Confucian ethics and virtue ethics revisited

In 2001 I published “Confucian Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” 1 which, as its title implies, discusses the relevance of Confucian ethics to virtue ethics. The aim of that article is primarily to explain the characteristics and core concepts of Confucian ethics, rather than to define and categorize the Confucian ethical system. 2 Since then, discussions on virtue ethics as well as on the relationship between Chinese philosophy and virtue ethics have made considerable progress; however, to my disappointment, the understanding and interpretation of Confucian ethics expressed in these discussions have often been off the mark. This article is an attempt to explain and clarify further some of the biased and inaccurate interpretations. It shares the focus of the previous article, namely, that it is not to compare the system of Confucian ethics with the ethical systems of Kant, Aristotle, and Hume and then to discuss the appropriateness of categorizing Confucian ethics as Humean, Aristotelian or Kantian virtue ethics; 3 instead, it will concentrate on examining the position of Confucian ethics with regard to the features of virtue ethics, so as to reveal its character and significance. What I would like to emphasize is that Confucian ethics should not be limited by (certain types of) “virtue ethics,” thereby depriving it of its richer connotation. In “The Moral and Non-Moral Virtues in Confucian Ethics,” 4 I argued that in Confucian ethics, non-moral virtue is independent of moral virtue, so the system of Confucian ethics is not confined to a narrow sense of moral system. 5 As will be shown below, this discovery is significant to the current issue.