We turn now to Neo-Confucian ethics. Although there is much that the Neo-Confucians found contentious in this area of inquiry, it is here that we can best see what unites Neo-Confucians, even bringing together Daoxue Confucians and their critics. Part of what it means to be a Confucian, in the eyes of our thinkers, is to have the ethical commitments that characterize the Confucian way of life (and are largely incompatible with Daoist and Buddhist ways of life). The chief among these commitments is giving ethical priority to one's family. To be a Confucian is to see members of one's family as having a stronger ethical claim on oneself than strangers, mere acquaintances, or even good friends. Historically, there have been many ways of spelling out the concrete implications of this position. In a well-known passage in the Analects, Confucius declares that an upright son would sooner cover up the thievery of his father than reveal the crime to the authorities, a claim that many have taken to suggest that the interests of one's family come before the interests of one's state.1 When asked whether a sage-king would execute his own father for committing murder, Mencius suggests that the sage would instead abdicate the throne and flee with his father to the hinterlands, presumably depriving the kingdom of the benefits of his sagely rule.2 Wang Yangming says that most people, when forced to choose between saving a stranger or a parent from starvation, would readily choose their parent, and rightly so.3
Giving ethical priority to the family is of a piece with other shared features of Confucian ethics. Far back in the classical period of Chinese philosophy, a rival school of thinkers known as the Mohists argued that everyone has an equal moral claim on us in some important sense, collapsing ethical distinctions between family and strangers.4 The Mohists called this the doctrine of “impartial care” (jian ai 兼愛); the Neo-Confucians often called it “care without distinctions,” and contrasted it with the sort of care that they promoted, care with distinctions. The most important virtue in Neo-Confucianism, as we will see, is humaneness (ren 仁), which is a form of care that ultimately includes everyone (and in many cases every thing) in its scope, but which preserves the notion of special attachments and relationships by caring about some more than others, in different ways than others. So the humane person cares about strangers, but not as much (nor in the same way) as acquaintances, friends, or neighbors, and none of those so much as family. Mohism disappeared long before the rise of Neo-Confucianism, but not, the Neo-Confucians think, the doctrine of care without distinctions, which survives and is embraced by Buddhists, whose idea of “great compassion” takes all of sentient life as an object and makes no distinctions among them.5 For the Neo-Confucians, ethics is essentially concerned with relationships. One of the terms that is often translated as “ethics” (lunli 倫理), literally means “the Pattern of human relationships.” For them, any ethical form of care had to preserve relationships, and for relationships to exist there must be distinctions or gradations in care. So the virtue of humaneness, as the chief virtue, must necessarily make such distinctions.
Another shared point of agreement is that filial piety – love of and devotion to one's parents – is among the most important virtues. It is not the chief virtue in the same way that humaneness is, as it does not describe what it means to be virtuous more generally, but it is crucial in at least two respects. First, filial piety is the “root” or “foundation” (ben 本) for virtuous character more generally. Developing filial piety is necessary to develop other virtues, including humaneness; these other virtues build on the sort of love and deference that we can only learn through our relationships with our parents.6 Second, filial piety is also important because it provides a behavioral principle which comes as close as any to being inviolable. There may be some circumstances in which one can neglect close friends or violate basic duties, but there are very few – perhaps no – cases in which one can neglect one's parents.7 Neo-Confucians see this as a fundamental point of contention with Buddhists as well.
The final shared commitment is to virtue more generally: not just to the idea that virtue is good and should be cultivated, but also to the more basic idea that virtue gives us our ultimate aims. This is contrasted with the idea that our ultimate aims have something to do with salvation, transcending this world, entering nirvana – all goals that they suspected Buddhist and Daoists of prioritizing over developing virtues and living virtuously. For the Neo-Confucians, ethics, not salvation, provides our ultimate ends, and the locus of those ends is in this world and this life, not beyond this world or in another life.8
Since so much of Neo-Confucian ethics is concerned with virtue and specific virtues, these will be the focus of the present chapter. We will discuss the cardinal Neo-Confucian virtues, review various views on humaneness and the senses in which it is inclusive of others, highlight an important quality of all virtues that the Neo-Confucians call “sincerity,” and conclude with a close look at some positions on women and virtue. Some of these discussions will primarily be a matter of explicating shared assumptions. There is not a great deal of debate about the nature and psychological structure of virtues like righteousness and wisdom, for example, although the Neo-Confucians often explore their nuances and build on one another's analysis of these virtues. However, there is considerable controversy regarding the nature and significance of humaneness and sincerity, and the similarity or dissimilarity of women's virtues to men's. We will examine these controversies in depth.
Neo-Confucians of all stripes agree in treating four virtues as basic and central: humaneness (ren 仁, also translated as “benevolence”), righteousness (yi 義), ritual propriety (li 禮), and wisdom (zhi 智). Most Daoxue Confucians also add a fifth virtue, trustworthiness (xin 信). One cannot talk about these virtues without quickly entering a thicket of observations in which these virtues overlap and combine, but as a point of entry it is helpful to consider what we might call paradigm cases of each virtue. For speakers of Chinese in the Neo-Confucian era, paradigm cases of humaneness (ren) are those in which one acts out of love or care to promote the interests of others, as when helping someone in need of food or looking after a child or sibling. Paradigm cases of righteousness (yi) are those in which someone refuses to violate moral prohibitions in ways that would rightly be regarded as degrading or shameful, even when doing so is difficult and appears to come at great personal cost. So, for example, it is righteous to refuse a large bribe in return for special political favors.9 But being righteous is not always so difficult. Sometimes it just refers to doing what is expected in a way that is fair, without any internal resistance arising from selfish motives, as when a public official distributes goods or when hosts decide which of their own food and drink to share with guests.
Model examples of ritual propriety (li) are those in which one performs a ritual properly (e.g., performing all the right steps) with a sense of reverence. But here we must be careful because “ritual” has a much broader scope than the English translation suggests. “Rituals” in the sense of li can apply to any protocol of social interaction; simple examples include bowing, offering drinks to guests, and taking care not to touch people of the opposite sex with whom one is not intimate. Those who are advanced in ritual propriety are able to do these things not just consistently and respectfully, but in the right manner. Often how one does something matters as much as what one does: think of someone who is skillful at making guests feel welcome, or showing that the guests are not burdening or imposing on their hosts.10
There are many potential paradigm cases of wisdom (zhi), but perhaps the most illustrative are those in which one astutely discerns the character of others, realizing which are truly humane or righteous, as when considering whether a candidate should be appointed to a demanding and consequential administrative position. Most often, wisdom is described as understanding the other virtues, including not just their characteristic behaviors but also their characteristic motives. This understanding both aids in developing the virtues in ourselves and helps us to recognize virtues (or the lack of virtues) in others. Other instances of wisdom include the recognition of what is truly valuable in life (as when one realizes that the family or relationships are more important than wealth) and knowing the best means to achieve a virtuous end.11
The fifth of the cardinal virtues is trustworthiness, best understood as the virtue of being committed to being guided by reality in a consistent and reliable way.12 Unlike for the other cardinal virtues, Neo-Confucians are careful to say that trustworthiness does not have its own characteristic domains of thought and action.13 Rather, it is a virtue that helps to ensure that other virtues are brought to fruition. Whether we aim to be humane, righteous, ritually proper, or wise, our success depends on seeing things as they are and being committed to see things as they are, without self-serving illusions that get us off the hook. To be sure, there is a narrower sense of “trustworthiness” that refers to things like honesty and being a reliable friend, but this is not the sense that the Neo-Confucians tend to have in mind when they characterize it as one of the five cardinal virtues.14
One of the most comprehensive Neo-Confucian accounts of the five virtues is found in a text known as Chen Chun's Meanings of Terms, authored by one of Zhu Xi's closest students and meant as an overview of Daoxue philosophical vocabulary.15 At one point in the text, Chen offers an example of hosting visitors:
As soon as we hear that the guests will be coming, naturally there is a feeling of cordiality calmly aroused in our heartminds. That is humaneness. This feeling having been calmly aroused in the heartmind, we solemnly go to receive them with respect. That is ritual propriety. Having received them, we then must discuss together what to provide for them, perhaps tea or perhaps wine. When the matter of how much to offer and how far to go has been settled in the right way, this is righteousness. To understand definitely how much to offer and how far to go is wisdom. Trustworthiness is being genuine from the beginning to the end.16
This example illustrates several of the salient features of the virtues described above, each in accordance with its own domain of thought and action, and it also highlights the distinctive nature of trustworthiness as a virtue without a particular domain, one that supports and helps to complete the others.
A final note about humaneness. There is a longstanding view in the Confucian tradition that one of the cardinal virtues, humaneness, is in some sense the chief virtue, and that calling someone “humane” is tantamount to saying that he is virtuous overall or has all of the virtues working in concert with one another.17 This is a view that most Neo-Confucians adopt as well. So while most Neo-Confucians suggest that humaneness is the virtue of appropriate care for others, they also propose that there is a more basic and encompassing sense according to which humaneness is just the virtue of ceaseless life-generativity.18 More specifically, it is the virtue of participating in and contributing to regular processes of life-generativity, which one can do in many ways not limited to caring for others. All virtues can thus be part of humaneness. For example, being ritually proper can contribute to life-generativity by helping to reinforce social structures like families and governments that both protect and nurture people and other living things. Many Daoxue philosophers characterize this as an important part of what they call “forming one body with the myriad things,” at minimum by participating in sustained life-generating processes that take all life – including plant and non-human animal life – into account.19 Below, we will discuss in greater depth the ways that the cardinal virtues can overlap, and that will give us an opportunity to explore this more encompassing sense of humaneness in greater depth.
Virtues are more than appropriate emotions and behaviors. If those were all it took to have a virtue, then one could be ritually proper on a fluke, or with only a superficial commitment to performing a particular ritual at a particular time. Someone who respectfully bows only when in a good mood is not ritually proper. Some of her actions might be ritually proper, but she, her person, is not. What is needed to make ritual propriety a true virtue are some durable emotions, aptitudes, and dispositions that can be counted on to produce ritually proper behavior when needed, so that her behavior arises from lasting qualities. “Character trait” is a convenient term to refer to these durable emotions, aptitudes, and dispositions. As Zhu Xi puts the point, “If one is dutiful today, but not tomorrow, then one has not attained dutifulness in oneself, and this cannot be called virtue (de 德).”20
Most philosophical accounts of virtues assume that virtues must be traits of character in the general sense, but there is room for disagreement about how deep those character traits must go, and what sorts of dispositions and aptitudes will comprise them. Someone might set the bar relatively low and say that the virtuous character traits should be capable of resisting some temptations to vice, but not all temptations, and say that they should be embedded in durable parts of one's psychology, but not permanent parts. Alternatively, someone might set the bar very high and insist that virtuous character traits must reliably produce good behavior, no matter what the circumstances, and insist that they be embedded in permanent parts of the self. It might help to think of the high-bar setters as holding that virtuous character traits should be “deep-rooted” – that is, they should be deep in the unchanging core of the self, and they should hold up no matter what assails them, like a deep-rooted plant resisting wind and rain.
Nearly all Neo-Confucians think that full virtues should be deep-rooted in the sense that they can hold up under great adversity. Superior people, because they have full virtues, can be expected to give up their lives or undertake great suffering for their parents.21 But there is less agreement about the degree to which they must be embedded in permanent parts of the self. In chapter 3, we noted that, for Dai Zhen, virtues can be made by nurturing and expanding natural predispositions. These predispositions, which are evident in our natural responses to things like seeing a child in danger, are considered by most Neo-Confucians to be essential parts of our humanity, but for Dai they can fail to develop, or even be wiped out, and so are not permanent parts of the self. They are only durable once they have been developed into full-blown virtues.
In contrast, Daoxue Confucians are adamant that the foundational dispositions of the virtues are in some sense features of our inherent nature (benxing), which is permanent and present from start to finish. In fact, all things have an inherent nature and the foundational dispositions of the five cardinal virtues are thus in all. To the extent that they are not manifest in our everyday behavior, this shows that we do not have perfect access to our natures, and the bad vital stuff in us must be purified before the virtues are expressed. We need to distinguish, therefore, between the “foundational dispositions” of our nature and what we can call our “manifest dispositions,” which are the ways in which a particular person with his or her current quality of vital stuff is in fact disposed to react. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, Daoxue accounts of what we are now calling foundational dispositions differ, depending on whether the theory is nature-focused or heartmind-focused, though they all hold that these foundational dispositions are permanent features of us. Daoxue thinkers agree, however, that “virtue” (de 德) depends on also having manifest dispositions. That is, one's nature is made up, in part, by the Pattern that is humaneness but, until one has transformed one's vital stuff appropriately, one cannot be said to have the “virtue” of humaneness. The Daoxue philosophers typically put this in terms of needing to “attain” (de 得) something. Zhu Xi says that, while the Way is general and shared Pattern, virtue is “attaining this Way in one's self.”22 Similarly, Wang Yangming says that “One calls the cosmic mandate within me my nature; when I attain this nature, one calls it virtue.”23 We discuss the mechanics of “attaining” one's inherent nature and its foundational dispositions at length in chapter 7, on self-cultivation.
For philosophers interested in the interrelationships among specific virtues, Neo-Confucian ethics offers a philosophical garden of delights. There are numerous ways in which a given event can instantiate two or more virtues. When one admonishes one's parents not to bribe or steal, that act is both humane (it is done out of a sense of love and care) and righteous (it is meant to reinforce right behavior). In fact, Chen Chun gets more specific than this. He says that admonishing one's parents to do the right thing is in the first instance humane, but it also contains a quality of righteousness that belongs to the humane act, or what he calls the “righteousness of humaneness.”24 This suggests that one sort of virtuous feeling or behavior (righteousness: encouraging people to do the right thing) is for the sake of the other (humaneness: caring about one's parents). This is to be distinguished from another way of instantiating multiple virtues in the same act, which Chen describes as cases where one virtue “carries the other along” (han dai 含帶). Here, the idea is that one virtuous response necessarily elicits another virtuous response, as when one's sympathy for a victim of grievous mistreatment (a humane response) necessarily elicits an indignant feeling, understood as a desire to see some justice for the agent and the victim of the mistreatment (a righteous response).25
We have just been considering cases in which virtues reinforce one another, but what about situations in which virtues seem to pull us in different directions? In the opening paragraph of this chapter, we briefly mentioned some famous cases in which Confucians believe that care for one's parents should win out over care for others but notice that such conflicts also often involve seemingly competing virtues. Consider the Analects passage in which an “upright” son is said to be one who will cover up the thievery of his father: certainly the virtue of humaneness is active here, but what about righteousness? We would normally expect righteousness to motivate one to avoid the shameful violation of public norms, but condoning theft seems like just such a violation. Here, there appears to be two ways of understanding this sort of scenario: either it could turn out that the conflict is only apparent, and the solution does not, in fact, require that we take sides with one virtue against another, or perhaps the conflict is very real, so that even in the best case we must favor one virtue (say, filial piety or humaneness) at the expense of another (say, righteousness). Generally speaking, the Neo-Confucians tend to favor the former approach: for those with sufficient moral acuity and imagination, most conflicts are only apparent. The Mencius tells of the sage-king Shun and his wicked brother Xiang. Shun loves his brother and wants to see him treated well, so he sets Xiang up as ruler of a fiefdom within Shun's domain. Shun also knows that the people of this fiefdom must be treated appropriately, so he deprives Xiang of any actual power; a virtuous subordinate has actual say over the treatment of the local people. Faced with a potential conflict between loving his brother and owing fair treatment to his people, Shun has found a path forward in which both virtues are realized. In fact, Zhu Xi comments that this solution represents the “extremity of humaneness and the utmost of righteousness,” in contrast to other, less-than-sagely rulers' efforts to resolve similar dilemmas, which fail to realize one or more virtues.26 The implication is that opportunities exist, at least for those sufficiently attuned to Pattern, to fully realize virtue.27
Finally, many Neo-Confucians see humaneness as the chief and all-encompassing virtue, which suggests that it overlaps in some way or another with all the other virtues. The clearest but perhaps least informative way of describing this relationship is to say that one cannot have humaneness without having all of the other virtues. So, if someone is humane, he is necessarily righteous, wise, and so on. But this is not sufficient to identify the privileged status of humaneness because it turns out that one cannot be wise without also being humane as well (each draws on and informs the other).28 A better way of accounting for the special status of humaneness is to invoke what we described above as the broader and more basic sense of humaneness as ceaseless life-generativity. Many Neo-Confucians take “life-generativity” to be the most general description of the good which virtuous people contribute to by developing themselves, contributing in turn to the development of others and to the continuity of living things. Insofar as righteous and ritually proper behavior are virtuous at all, they must contribute to an orderly process of life-generativity.
However, by endorsing this more basic and broader sense of “humaneness,” the Neo-Confucians are compelled to take up an interesting conceptual and interpretive challenge. On the one hand, they want to say that humaneness is one virtue alongside others, characterized by caring for others in the right way, as opposed to, say, knowing certain things or performing rituals reverentially. But, on the other hand, they want to say it encompasses the others. Can both of these things be true? Different Neo-Confucians respond to this challenge differently. Dai Zhen, looking at the classical Confucian texts that later Confucians took as canon, ultimately concludes that humaneness cannot just be a stand-in for virtue more generally – there is too much evidence that the ancient sages regarded the virtues as distinct, marking different sorts of achievements. The more enlightened and better informed view, he implies, is to accept that humaneness is the virtue of promoting life-generativity but also acknowledge that life-generativity is a salient but not exhaustive description of the good that virtuous people promote. That more complete description is something like orderly life-generativity, and order is provided by the virtues of righteousness and ritual propriety.29
By contrast, most Daoxue Confucians propose that “humaneness” can be used in both senses. In its most encompassing sense, it refers to a state in which we “form one body” with others, joining them in ceaseless life-generativity. Zhu Xi suggests that humaneness, as life-generativity, provides both impetus and functional meaning to the other virtues. To make this point, he likens the relationship of humaneness to the other virtues to the relationship of spring to the other seasons:
It is like the four seasons. One must see the divisions between the four seasons but also see how the spring embraces the other three seasons. The vital stuff of the four seasons varies from warm, to cool, to hot, to cold. When the vital stuff is cool or cold then life is not produced. When the vital stuff is hot in the summer, this too is not a time for producing life. The vital stuff is warm and rich only in the spring, and only then can one witness the life-producing heartmind of heaven and earth. … If the spring did not have the intention to produce living things then the subsequent three seasons would not exist. This is the sense in which humaneness can embrace righteousness, ritual propriety and wisdom.30
At times, though, we want to speak about virtues in more specific terms in order to describe which specific intentions and emotions are motivating behavior, rather than just referring to its overarching contribution to life-generativity. At this level of specificity, some behavior will be motivated by care or love, and thus the result of humaneness in its narrow sense. But some behavior will be motivated by a sense of shame or deference, which are characteristic of righteous and ritually proper behavior; and so on for the other specific virtues.31
This completes our overview of Neo-Confucian virtues and the ways in which they can intersect with, require, and encompass one another. Next, we turn to another crucial attribute of virtues in the full and complete sense: sincerity.
One feature of virtues that we have not yet discussed has to do with the comprehensiveness of one's psychological commitment to them. Intuitively, it seems odd or even paradoxical to say that someone is fully humane and yet has intentions, emotions, or desires that resist humane behavior, like a loving parent who cares for his children reluctantly. Historically, most Confucians thought that full virtue required a wholehearted devotion to virtuous ends, and they set the bar of wholeheartedness rather high.32 The Analects famously describes Confucius as being able to “follow his heartmind's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety,” which is one important indication of wholeheartedness.33 But even desiring seems not to be enough. In another memorable passage, he declares that neither understanding nor loving the Way are adequate: one should take joy in the way.34 He also seems to indicate that someone who really understands the Way and humaneness would be so enthused that he could not help but want to instruct others in them.35 Mencius is similarly adamant that virtuous behavior is characteristically joyful for the virtuous agent, and he also stresses the effortless, almost involuntary quality of it, likening it to tapping one's foot in time with music.36 In what follows we will see how the Neo-Confucians build on this longstanding interest in wholeheartedness, exploring both the significance of wholeheartedness for virtue and its implications for moral deliberation and behavior more generally.37
In Daoxue Confucianism, the term that comes to be used to mark wholeheartedness of virtue is cheng 誠, which we translate as “sincerity.”38 The Daoxue Confucians have a great deal to say about the meaning of cheng, and at first glance they might be taken to suggest that the term has numerous meanings, including genuineness, being true, being without folly or error (wuwang 無妄), and even forming a whole or triad with heaven and earth.39 We use “sincerity” because it comes closest to the core meaning of the term for Daoxue Confucians, but it is useful to see why they sometimes try to capture it in these other expressions, particularly when they say that those who are sincere are without error and form a triad with heaven and earth.40 The main thing to bear in mind is that, for the Daoxue Confucians, our inherent natures (benxing) are good and, furthermore, are an ineradicable link to the life-generative processes of the cosmos. We have certain inclinations to produce and nourish life that can be suppressed with some effort, but cannot be destroyed.41 If sincere (cheng) behavior is necessarily wholehearted and wholeheartedness rules out internal psychological conflict, then sincere behavior will necessarily be consistent with our good nature and thus harmonize with the life-generative processes of the cosmos. So on this view, to say that being sincere is to be without folly is to say not what it means so much as what it entails: one who is sincere must necessarily be without mistake or errors with respect to the virtues. And to say that those who are sincere form a triad with heaven and earth is to describe a natural consequence of sincerity.42
Like Confucius and Mencius, many Neo-Confucians highlight the fact that wholehearted virtue comes naturally or spontaneously, without being forced, and they express corresponding worries about forced or merely conscientious ethical behavior.43 One key reason for this is that natural processes continue endlessly, adjusting to any new circumstances whereas, even if one is successful at forcing oneself to follow a set of rules, one may come upon circumstances unanticipated by the rule makers and not know how to respond. Zhang Zai explicitly compares the endlessness of cosmic functioning to the ceaselessness of humaneness and filial piety of a “sincere” person.44 Cheng Yi tends to put the point in terms of the superior person's ability to “act joyously” (lexing 樂行) instead of needing to force himself.45 In addition to potentially facing gaps, those who are forcing themselves to follow rules are also unavoidably rigid, which we saw in chapters 3 and 4 was one of Wang Yangming's chief reasons for basing ethical evaluations on the context-sensitive “good knowing.”
A final issue raised by the desirability of wholehearted virtue concerns the role of deliberation in decision making. Oftentimes, some Daoxue philosophers suspect, when we act on the urge to deliberate about what to do, we are in fact indulging or creating opportunities for more selfish intentions and desires to lead us to conclusions that run counter to virtuous ends. If one must ponder whether to accept a bribe in return for political favors, that likely indicates that there is a part of oneself that wants to accept the bribe, which casts doubt on the sincerity of one's virtue (even if one ultimately refuses the bribe). But this might strike some people as absurd: does it imply that people should not stop to ponder pros and cons before making decisions?
There are several responses to this. One comes from Dai Zhen, who is careful to distinguish between the effortlessness of one's decision making and the effortlessness of the resultant actions. Just because someone takes a while to arrive at a conclusion about what to do, it does not necessarily follow that she is less than wholehearted about it. In fact, it can often be the case that thinking about pros and cons helps any lingering doubts or reluctance to fall away and thus strengthens her resolve. Dai thinks there are certain advantages in quick and easy decision making, which works well enough for many everyday purposes (we do not really need to stop and ponder whether to accept a bribe or steal a horse), but there will be special cases which are unusual enough to warrant what he calls “weighing” (quan 權, also translated as “discretion”), and it would be a grave mistake to think that we could arrive at a sound conclusion without it.46
However, Dai is a critic of Daoxue Confucianism, in part because of what he perceives as its infatuation with spontaneity. Perhaps the more interesting question is what the supposedly spontaneity-infatuated Confucians themselves think about deliberative decision making. It is true that Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming (among many others) see deliberation as an opportunity for self-serving biases to take hold, especially when one's own perceived welfare and interests are at stake. Zhu suggests that righteousness (yi) is manifest in cases where people make decisions without hesitation or ambivalence.47 But, like Dai, Zhu makes allowances for special cases, when circumstances deviate enough from standard ones (perhaps when deciding whether one may steal some life-saving medicine for someone who cannot afford it) or when the issues are so complicated and consequential that one cannot afford to make a mistake (as when weighing difficult matters of public policy).48 Furthermore, it is possible that when Zhu condemns ambivalence and hesitation as unrighteous, he has in mind the kind of ambivalence that arises from conflicts between one's own interests and virtuous ends, not conflicts between different outcomes in which one's own interests are largely irrelevant. So there may be little harm in taking time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of two different methods of punishment or tax policies when it makes no difference to the decision maker.
As we have seen thus far, the Neo-Confucians have a great deal to say about specific virtues, their interrelations, and the nature of virtue itself. On this last issue, we noted that wholeheartedness and deep-rooted character traits are essentials feature of virtue of all kinds, and that, at least in the eyes of most Neo-Confucians, humaneness in the broadest sense – referring to ceaseless life-generativity – is an apt description of the most complete and well-rounded virtue. All of these issues are front and center in much of the Neo-Confucian discourse on ethics and character, but it is notable that a great deal of the discourse applies primarily or even exclusively to men. This is particularly the case for our discussion of the cardinal virtues: the Neo-Confucians largely have men in mind both when they describe which virtues are cardinal (humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness) and when they attribute specific content to those virtues. A theory of the virtues that applies primarily to men tells us far too little. In this chapter's final section, we turn to examine how their views about virtue change when applied to women.
If the major works of Daoxue philosophers are any indication, the most influential Neo-Confucian philosophers are far more interested in the ethical virtues of men than of women. In fact, it is likely that philosophers like Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi simply fail to think very systematically about women and virtue, endorsing educational proscriptions and ideals of chastity that appear to be at odds with some of their own views about women's social roles.49 But, outside of the mainstream, there are some Neo-Confucians who do think more carefully and consistently about women and virtue, and where such philosophers appear they also tend to adopt some decidedly unorthodox views on the matter. In this section, we describe what we take to be the more mainstream Neo-Confucian views on women, virtue, and education – warts and all – and then canvass some of the arguments taken up by critics.
For the vast majority of Neo-Confucians, there is little question about the status of women in the social hierarchy. Virtually none of the administrative positions in the civil service are available to women, leaving women with vanishingly few opportunities to become authorities in public life. Nor is there much room for authority in domestic life. In the family structures that most Neo-Confucians envision, every configuration that includes adult males has women in subordinate positions. Even when the male head of household dies, his widow is expected to obey her oldest adult son, although the history and literature of the Neo-Confucian period are rich with examples of powerful family matriarchs (and deferential sons) who defy this convention.50
Arguably, the lines of obedience were not always so clearly drawn. In Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women, a Han dynasty text widely recommended by mainstream Neo-Confucians, Ban encourages married women to do everything they can to win the love of their husbands, but also suggests that a wife's first and greatest allegiance is to her parents-in-law.51 Another popular instructional text, the Book of Filial Piety for Women, hints that the ideal married woman can deftly navigate potential conflicts between husband and parents-in-law by modeling filial behavior for her husband to emulate, thereby reinforcing the centralized authority of the parents-in-law while retaining the love and respect of her husband.52 Many texts that are influential in the Neo-Confucian period make it relatively clear that a married woman's first loyalty is to the larger family unit into which she marries – including not just her own husband and her children, but nieces, nephews, and the children of her husband's other marriage partners (wives or concubines).53
When Neo-Confucian philosophers do mention women, it is often to assign women blame for discord within families. Zhou Dunyi writes that “it is difficult to govern the family whereas it is easy to govern the world, for the family is near while the world is distant. If members of the family are divided, the cause surely lies with women.”54 By the start of the Neo-Confucian era, Chinese histories had long depicted scheming wives and concubines as sowers of dissension within families, usually by taking advantage of the love and devotion of their husbands to serve their own private interests. For this reason, Neo-Confucians and the didactic treatises they endorse tend to recommend that husbands and wives keep a certain respectful distance from one another so as to curtail the sort of intimacy that makes them more loyal to one another than to the larger family unit. Zhu Xi stands out, however, in recognizing the importance of the distinctive sort of intimacy between husband and wife:
To live as a man and woman is the most intimate affair, and the exercise of the Way is found therein. This is why the Way of the gentleman is so widespread, and yet secret. It lies within darkness and obscurity, where it cannot be seen atop the sleeping mat, and people may look on it with contempt. But this is not the way of our natural endowment. The Way of the gentleman begins its rise in the confidential moments between husband and wife.55
In this passage, we employ the older translation of “gentleman” for junzi, instead of our usual “superior person,” to emphasize the gendering of that status that Zhu is assuming. Still, Zhu's recognition that the transformation to becoming a superior person – or even a sage – begins with the most subtle, intimate of relationships fits well with his other views about personal cultivation, even if he himself notes this connection only rarely.
Turning now to philosophical issues concerning women and the virtues that Neo-Confucians address more explicitly, two points of contention are particularly important. First, what sorts of virtue do the Neo-Confucian philosophers regard as valuable for women? Second, are these virtues equal to men's virtues? We will examine three different positions on these two issues, succinctly captured by the terms “different” and “equal.” The first position, which is endorsed by most mainstream Confucians, is that women have separate and unequal (inferior) virtues: what counts as a virtue for women is significantly different from what counts as a virtue for men, and these distinctive virtues do not bring women as close to the moral ideal as do men's virtues. The second position, defended by Luo Rufang, agrees that women have different virtues than men but rejects the claim that this makes them unequal in virtue. As we will see, in fact, Luo might even be read to suggest that women are morally superior in crucial respects. Finally, a third position is defended by the iconoclastic Neo-Confucian Li Zhi, who views roughly the same virtues as valuable in both men and women, and contends that women are as capable of sagehood as men. Each of these positions has implications for the kind of education that girls and women should receive.
It is the consensus among most Neo-Confucians that the constellation of character traits that qualify as virtues for women is quite different from that of men, although there is little consensus about what those virtues are.56 Ban Zhao uses the term “virtue” (de) in both broad and narrow senses. In the narrow sense, “womanly virtues” (fude 婦德) have to do with maintaining chastity, modesty, and self-control. The “great virtues” which qualify a woman as good in a more well-rounded sense include the narrower ones just mentioned, plus the reliable and consistent performance of “womanly words” (fuyan 婦言), “womanly bearing” (furong 婦容), and “womanly work” (fugong 婦功), which are characterized by such things as avoiding vulgar language, staying clean, avoiding gossip, and serving guests.57 By using the modifier “womanly,” she strongly implies that there is something different in kind about these virtues. Sima Guang, a Song dynasty Confucian whose Precepts for Family Life was endorsed by Zhu Xi and widely read, identifies several virtues as indispensable for women in their capacity as wives and mothers, including frugality, purity, and compliance.58 Zhu Xi also emphasizes frugality as well as character traits like generosity and harmony.59 To be sure, mainstream views do see some virtues as shared by both men and women, most notably filial piety, dutifulness, and ritual propriety.60 But on the whole the mainstream tends to treat virtues like chastity and compliance as being the primary characteristics of exemplary women, while making little of the contribution these traits might make to the moral achievement of men.61
Just because two different groups of people have different sorts of virtues, it does not follow that one group's virtues necessarily compare unfavorably to the other's. Women might have virtues that are distinctive but can be just as admirable and valuable. Is this a view embraced by mainstream Neo-Confucians? In most respects it was not. Few take seriously the proposal that women could be sages. There is a sense in which both social and ethical inferiority is required by the very nature of women's virtues. Compliance is arguably only a virtue that a social subordinate could have, and perhaps no virtue can achieve sagely heights without a sophisticated grasp of deep truths and worldly affairs that are inconsistent with the modesty and humility expected of women – not to mention being inconsistent with the more parochial sort of education that mainstream Neo-Confucians tend to recommend for women and girls.62
The second, minority position we find within Neo-Confucian discourse on women and virtue is that women's virtues are different but nevertheless at least equal. Here, it is useful to distinguish between two different respects in which gendered virtues might be compared. The first has been mentioned already: men's or women's virtues might be equal in potential – for example, both could allow their possessors to achieve sagehood. But another idea is that women's virtues may tend, as a matter of fact, to make women as good as (or even better than) men's virtues make men. The latter claim is not about the ultimate potential of each set of virtues, which after all only matter for those who achieve great heights, but rather about the sort of character that men and women will have on average or under normal circumstances. We look here at the views of Luo Rufang, first mentioned in chapter 4, who appears to hold that women's virtues are equal (or perhaps superior) in at least one of these two senses.
Luo is associated with the Taizhou School, a Ming dynasty group of Daoxue thinkers most notable for entertaining radical ideas and for their commitment to bringing Confucian teachings to ordinary people. Luo does not set forth his thoughts on women and virtue in comprehensive essays devoted explicitly to the topic, but his letters and other writings strongly suggest that he has a considered and distinctive view. Luo aims to highlight and elucidate underappreciated features of maternal affection.63 By Luo's time, as we saw in section 1 of this chapter, the Confucian tradition had long seen filial piety (xiao) as a “foundational” virtue. Acquiring it is necessary for acquiring the other major virtues (especially humaneness), and other virtues are natural extensions or outgrowths of filial piety, drawing on aptitudes and emotional dispositions formed by loving, serving, and showing deference to one's parents. But Luo observes that the affection and care of mothers for their children plays an even more fundamental role than filial piety, as it elicits filial piety of the best and most important kind. He highlights this role in a tribute to one exemplary mother:
Reading about the maternal affection and lifelong chastity of his mother as recorded on the tablet, the son is easily moved within his heartmind; reading the tablet inscribed in her memory, he also easily expresses his heartmind outwardly. And is this not just as it should be, when filial piety responds to maternal affection … and love is aroused spontaneously, without restraint?64
On Luo's reading, filial piety arises out of a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the unsolicited love and sacrifices of the parents.65 The son recognizes these and experiences a sense of love and devotion like no other. For Luo, the filial response to parental care is an unparalleled instance of natural virtue, distinctive because it is fully sincere in the senses discussed in the previous section – it is a wholehearted and authentic expression of one's true nature, arising spontaneously, effortlessly, and without internal resistance.66 Children can surely be filial without great parental affection, but it is extremely rare that the filial feelings be fully sincere without it.
For heartmind-focused philosophers like Luo, accessing sincere feelings plays a crucial part in moral cultivation because it helps us to recognize a distinctive faculty and source of reliable moral behavior. Luo (as mentioned in chapter 4) thinks virtue in its proper sense is always an expression of what he called the “infant's heartmind” (chizi zhi xin 赤子之心), which is authentic in the sense that it is stripped of conventional beliefs and values that we normally acquire from our social environment.67 One who has achieved true sincerity in this domain, Luo suggests, will be consistently filial and dutiful.68
As we have seen, then, Luo promotes a virtue that he takes to be most characteristic of women and mothers. He also reveres some exemplary women for maintaining lifelong chastity and, in general, understands women's virtues to be tailored to their distinctive roles in childrearing and household management. Thus he shares the mainstream view that women's virtues differ from men's. Does he think that women are men's equals in virtue? Here, we should look again at the two different ways in which their virtue could be compared: the first concerns the potential equality or superiority of the virtues of each sex. For example, one who thinks that both men and women can be sages is likely to endorse the view that men and women are equal in virtue in this respect. Luo's view on this issue is subtle. For him, “sage” is a masculine term that is apt only when applied to men, but Luo strongly suggests that “sage” is not the only term for a moral paragon. Exemplary women are in certain respects the superiors even of sages. The contemporary scholar who has written most extensively about Luo, Yu-Yin Cheng, suggests that, in fact, he saw exemplary women as meeting greater moral demands, and thus as achieving greater moral distinction, than sages. Sages are not asked, as exemplary mothers are, to have the fortitude and strength of character to maintain lifelong chastity to deceased husbands, even when this leaves them destitute, while nevertheless maintaining wholehearted and loving care for their children without regret or resentment.69 The second way of comparing the virtues of men and women is to ask whether women tend, on average or under normal circumstances, to be as virtuous as men, which would contradict assumptions made by mainstream Neo-Confucians like Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi. Although Luo does not address this question directly, his lifelong preoccupation with the distinctive advantages of maternal affection and his countless tributes to accomplished mothers suggest that women tend to be at least the equals if not superiors to men in virtue. No virtue comes as naturally to men as maternal affection comes to women. Furthermore, his tributes appear to suggest that women more consistently recognize what matters most for living a life according to the Way, putting people's actual interests and welfare before superficial goods like wealth and social status.70 Finally, Luo notes that women have a certain consistency of virtue unmatched by men in any moral domain, for no mother, he says, has ever failed to rear her children.71
The issue of equality in virtue sometimes comes up in Neo-Confucian discussions of another major issue, women's education. Neo-Confucians sometimes discuss the question of whether it is appropriate for women to “learn the Way” (xuedao 學道) insofar as a great deal of reading and reflection is required for a deep understanding of human nature, the sources of virtue, and our place in the larger world. Many mainstream Neo-Confucians think women unsuited for this sort of learning, in part because they think it adds little to women's primary responsibilities in the inner chambers. Without a major role in public life, they suggest, there is little justification for using the tremendous pedagogical resources required to master the classics and engage in public debates about issues of ethics and governance, and furthermore encouraging women to undertake such studies might promote an independence of mind that could threaten the family structure.72 But this view is in tension with a longstanding tradition in Confucianism that lionizes mothers who played a major, often decisive, role in cultivating virtues in their sons, a tradition that stretches back to stories about Mencius' mother, and is evident in Cheng Yi's accounts of his own mother. Cheng, for example, lauds his mother for teaching him to respect the basic humanity in people, no matter what their class or station, and for deft management of their large household, among many other things.73 Many Neo-Confucians saw that this sort of teaching required a strong grasp of philosophical fundamentals, and the Neo-Confucian era was replete with texts and instruction manuals that promoted the idea of the “learned instructress,” mothers and wives who, like Mencius' own, knew enough about the Way to impart lessons to their children during their formative years and to set their husbands aright when the husbands sank into vice.
Few mainstream Neo-Confucians even acknowledge the tension between these two views, and even fewer address it squarely. For Luo, by contrast, the fact that women play so important a role in their children's education – and, for that matter, are often needed to serve as models of virtue to both men and women their own age – makes it abundantly clear that they can and should learn the Way.74 Although Luo presupposes that virtues like maternal affection and chastity are more appropriate for women than men, he nevertheless thinks that women and men share a need for wisdom and philosophical insight, and Luo is particularly interested in women who exceed all of the men around them in these two respects, citing in particular two women (one of them his own mother) who loved philosophical discussion and reflection and by all appearances achieved perfect tranquillity through a deep understanding of Daoism.75 On his view, it does not matter that they achieved their enlightenment by means of Daoist rather than Confucian sources. It is a grasp of the Way all the same.76
The topic of women and education brings us to the third and final position in this debate. This is the stance that women and men are moral equals and further proposes that, for the most part, moral achievement in both is characterized by the same virtues. To illustrate this position, we turn to Li Zhi, another Taizhou thinker and the Neo-Confucian tradition's renowned iconoclast.77 In his “A Letter in Response to the Claim that Women Cannot Learn the Way Because They are Shortsighted,” Li describes his view elegantly by drawing an analogy between people's capacity for learning the Way and the faculty of vision (jian 見).78 That faculty is shared by men and women and is essentially the same. Insofar as we do find variants in people's ability to see, their sex itself has little to do with it: “It is fine to say that there are male and female people, but how could one say that there is male and female vision? It is fine to say that there is shortsightedness and farsightedness, but how could one say that men's vision is wholly farsighted and women's vision wholly shortsighted?”79 As evidence, Li points to numerous accounts of enlightened and capable women in history. Insofar as women of his time seem to have a more parochial understanding of the world, then, it cannot be due to their sex. The better explanation is that their experiences and education have been confined to domestic matters, to life in the inner chambers, giving them too little opportunity to see the world beyond.80 As Li develops the metaphor, he can be seen as downplaying the outsized importance of biological gender, which he regards essentially as a difference in bodily form and not in “vision” or understanding. He asks whether a person should be any less humbled by a woman with profound understanding simply because she happens to have a woman's body, and he suggests (shockingly, for his time) that the historical Confucius may have been wandering the world in part to find a sage with the body of a woman. On Li Zhi's view, then, history shows that women are as capable of being moral paragons as men, thus establishing moral equality in the first of our two senses. And, furthermore, Li thinks actual inequalities in enlightenment between actual men and women are better explained by the scope of women's and men's experiences than by sex, which strongly suggests a moral equality in the second sense, understood as equality of character under circumstances not distorted by social conventions.81
It is a further question whether Li holds that morally accomplished men and women are characterized by the same virtues. Here, the evidence is mixed, and the challenge of understanding Li's views as a whole makes it difficult to give a definitive answer. On the one hand, he joins most traditional Confucians in celebrating certain meritorious women for their chastity, and like most Neo-Confucians he speaks in abstract terms about the benefits of gender complementarity – harmonizing male and female like harmonizing yin and yang principles.82 On the other hand, Li thinks that the husband–wife relationship is the supreme expression of the traditional five virtues, in both women and in men, which is one reason why he sees it as the most important of the traditional Confucian relationships.83 Furthermore, the question is complicated by the fact that, for Li, there is a more fundamental guideline for moral behavior than virtue, which has to do with expressing one's genuine emotions or one's “child's heartmind.” Our genuine emotions can vary a great deal, which could be taken to suggest that some are more genuine in being filial or ritually proper than others. Moreover, the content of one's genuine emotions will vary between members of the same sex, not just between the sexes, so that it would be hard to generalize about either men's or women's virtues as such. In the end, there is a certain coordination of life-generating tendencies built into our genuine emotions, so that each person living in her or his own authentic way will, without intending it, contribute to harmonious life-generativity overall.84 This suggests that the real similarity between women's and men's virtues is no more nor less than the similarity between the virtues of any individuals, whatever their sex or gender, or at least not different in kind. That already is sufficient to show how dramatically Li departs from other Neo-Confucians on this issue.
Li Zhi thus carves out a position on women and virtue that is, by almost any standard, unusual in Neo-Confucianism. But it should be said that, in spite of the strong stance that Li takes in this essay, there is mixed evidence about the impact that this had on his own thinking and behavior more generally. Li himself lived in a relatively traditional marriage. His essays and letters suggest that his views varied widely and perhaps changed over the course of his life. Sometimes he praised women for observing the principles of lifelong chastity, which traditionally prohibited women from remarrying after their husband's death. At other times, he defended widows' right to remarry.85 Whatever his true or most heartfelt position on these issues, he did not make major strides in changing the views of his Confucian contemporaries. It is not until much later, in the modern era, that some Confucians look to see how far they can take moral equality in both theory and practice.