Justice as a Personal Virtue and Justice as an Institutional Virtue: Mencius’s Confucian Virtue Politics
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Yong Huang
Abstract
It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial Preface
- Vorwort des Herausgebers
- An Exercise in Global Philosophy
- I: Global Justice – 全球正义
- A Vindication of Distributive Justice
- Principles of Justice in a Changing World Order
- Global Justice: A Utopia and Concern of Humanitarianism
- On the Justifications of Contemporary Global Justice Theories
- Political Reconciliation in Light of Global Injustices
- The Interdependence of Domestic and Global Justice
- Kant on Structural Domination and Global Justice
- The Ethical Constraint on War
- II: Global Philosophy – 全球哲学
- Sheng-Sheng (生生) as Being-Between-Generations: On the Existential Structure of Confucian Ethics
- The Openness of Life-world and the Intercultural Polylogue
- How to Justify Principles of Justice
- Universalism vs. “All Under Heaven” (Tianxia / 天下) – Kant in China
- Three Types of Cosmopolitanism? Liberalism, Democracy, and Tian-xia
- III: Global Justice and Progress – 全球正义与进步
- Rethinking Progress Today
- Progress and Human Rights Justice as Evaluating Criteria for Global Developments
- Justice in Anthropocentrism. An Attitude Towards Contemporary Human Beings and Their Intellectual Crisis
- Towards a Transcultural Concept of Justice Based on Self-respect
- Justice as a Personal Virtue and Justice as an Institutional Virtue: Mencius’s Confucian Virtue Politics
- Moral Progress: Between Justification and Innovation
- Forms of Injustice and Regression
- Compulsive Growth and the Dynamics of “Perverted Progress”
- IV: Varia and Miscellaneous – 杂文拾萃
- Subjekt und Person: Zwei Selbst-Bilder des modernen Menschen in kulturübergreifender Perspektive
- Heideggerian Existence after Being and Time: In the Nameless ─ and a Brief Comparison of Namelessness and the Underlying Philosophy of Language between Heideggerian and Buddhist Perspectives
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial Preface
- Vorwort des Herausgebers
- An Exercise in Global Philosophy
- I: Global Justice – 全球正义
- A Vindication of Distributive Justice
- Principles of Justice in a Changing World Order
- Global Justice: A Utopia and Concern of Humanitarianism
- On the Justifications of Contemporary Global Justice Theories
- Political Reconciliation in Light of Global Injustices
- The Interdependence of Domestic and Global Justice
- Kant on Structural Domination and Global Justice
- The Ethical Constraint on War
- II: Global Philosophy – 全球哲学
- Sheng-Sheng (生生) as Being-Between-Generations: On the Existential Structure of Confucian Ethics
- The Openness of Life-world and the Intercultural Polylogue
- How to Justify Principles of Justice
- Universalism vs. “All Under Heaven” (Tianxia / 天下) – Kant in China
- Three Types of Cosmopolitanism? Liberalism, Democracy, and Tian-xia
- III: Global Justice and Progress – 全球正义与进步
- Rethinking Progress Today
- Progress and Human Rights Justice as Evaluating Criteria for Global Developments
- Justice in Anthropocentrism. An Attitude Towards Contemporary Human Beings and Their Intellectual Crisis
- Towards a Transcultural Concept of Justice Based on Self-respect
- Justice as a Personal Virtue and Justice as an Institutional Virtue: Mencius’s Confucian Virtue Politics
- Moral Progress: Between Justification and Innovation
- Forms of Injustice and Regression
- Compulsive Growth and the Dynamics of “Perverted Progress”
- IV: Varia and Miscellaneous – 杂文拾萃
- Subjekt und Person: Zwei Selbst-Bilder des modernen Menschen in kulturübergreifender Perspektive
- Heideggerian Existence after Being and Time: In the Nameless ─ and a Brief Comparison of Namelessness and the Underlying Philosophy of Language between Heideggerian and Buddhist Perspectives
