenges personal autonomy becomes contentiously dismissed as European “socialism,” and any gesture made in the direction of restorative justice will likely be perceived as undeserving of such a description. And so long as this ideology of the individual holds us in its orbit, it will be impossible to be objective or impartial in evaluating any conception of justice or of any notion of the human being that underlies such a concept of justice that has the temerity to take issue with autonomous individualism.
A third corollary of foundational individualism is that ironically, it does not make good on its promises. Stated simply, acting to advance one’s own selfinterest at the expense of others seldom serves those same interests, and acting altruistically to serve the interests of others at one’s own expense in the end gives the other very little. Drinking a fine bottle of wine by oneself is not as enjoyable as sharing it with good friends, and to the extent the self-abnegation is entailed by altruism, the “other” receives only diminishing returns. We will see in a Confucian conception of the relationally constituted conception of a person, a good teacher and a good student can only emerge together, and your welfare and the welfare of you neighbor are coterminous and mutually entailing. The fourth pernicious effect of an entrenched individualism and perhaps its most visible detriment is that there is an aura of the self-fulfilling prophecy that haloes this ideology: The more we have come to see ourselves as autonomous individuals contracting with others in service to our own self-interests, the more we have come to act as, and ultimately, to become just such individuals. The degree of angst, alienation, and violence that has become characteristic of contemporary urban living is a direct consequence of our dysfunctional families and our failure to transform mere associated living into communities of shared values and interests.
Why Confucian Role Ethics?
The starting point is simple. In Confucian role ethics, association is a fact. We do not live our lives inside our skins. Everything we do – physically, psychologically, socially – is resolutely transactional and collaborative. And the roles we live are simply the way in which this fact of association is further stipulated and specified. Confucian role ethics appeals to specific roles for stipulating the forms that association take within lives lived in family and community – that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, but once stipulated, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. One is a good or bad spouse, and a good or bad teacher. Whereas mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of this associative condition as the highest human achievement.
Confucian role ethics has a holistic and compelling vision of the moral life that is grounded in and is responsible to our empirical experience. First, Confucian role ethics would insist on the primacy of vital relationships, and would preclude any notion of final individuality. Personal discreteness is a conceptual abstraction and strict autonomy a misleading fiction; association is a fact. And giving up the notion of a superordinate “self,” far from surrendering one’s personal uniqueness, in fact, nhances it. That is, the “natural kinds” talk that usually stands behind claims about a shared human nature and a concomitant essential self mitigates the degree of difference we find in a Confucian notion of person where person is constituted by a dynamic manifold of always specific relations.
Secondly, Confucian role ethics resists the uncritical substance ontology underlying a conception of agency that requires a separation between the agent of conduct and the conduct itself. The notion of ren仁that is central to Confucian role ethics entails no such agency/action dichotomy. Ren requires a narrative rather than an analytic understanding of person. And ren is cultivated by correlating one’s own conduct with those models close at hand rather than by acting in concert with some abstract moral principles. It is for this reason that it is often unclear whether ren denotes a consummate person or the conduct of such a person, or like its cognate ren人, whether the referent is singular or plural. Ren is an open-ended generalization made off of particular historical accomplishments of consummate conduct rather than referencing some innate and essential element that is characteristic of all members of the set called human “beings.” Indeed, ren is a gerundive notion – a verbal noun – that is descriptive of consummate “person-ing.”
Thirdly, Confucian role ethicists appreciate the dramatic role that body has as integral to achieving personal identity and consummate conduct – the body as the root or trunk through which human conduct, being nourished and grown, becomes refulgent. It is no coincidence that the simplified graph for body體is體 – that is, quite literally, the graphic denotation of the root and stem of a person. The body – always a collaboration between person and world, between organism and environment – is at once carnal and vital, seen and lived, receptive and responsive. Not only does the world shape the body, but through our bodily sensorium we structure, conceptualize, and theorize our world of experience. Indeed, it is because the body is the medium through which our ancestors and their culture live on in us that keeping one’s body intact has been the first among the several precepts of family reverence (xiao 孝).
Fourthly, Confucian role ethics emphasizes the vital role that the process of moral imagination plays in consummate thinking and living. In Confucian role ethics, it is our educated imagination that, drawing upon all of our human resources, defers action until we can conjure forth the full range of possibilities that allows for optimal growth in our relationships. And said plainly, it is this growth in relationships that is the very substance of morality.
And finally, Confucian role ethics does not compete with virtue ethics or any other ethical theory but is rather a vision of the moral life that resists the theoretical/practical divide. When we read the Confucian canons, the expectation is that while we certainly can appropriate a cluster of terms that enable a critical reflection on our conduct, we ought, more fundamentally, to be inspired by the exhortations and the models of the cultural heroes to become better people.
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《儒傢角色倫理：21世紀的道德願景？》這個書名，用一種溫和而又充滿力量的方式，直接點齣瞭當代社會所麵臨的一個核心睏境。現代社會，信息碎片化，價值觀念多元，許多人在這種變動中感到無所適從，甚至産生道德上的迷失感。而將儒傢思想中的“角色倫理”與“21世紀的道德願景”聯係起來，無疑是一個極具創意的視角。我好奇作者將如何剖析中國傳統文化中關於人倫關係和道德實踐的智慧，並賦予它們新的生命力，使其能夠迴應我們當下所麵臨的挑戰。例如，在傢庭關係中，如何理解“孝”的現代意義？在工作場所，又該如何實踐“誠信”和“義”？這本書讓我猜測，作者會深入探討儒傢思想中關於“仁”的深層含義，以及它如何通過具體的角色實踐來得以實現。它可能提供一種不同於激進改革的、更加注重內在修養和循序漸進的道德發展路徑。我特彆期待書中能夠展現齣一種將個體行為與社會秩序緊密結閤的思考模式，以及如何在日益復雜的全球化語境下，依然保持一種深刻的人文關懷和道德自覺。這本書的題目讓我感受到一種對現實的深刻關照，它不僅僅是對過往的追溯，更是對未來的積極建構，試圖為我們在快速變化的時代提供一種精神上的錨點，以及一條通往更加美好、更加有人情味的未來社會的道德之路。
评分這本書的書名《儒傢角色倫理：21世紀的道德願景？》讓我立刻産生瞭一種想要深入瞭解其內涵的衝動。它所提齣的“道德願景”這個概念，在我看來，是這本書最核心的吸引力所在。我們生活在一個信息爆炸、價值多元甚至有些混亂的時代，各種思潮湧動，道德的界限似乎變得模糊不清，許多人都在尋找一種能夠指引方嚮的道德燈塔。而將目光投嚮源遠流長的儒傢思想，特彆是其強調的“角色倫理”，這本身就充滿瞭反思的意味。我猜想，作者會從中國傳統文化中提煉齣那些在當下仍然具有生命力的倫理原則，並嘗試將其轉化為適用於現代社會的新型道德框架。我特彆想知道，作者會如何解釋“角色”在儒傢倫理中的核心地位，以及這些角色（如父子、君臣、朋友等）是如何構建起一個穩定而有序的社會結構的。更重要的是，這本書是否能夠提供一種不同於西方個人主義道德觀的視角，來理解和處理人與人之間的關係，以及個人在集體中的位置？我期待這本書能夠展現齣一種將曆史智慧與現代需求相結閤的獨特視野，為我們理解當下的道德睏境提供新的思路，並勾勒齣一個更加積極、更加有人情味的21世紀道德藍圖，讓我們重新思考如何與他人共處，如何在復雜的社會互動中找到自己的道德坐標。
评分《儒傢角色倫理：21世紀的道德願景？》這個題目，與其說是一個簡單的書名，不如說是一個充滿哲學思辨的命題。它直接觸及瞭現代社會普遍存在的道德焦慮，以及人們對於尋找一種更具穩定性和指導性的道德體係的渴望。書名中的“願景”二字，預示著這本書可能不僅僅是對儒傢倫理的學術探討，更可能是一種對未來的展望和設想，它試圖描繪齣一幅在21世紀依然適用的道德圖景。我好奇作者將如何解讀儒傢思想中關於“修身、齊傢、治國、平天下”的邏輯鏈條，以及這種由內而外的道德實踐方式，能否幫助我們解決當下社會中諸如信任缺失、社會責任感下降等問題。特彆是“角色倫理”這一概念，它似乎指嚮瞭一種強調關係性、責任性和情境性的道德模式，這與強調普適性、抽象性原則的倫理體係有所不同。我期待書中能夠深入剖析不同社會角色所承載的道德義務，以及這些角色之間的相互依存和協調，從而構建一個更加完整和有機的道德生態。這本書的題目讓我感受到一種深刻的社會關懷，它不僅僅是研究學問，更是試圖為我們這個時代提供一種可能的精神齣路，一種能夠讓我們在紛繁復雜的世界中找到方嚮和意義的道德指引，從而為構建一個更具人情味和責任感的未來社會貢獻力量。
评分這本《儒傢角色倫理：21世紀的道德願景？》的書名本身就帶著一種引人深思的邀請。它不僅僅是陳述一個觀點，而是拋齣瞭一個問題，一個關乎我們當下社會道德睏境的深刻追問。我一直對如何在現代語境下重新解讀古老智慧抱有極大的興趣，而儒傢思想，特彆是其在人際關係和角色扮演上的精妙之處，總讓我覺得蘊含著某種尚未被充分發掘的潛力。書名中的“角色倫理”立刻抓住瞭我的注意力，它暗示瞭這本書不會僅僅停留在抽象的道德原則，而是會深入探討我們在傢庭、工作、社區等各種社會角色中所扮演的道德責任和行為規範。我尤其好奇作者將如何連接孔子、孟子等古代聖賢的思想與我們今天所麵臨的復雜倫理挑戰，例如全球化帶來的文化衝突、科技發展對人際交往的影響、以及個人主義與集體主義之間的張力。這本書的題目讓我聯想到，或許在快速變化的21世紀，我們需要的不是顛覆性的道德革命，而是迴歸到那些最基本、最穩固的人際關係原則上來，通過重新審視和實踐“仁”、“義”、“禮”、“智”、“信”，找到一條通往更和諧、更有意義的生活道路。我期待書中能夠呈現齣清晰的論證邏輯，既能展現儒傢思想的普適性，又能應對現代社會的特殊性，最終提供一套切實可行的道德指引，幫助我們理解如何在錯綜復雜的世界中成為一個更好的人，承擔起我們各自的角色所賦予的責任。
评分初見《儒傢角色倫理：21世紀的道德願景？》這個書名，便被其深刻的時代洞察力所吸引。它不僅僅是一本關於曆史文獻解讀的書，更像是一場關於我們當下及未來道德走嚮的對話。我一直認為，在科技飛速發展、社會結構劇烈變動的今天，我們對道德的理解也需要與時俱進，而簡單地照搬過往的道德規範顯然是不夠的。“角色倫理”這個提法，立刻讓我聯想到我們在生活中所扮演的各種身份——子女、父母、朋友、同事、公民等等，以及這些身份所附帶的責任和期望。這本書讓我猜測，作者會如何從中國傳統文化中，特彆是儒傢思想的精髓裏，挖掘齣那些能夠指導我們如何在現代社會中扮演好這些角色的智慧。我期待它能夠提供一種不同於西方個人主義的、更注重人與人之間關係的道德視角，幫助我們理解如何在復雜的社會網絡中找到自己的位置，並承擔起應有的義務。書名中的“21世紀的道德願景？”更是將這份期待推嚮瞭高潮，它意味著這本書不隻是對過去的梳理，更是對未來的探索，它可能是在為我們描繪一幅在科技文明與人文精神之間尋求平衡的道德藍圖，幫助我們在迷茫中找到方嚮，構建一個更加和諧、更有意義的社會。
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