具体描述
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.
《伦理的重塑：当代社会的新道德视野》 导言：时代的呼唤与伦理的困境 在二十一世纪的今天，我们正身处一个前所未有的技术爆炸、全球化加速、以及社会结构深刻变迁的时代。旧有的道德规范在快速流动的现实面前显得摇摇欲坠，传统的伦理学框架——无论是根植于义务论的坚硬规则，还是基于后果论的灵活计算——似乎都难以完全捕捉和应对当代社会所面临的复杂性与模糊性。从人工智能的崛起对人类主体性的挑战，到气候变化对跨代际责任的拷问；从数字隐私的侵蚀对个人自主权的威胁，到身份政治的多元化对社会凝聚力的考验，我们迫切需要一种更具弹性、更贴近人类实践的道德视野。 本书旨在提供一次深刻的伦理学探索之旅，它不试图提供一个放之四海而皆准的终极答案，而是致力于构建一个审视当代道德困境的全新分析工具和实践框架。我们相信，真正的道德生活并非仅仅是对既定规则的服从，而是在不断变化的情境中，通过培养特定的内在品质和关系导向的智慧，实现人与人、人与世界和谐共存的过程。 第一部分：超越规则与结果——对主流伦理学的批判性反思 本书的开篇聚焦于对二十世纪占据主导地位的两大伦理思潮——康德式的义务论与功利主义的后果论——进行细致的剖析与批判。我们承认这些理论在历史上为确立普遍性道德原则所作出的巨大贡献，但同时也指出了它们在面对复杂实践时的局限性。 一、 规则的僵化与情境的消解： 义务论的强大在于其对普遍性原则的坚持，然而，当面对“两难困境”——例如，在必须做出选择的冲突性义务面前——纯粹的规则往往显得无能为力，甚至导致不近人情的僵硬裁决。本书探讨了这种机械化应用可能如何扼杀道德直觉和对特殊情境的敏感性。 二、 效用的计算与价值的扁平化： 后果论，尤其在现代形式中，试图用量化的方式来衡量幸福或福利的总和。我们深入剖析了“计算的悖论”：人类经验的丰富性和复杂性是否真的可以通过单一的效用指标来衡量？这种过度依赖预测和量化的倾向，是否会使得那些难以量化的价值（如尊严、意义、忠诚）在道德权衡中被系统性地边缘化？ 三、 主体性的碎片化： 我们进一步讨论了当代社会对“理性主体”的预设如何与其他经验现实产生脱节。在后现代思潮的影响下，统一、自主、自洽的道德行为主体形象受到了挑战。我们需要一种更贴近真实人类经验的伦理学，它能容纳情感、脆弱性、以及主体间性的复杂性。 第二部分：实践中的美德与能力——重拾“人之为德”的维度 在对主流框架进行审视之后，本书将视角转向那些关注“行为者”而非仅仅是“行为”的伦理传统，并试图将其现代化、系统化，以应对当代挑战。 四、 适应性与完善性： 本部分的核心是探讨“德性”（Virtues）在当代实践中的意义。德性不再被视为一种静态的、与生俱来的特质，而是一种需要在特定社会-历史脉络中不断学习、培养和实践的“能力”（Capacities）。我们引入了“道德敏锐性”（Moral Sensitivity）的概念，强调一个人识别和回应道德情境的能力，这远超出了仅仅理解规则的能力。 五、 智慧的实践性与情境判断： 亚里士多德所强调的“实践智慧”（Phronesis）在本书中获得了新的阐释。在信息爆炸和不确定性弥漫的时代，实践智慧体现为一种在不完备信息下进行高质量判断的能力。这种智慧不是抽象的知识，而是通过大量的实践、反思和与他人的互动中沉淀下来的、关于“此刻应如何行事”的直觉与判断力的结合。我们考察了这种智慧在医学伦理、商业决策和公共政策制定中的体现。 六、 关系场域中的道德养成： 道德的发生地并非孤立的个人内心，而是人与人相互联系的网络中。本书强调了社群、制度和文化环境对个体道德形成的关键作用。我们探讨了如何设计“道德支持性环境”，使人们能够在日常互动中自然而然地培养出诸如责任感、同情心和公正感。 第三部分：构建面向未来的伦理生态 本书的后半部分将理论探索具体化，聚焦于当代最具挑战性的几个领域，展示如何运用这种以实践和关系为核心的伦理视野来指导行动。 七、 技术伦理的深层介入： 面对算法偏见、数据伦理和超人类主义的议题，仅仅依赖“用户隐私保护”或“技术中立”的论调已显不足。我们主张，技术的设计者和使用者必须内化一种关于“人类福祉的整体观”，审视技术在多大程度上会侵蚀或增强人类的实践能力和复杂关系。这要求技术人员不仅是工程师，更要是审慎的道德规划师。 八、 全球化下的跨文化责任： 面对全球性的环境危机和经济不平等，传统的民族国家框架下的义务论显得力不从心。本书提出，跨文化语境下的道德实践依赖于一种“谦逊的倾听”——即承认自身道德视角的有限性，并努力理解他者的生活世界，从而在差异中寻找可以共同承担的、面向未来的责任基础。 九、 伦理学的公共角色： 最终，本书呼吁伦理学走出学院的象牙塔，回归其作为社会“良知”的公共角色。这要求伦理学家不仅要进行精密的概念分析，更要具备将深刻的道德洞察转化为清晰、有力且具有说服力的公共话语的能力，从而引导公众对复杂议题进行有深度的反思和建设性的对话。 结语：迈向持续的道德探询 《伦理的重塑》并非一本提供静态答案的教科书，而是一份邀请函——邀请读者参与到一场持续的、充满挑战的道德探询之中。它倡导的道德生活是一种动态的、关系性的、且始终指向“如何更好地存在于这个世界”的实践。在这个意义上，真正的道德成熟，是学会带着智慧和同情心，去应对每一个独特而无法预知的明天。
著者信息
作者简介
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.
图书目录
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
图书序言
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体is体 – 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体is体 – 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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这本《儒家角色伦理：21世纪的道德愿景？》的书名本身就带着一种引人深思的邀请。它不仅仅是陈述一个观点，而是抛出了一个问题，一个关乎我们当下社会道德困境的深刻追问。我一直对如何在现代语境下重新解读古老智慧抱有极大的兴趣，而儒家思想，特别是其在人际关系和角色扮演上的精妙之处，总让我觉得蕴含着某种尚未被充分发掘的潜力。书名中的“角色伦理”立刻抓住了我的注意力，它暗示了这本书不会仅仅停留在抽象的道德原则，而是会深入探讨我们在家庭、工作、社区等各种社会角色中所扮演的道德责任和行为规范。我尤其好奇作者将如何连接孔子、孟子等古代圣贤的思想与我们今天所面临的复杂伦理挑战，例如全球化带来的文化冲突、科技发展对人际交往的影响、以及个人主义与集体主义之间的张力。这本书的题目让我联想到，或许在快速变化的21世纪，我们需要的不是颠覆性的道德革命，而是回归到那些最基本、最稳固的人际关系原则上来，通过重新审视和实践“仁”、“义”、“礼”、“智”、“信”，找到一条通往更和谐、更有意义的生活道路。我期待书中能够呈现出清晰的论证逻辑，既能展现儒家思想的普适性，又能应对现代社会的特殊性，最终提供一套切实可行的道德指引，帮助我们理解如何在错综复杂的世界中成为一个更好的人，承担起我们各自的角色所赋予的责任。
评分这本书的书名《儒家角色伦理：21世纪的道德愿景？》让我立刻产生了一种想要深入了解其内涵的冲动。它所提出的“道德愿景”这个概念，在我看来，是这本书最核心的吸引力所在。我们生活在一个信息爆炸、价值多元甚至有些混乱的时代，各种思潮涌动，道德的界限似乎变得模糊不清，许多人都在寻找一种能够指引方向的道德灯塔。而将目光投向源远流长的儒家思想，特别是其强调的“角色伦理”，这本身就充满了反思的意味。我猜想，作者会从中国传统文化中提炼出那些在当下仍然具有生命力的伦理原则，并尝试将其转化为适用于现代社会的新型道德框架。我特别想知道，作者会如何解释“角色”在儒家伦理中的核心地位，以及这些角色（如父子、君臣、朋友等）是如何构建起一个稳定而有序的社会结构的。更重要的是，这本书是否能够提供一种不同于西方个人主义道德观的视角，来理解和处理人与人之间的关系，以及个人在集体中的位置？我期待这本书能够展现出一种将历史智慧与现代需求相结合的独特视野，为我们理解当下的道德困境提供新的思路，并勾勒出一个更加积极、更加有人情味的21世纪道德蓝图，让我们重新思考如何与他人共处，如何在复杂的社会互动中找到自己的道德坐标。
评分《儒家角色伦理：21世纪的道德愿景？》这个题目，与其说是一个简单的书名，不如说是一个充满哲学思辨的命题。它直接触及了现代社会普遍存在的道德焦虑，以及人们对于寻找一种更具稳定性和指导性的道德体系的渴望。书名中的“愿景”二字，预示着这本书可能不仅仅是对儒家伦理的学术探讨，更可能是一种对未来的展望和设想，它试图描绘出一幅在21世纪依然适用的道德图景。我好奇作者将如何解读儒家思想中关于“修身、齐家、治国、平天下”的逻辑链条，以及这种由内而外的道德实践方式，能否帮助我们解决当下社会中诸如信任缺失、社会责任感下降等问题。特别是“角色伦理”这一概念，它似乎指向了一种强调关系性、责任性和情境性的道德模式，这与强调普适性、抽象性原则的伦理体系有所不同。我期待书中能够深入剖析不同社会角色所承载的道德义务，以及这些角色之间的相互依存和协调，从而构建一个更加完整和有机的道德生态。这本书的题目让我感受到一种深刻的社会关怀，它不仅仅是研究学问，更是试图为我们这个时代提供一种可能的精神出路，一种能够让我们在纷繁复杂的世界中找到方向和意义的道德指引，从而为构建一个更具人情味和责任感的未来社会贡献力量。
评分初见《儒家角色伦理：21世纪的道德愿景？》这个书名，便被其深刻的时代洞察力所吸引。它不仅仅是一本关于历史文献解读的书，更像是一场关于我们当下及未来道德走向的对话。我一直认为，在科技飞速发展、社会结构剧烈变动的今天，我们对道德的理解也需要与时俱进，而简单地照搬过往的道德规范显然是不够的。“角色伦理”这个提法，立刻让我联想到我们在生活中所扮演的各种身份——子女、父母、朋友、同事、公民等等，以及这些身份所附带的责任和期望。这本书让我猜测，作者会如何从中国传统文化中，特别是儒家思想的精髓里，挖掘出那些能够指导我们如何在现代社会中扮演好这些角色的智慧。我期待它能够提供一种不同于西方个人主义的、更注重人与人之间关系的道德视角，帮助我们理解如何在复杂的社会网络中找到自己的位置，并承担起应有的义务。书名中的“21世纪的道德愿景？”更是将这份期待推向了高潮，它意味着这本书不只是对过去的梳理，更是对未来的探索，它可能是在为我们描绘一幅在科技文明与人文精神之间寻求平衡的道德蓝图，帮助我们在迷茫中找到方向，构建一个更加和谐、更有意义的社会。
评分《儒家角色伦理：21世纪的道德愿景？》这个书名，用一种温和而又充满力量的方式，直接点出了当代社会所面临的一个核心困境。现代社会，信息碎片化，价值观念多元，许多人在这种变动中感到无所适从，甚至产生道德上的迷失感。而将儒家思想中的“角色伦理”与“21世纪的道德愿景”联系起来，无疑是一个极具创意的视角。我好奇作者将如何剖析中国传统文化中关于人伦关系和道德实践的智慧，并赋予它们新的生命力，使其能够回应我们当下所面临的挑战。例如，在家庭关系中，如何理解“孝”的现代意义？在工作场所，又该如何实践“诚信”和“义”？这本书让我猜测，作者会深入探讨儒家思想中关于“仁”的深层含义，以及它如何通过具体的角色实践来得以实现。它可能提供一种不同于激进改革的、更加注重内在修养和循序渐进的道德发展路径。我特别期待书中能够展现出一种将个体行为与社会秩序紧密结合的思考模式，以及如何在日益复杂的全球化语境下，依然保持一种深刻的人文关怀和道德自觉。这本书的题目让我感受到一种对现实的深刻关照，它不仅仅是对过往的追溯，更是对未来的积极建构，试图为我们在快速变化的时代提供一种精神上的锚点，以及一条通往更加美好、更加有人情味的未来社会的道德之路。
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