Contesting Ren in Classical Chinese Philosophy
TAO JIANG
Oneness is a description of intimate relationships. Oneness with those close to us, especially family members, is a natural form of oneness whereas the sense of oneness with fellow citizens when one’s country is under attack is also a powerful, if more temporary, form of oneness. Clearly, depending on contexts and circumstances, our sense of oneness with others can shift and our obligations to others change as a result. Importantly, oneness is both inclusive and exclusive at the same time, for example, to be one with our family can be at odds with our relationship with others or our sense of oneness with others can, under certain circumstances, jeopardize our family relationship. Consequently, oneness and its discontent are one of the most persistent problems that characterize the human condition.
The Chinese intellectual tradition has struggled with this problem since its very inception in the classical period (from the eighth century to the third century BCE). The challenge for the classical Chinese thinkers was how to negotiate the tension between the idea that oneness with one’s family should be the foundation of a broader sociopolitical order and the idea that oneness with all impartially can provide a better model for an orderly world. The following two anecdotes put into sharp focus the wide gap in moral sensibility between classical Confucians and Mohists. The first is from the Analects:
The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
(Analects 13.18, Slingerland’s translation)
The second anecdote is recounted in The Annals of Lü Buwei I/5.5 (呂氏春秋):
The Mohist leader Fu Tun resided in Qin. His son murdered a man. King Hui of Qin said, “You, sir, are too old to have another son, so I have already ordered that the officials not execute him. I hope, sir, that you will abide by my judgment in this matter.”
Fu Tun replied, “The law of the Mohist order says: ‘He who kills another person shall die; he who injures another shall be punished.’ The purpose of this is to prevent the injuring and killing of other people. To prevent the injuring and killing of other people is the most important moral principle in the world. Though your majesty out of kindness has ordered that the officials not execute my son, I cannot but implement the law of the Mohist order.” He would not assent to King Hui’s request and proceeded to kill his own son.
A son is what a man is most partial to. Yet Fu Tun endured the loss of what he was most partial to in order to observe his most important moral principle. The Mohist leader may properly be called impartial.
(Knoblock and Riegel 2000, 75, with slight modification)
These two narratives, to the extent they represent typical Confucian and Mohist moral instincts, vividly capture the core tension and conceptual parameters in Chinese moral thinking of the classical period. That is, classical moral thinking struggles with the tension between humaneness and justice. Humaneness is understood here to be an agent-relative virtue, referring to our natural inclination to be partial toward those who are close to us in a variety of ways, especially our family members, whereas justice is an agent-neutral virtue, referring to our exercise of impersonal judgment on the merits of persons and states of affairs irrespective of their relations to us. Importantly, both humaneness and justice are universal values. The distinction between them, in classical Chinese debate, has to do with whether or not differential treatments accorded to a family member and someone unrelated can be justified and on what ground, especially when the two treatments are in conflict. What is the proper way to treat our family when they are at fault is at the heart of the struggle between humaneness and justice. Most contemporary scholarship on classical Confucian and Mohist philosophies is built on the implicit assumption operative in these two representative narratives, with Confucians touting humaneness and Mohists extolling justice.
However, I will argue that it would be too simplistic to characterize the Confucian moral project as being exclusively oriented toward humaneness since concern for justice is also one of its core considerations. In fact, I will make the case that from the very beginning the Confucians struggle with the tension between humaneness and justice in their conceptions of ideal virtue, community, and polity.1 In this essay, the tension is highlighted, instead of explained away, and used as a lens to look into the conflicted world of the moral universe presented in the Analects. I do this by drawing our attention to the concern for justice in several iterations of ren, a notion that is at the very center of the Confucian moral universe.
Ren, most appropriately translated as Good,2 has been universally recognized as the singular moral ideal touted in the Analects. Due to the multiple definitions of ren in the text, the internal structure of ren and the order of priority among its definitions are still debated among contemporary scholars. More specifically, on different occasions, ren is defined as wisdom, courage, self-discipline, following ritual propriety, reverence, care, and so on. The reigning interpretative strategy among scholars of Confucianism is to treat ren as a kind of metavirtue that encapsulates various lower-order virtues mentioned earlier (for example, Slingerland 2003, Luo 2012). I generally agree with this interpretative strategy, although I think justice should be added to the list of qualities constitutive of ren. More importantly, I would argue that if the previous set of virtues listed under ren can be captured under “humaneness,” justice is more difficult to accommodate within such an interpretation due to its agent-neutral nature. That is, the element of justice in ren destabilizes the humaneness-centered interpretation of the latter. Consequently, a critical question naturally presents itself: Is there a better interpretation of ren that can accommodate these conflicting components of this seminal concept? This essay is an attempt in such a direction.
In order to address this question, I would like to propose that, instead of treating ren as the settled concept of humaneness in the Analects, we should see it as the locus of philosophical debate whereupon contestations and competitions of visions by different thinkers on ideal virtue, community, and polity are registered during the formative period of Chinese intellectual history. Such an interpretation is more historically grounded in that, as Lin Yü-sheng (1974–75) has pointed out, it was Confucius who appropriated an earlier concept of ren referring to the noble qualities of an aristocratic man, removed it from its aristocratic association, and made it the central idea that anchors the emerging Confucian moral universe. Given Confucius’s new and innovative way of using ren, it is at least reasonable to assume that it was not yet a settled concept. I will argue that central to the contestation of ren is the competition between two kinds of ideal virtue, community, and polity, namely a humaneness-centered vision versus a justice-centered one. The fact that ren is defined in so many ways in the Analects itself is a clear indication that Confucius and his close disciples are still trying to think through what constitutes ideal virtue, community, and polity. The unsettled nature of ren becomes even more evident when we bring in other thinkers from the classical period, especially the Mohists, who are widely acknowledged as the most serious challengers of the Confucians and their intellectual project.
While many occurrences of ren in the Analects warrant the interpretation of humaneness, here I argue that in certain other cases, within the Analects and other classical texts like the Mozi, it is actually preferable to understand ren in terms of justice, rather than humaneness. In light of this, I conclude that the prevailing translation of ren tends to privilege agent-dependent virtues like humaneness, with the result that the classical Confucian project has been framed with a bias toward humaneness at the expense of properly appreciating the intellectual struggle between these two kinds of concerns therein.
To make the case, let us first examine some occurrences of ren in the Analects in which it makes more semantic sense to interpret it as justice instead of humaneness. Second, and more importantly, we look into an underappreciated aspect of ren, namely, the constitutive role of the Golden Rule in Confucius’s formulation of ren, and explore its implications for the component of justice in ren. Although there is a good deal of scholarly literature on ren and the Confucian Golden Rule, not much attention has been given to exploring the implications of the Golden Rule’s constitutive role in ren articulated in the Analects. Furthermore, we will direct some attention to examining the Mohist exercising of the Golden Rule in developing the Confucian notion of ren and its extraordinary intellectual consequences, which have been largely ignored in the scholarly discussion of the Golden Rule and ren in Chinese intellectual history.
My central argument in this essay is that the critical role of the Golden Rule in Confucius’s articulation of ren highlights the importance of justice in the project outlined by Confucius and that the reigning consensus on interpreting ren as humaneness underappreciates such a critical component in ren. Furthermore, I make the case that it is Mozi and the Mohists who disambiguate the notion of ren in Confucius’s teaching by putting the Golden Rule into practice and pushing ren to its logical conclusion, thereby pioneering a powerful theory of impartial care and universal justice.
Instances of Ren as the Virtue of Justice in the Analects
In order to make the case that there is a conceptual tension between humaneness and justice in Confucius’s articulation of ren, let us begin by taking a close look at certain occurrences of ren in the Analects that favor a justice-oriented interpretation, as opposed to other occurrences that favor a humaneness-oriented interpretation. Since the latter have received most of the scholarly attention, we will focus on the former as a corrective to the dominant discourse on ren. Specifically, we will look at three particular cases wherein translating ren as humaneness is both conceptually and semantically difficult: First, how can a person of ren both love and despise people? Second, what does ren mean in the case of “sacrificing oneself to realize ren (shashen chengren 殺身成仁, Analects 15.9)? Third, should Guan Zhong 管仲 be considered ren or not? Let us examine these cases more closely to see what is at stake in the interpretation of ren. We will see how, in different ways, the prevailing interpretative paradigm has tried to accommodate these difficulties and how such interpretative maneuvers have failed to appreciate the critical component of justice in ren.
The first interpretative difficulty has to do with whether a person of ren loves or despises/hates people. In Analects 12.22, Confucius famously defines ren in terms of loving or caring for people (ai ren 愛人). However, Analects 4.3 seems to problematize such a definition:
The Master said, “Only a person of ren knows how to like people and how to hate (or despise) them.”3
(Analects 4.3)
This occurrence of ren appears to contradict the definition of ren in terms of loving or caring for people in 12.22, and it demands some semantic flexibility in interpreting ren. One way to treat the difficulty is to sharply distinguish the meanings of ai 愛 from hao 好. However, given a significant overlap in the generic meanings of these two words, such an interpretative strategy does not take the conceptual tension between the two understandings of ren seriously.
Conceptually, there is a clear tension between saying that ren is loving/caring for people and saying that ren is knowing how to love and despise/hate people. While loving and caring for people are indicative of the humaneness of the moral agent, knowing how to love and despise/hate people brings in the consideration of desert in the agent’s treatment of others. Knowing how to treat others, whether liking or disliking, based on their moral desert points to the virtue of justice (each receiving her due)4 that is being touted in Analects 4.3. It is therefore more straightforward to understand ren in 4.3 as the virtue of justice rather than humaneness. The Analects is full of disparaging remarks and observations regarding “petty men” (xiao ren 小人) and warns the disciples to be vigilant against (becoming) such people, with the obvious implication that petty men deserve being despised and that it is just to despise them. On the other hand, the semantic limit of humaneness is less accommodating of the elements of despising and disliking.
The second interpretative difficulty concerns the understanding of ren ren 仁人, those who are ren. In Analects 15.9, Confucius famously heaps praises on persons of ren:
The Master said, “No scholar-officials with noble vocations or persons of ren would harm ren when trying to preserve their lives, but they could very well sacrifice themselves in accomplishing the ideal of ren.”
(Analects 15.9)
Again, a person of ren (ren ren 仁人) is usually translated as a humane person. However, it is rather counterintuitive to understand ren as humaneness in this particular context since “sacrificing oneself to accomplish the ideal of humaneness” does not work very well either semantically or conceptually. On the other hand, it is much more intuitive to translate ren as the virtue of justice here. That is, translating ren ren as humane persons is rather stretched as it is not quite intuitive to say that a humane person would sacrifice his or her life to accomplish humaneness whereas the semantic and conceptual range of justice is much more aligned with the context here, namely, a just person would sacrifice his or her life for a just cause.
Third, for the purpose of this essay the most significant of these interpretative difficulties has to do Confucius’s evaluations of Guan Zhong on different occasions. There are several interesting evaluations of important historical personalities in the Analects, Guan Zhong being one of the most prominent and controversial figures. He was Duke Huan of Qi’s 齊桓公 chief minister and was instrumental in launching critical reforms to make Qi an efficient and centralized bureaucratic state as well as an economic and military power. He was widely credited as being primarily responsible for making Duke Huan the first of the five hegemons (ba 霸) of the Spring and Autumn period (chunqiu wuba 春秋五霸).5 Confucius, as recorded in the Analects, seems rather conflicted in his evaluations of Guan Zhong.
In the Analects 3.22, Confucius criticizes Guan Zhong as someone who does not understand ritual (li 禮), a damning critique of a figure with such a high stature. However, in 14.16 and 14.17 Confucius seems to take a completely different attitude toward Guan Zhong. Indeed, in those passages Confucius praises Guan Zhong rather profusely. Let us take a closer look.
Analects 14.16 records an interesting conversation between Confucius and his disciple Zilu:
Zilu said, “When Duke Huan had his brother Prince Jiu murdered, Shao Hu died for his master, whereas Guan Zhong did not.” He then added, “Does this behavior not fall short of Goodness?”
The Master replied, “It was Guan Zhong’s strength that allowed Duke Huan, on many occasions, to harmoniously unite the feudal lords without the use of military force. Ru qi ren, ru qi ren …”
(Slingerland’s translation with modifications)
According to established ritual norm at the time, a vassal should kill himself when his master dies as a demonstration of loyalty to his master. However, Guan Zhong did not follow this norm. Instead, he was recruited by the murderer of his master, the brother of his master, who became Duke Huan, to serve as his chief minister. Due to such a serious violation of ritual norm, Zilu asks Confucius whether Guan Zhong should indeed not be considered ren. Given Confucius’s disapproval of Guan Zhong as someone who does not understand li and the importance of li in the virtue of ren (Analects 12.1), we would expect Confucius to dismiss Guan Zhong as someone who is not ren. Surprisingly, however, Confucius touts Guan Zhong’s accomplishment, including his assistance in helping Duke Huan to bring peace among the warring lords without resorting to military means.
Toward the end of Confucius’s remarks, he utters “ru qi ren, ru qi ren” 如其仁如其仁 and the precise meaning of the Master’s words has been contested in contemporary scholarship. Interestingly, however, traditional Chinese commentary regarding the meaning of ru qi ren is a settled one. As Edward Slingerland summarizes,
Beginning with Kong Anguo, the standard interpretation of Confucius’ final assessment, ruqiren (lit. “like his Goodness”), has been to understand it either with an implicit “who” before it (“who could match his Goodness!”) or as in the sense of “such was his Goodness!” Such high praise has caused consternation among commentators, considering the negative attitudes expressed toward Guan Zhong in 3.22, as well as the fact that he was serving a hegemon rather than a legitimate king. Zhu Xi follows Kong Anguo, but tries to explain away the contradiction by adding, “probably what he meant is that, although Guan Zhong was not quite a truly Good person, his beneficence extended to all people, and therefore his achievements were Good.” A more satisfying way to reconcile 14.16–14.17 with 3.22 is to follow commentators who understand ruqiren—like the “Ah! That man! That man!” in 14.9—as a noncommittal “But as for his Goodness, as for his Goodness.”
(160–61; “Good”/“Goodness” is Slingerland’s translation of ren)
Slingerland makes a reasonable case for understanding ru qi ren to refer to Confucius’s noncommittal attitude toward Guan Zhong. However, the fact that the long-standing Confucian commentarial tradition has interpreted Confucius to be praising Guan Zhong as an exemplar of ren par excellence is itself telling. That is, the Confucian commentarial tradition recognizes the virtue of ren demonstrated by Guan Zhong, manifested in the restoration of order in the world without resorting to military force. Such a recognition should not be easily dismissed as a case of misreading or misunderstanding Confucius.
This positive reading of Confucius’s evaluation of Guan Zhong in Analects 14.16 is strengthened by 14.17, wherein Confucius credits Guan Zhong for his effort to preserve the cultural heritage of the Chinese civilization and prevent the invasions of “barbarians.”
Zigong asked, “Guan Zhong was not a Good person, was he? When Duke Huan had Prince Jiu murdered, Guan Zhong was not only incapable of dying with his master, he moreover turned around and served his master’s murderer as Prime Minister.”
The Master replied, “When Guan Zhong served as Duke Huan’s Prime Minister, he allowed him to become hegemon over the other feudal lords, uniting and ordering the entire world. To this day, the people continue to enjoy the benefits of his achievements—if it were not for Guan Zhong, we would all be wearing our hair loose and fastening our garments on the left. How could he be expected to emulate the petty fidelity of a common husband or wife, going off to hang himself and die anonymously in some gully or ditch?”
(Analects 14.17, Slingerland’s translation)
Here Confucius is much more forthcoming in rejecting the notion that Guan Zhong was not ren due to his violation of the ritual norm expected of him with the death of his former master. Confucius makes a powerful case for considering Guan Zhong ren by listing his major accomplishments.6 When compared with such towering achievements in bringing greater good to the world, Guan Zhong’s following his master to death would have been petty and pitiful. Confucius’s low regard for petty men (xiaoren 小人), manifestly evident in this passage, is well known. The Confucian tradition has clearly seen this as a case of sacrificing the norm of personal virtue for the greater good of bringing peace to the world.
If we restrict the meaning of ren to the agent-dependent virtue of humaneness, Guan Zhong was not a person of ren since he did not demonstrate sufficient devotion and loyalty to his former master. On the other hand, if ren is understood more in the direction of the agent-neutral virtue of justice, Guan Zhong can indeed be regarded as a person of ren. This point becomes even clearer in the third reference to Guan Zhong in Analects 14.9. Someone asks for Confucius’s assessments of Zichan, Zixi, and Guan Zhong and Confucius’s comment on Guan Zhong is again an interesting one.
They asked about Guan Zhong. The Master replied, “Now there was a man. He confiscated the three hundred household city of Ping from the head of the Bo Clan, reducing him to abject poverty, and yet to the end of his days not a single resentful word was uttered against him.”
(Analects 14.9, Slingerland’s translation)
Slingerland provides some helpful historical background to the reference Confucius makes here: “The head of the Bo Clan was a minister in the state of Qi, and apparently his fiefdom was confiscated as punishment for an unspecified crime. The most plausible way to understand Confucius’ comment is to follow Kong Anguo: Guan Zhong’s actions were appropriate and reasonable, and therefore even those who suffered from his decisions could find no reason to blame him” (Slingerland 2003, 157). Recall Analects 12.2, wherein one of the qualities of ren is the ability to cause no resentment in fulfilling one’s official duties. In 14.9, Confucius clearly recognizes such a quality in Guan Zhong.
All of these cases point to Guan Zhong’s deserving the recognition of being a person of ren, as a man of justice, in the eyes of Confucius. As for Confucius’s dismissal of Guan Zhong as not a person of li, it can be more interestingly explored in terms of the tension between li and ren in the moral universe of the Analects. This approach, which takes seriously such tensions in the Confucian moral universe, should be more fruitful to the philosophical interpretation of the Confucian project. Seeing Guan Zhong as representing at least one kind of ren opens up the possibility of integrating the component of justice into a fuller understanding of ren.
If the case made for interpreting ren as the virtue of justice in some instances within the Analects is plausible, a question would follow: Are there conceptual resources for such an interpretation of ren in the text? In this connection, Guan Zhong’s own understanding of ren is a useful pointer for us. In Guanzi 51.2, Guan Zhong is recorded as advising Duke Huan, “what one does not want do not impose it on others. That is ren” (非其所欲，勿施於人，仁也). As we will see in the next section, although the Golden Rule is not used by itself to define ren in the Analects, unlike in the Guanzi, it is nevertheless constitutive of ren. Indeed, I argue that Confucius’s deliberation on the Golden Rule as constitutive of ren in the Analects offers a precious conceptual resource to explore the dimension of justice in ren.
Ren and the Golden Rule in the Analects
The Golden Rule is a major milestone in the historical development of human moral consciousness in that it forges a powerful and, at least prima facie, intuitive path toward a fair treatment of others that is necessary in building a flourishing community by using the self as the barometer to measure how others should be treated, especially strangers. There has also been a long-standing critique of the Golden Rule arguing that using what the self desires and wants as the criterion to measure how to treat others properly is unreliable at best and problematic at worst, given the troubling nature of the self and the great diversity of people’s desires and hopes. For example, the Golden Rule logic can potentially turn a masochist into a sadist if a masochist believes that everybody shares his masochism (Ivanhoe 1990, 19), or a fanatical Buddhist can use the Golden Rule logic to justify his effort to convert others to Buddhism with the belief that everybody would be better off being a Buddhist, just like him. To be fair to the Golden Rule, it is hard to conceive of a moral principle that would be foolproof in providing guidance to our actions under any circumstance, although that has not prevented philosophers from trying to formulate one.
However, my focus here is not on an evaluation of the Golden Rule per se. Rather, I am more interested in the connection between ren and the Golden Rule in the Analects as a fertile conceptual resource for interpreting ren as justice in some contexts within the classical Chinese philosophical discourse and for examining its philosophical and historical implications and consequences. The clearest connection between ren and the Golden Rule is laid out in Analects 12.2, where Confucius explains ren this way:
Zhong Gong inquires about ren. Confucius says, “When you leave home, act as though you were about to greet important guests; when you employ people, act as though you were performing the grand sacrificial ritual. Do not do to others what you do not want for yourself. Then there would be no resentment in public or at home.”
In this passage, the Golden Rule is clearly understood as constitutive of ren. The expression “do not do to others what you do not want for yourself” (己所不欲勿施於人) is referred to as shu 恕 in the Analects. Shu’s constitutive role in ren is key to our following discussion.
Shu, commonly translated as reciprocity, is often dubbed the negative Golden Rule (or Silver Rule), in contrast with the famous Golden Rule in the biblical tradition, which has a positive formulation. Indeed, the negative formulation features so prominently in the Analects that, within recent scholarly discussions of the Golden Rule, it is widely regarded as a uniquely Confucian formulation. Earlier, scholars debated whether the positive or the negative formulation had the conceptual advantage, although lately there has not been much scholarly interest in adjudicating such an issue.
The negative Golden Rule appears on several occasions in the Analects. For example,
Zigong asks, “Is there one word that can be applied throughout one’s life?” Confucius replies, “Is that shu? Do not do to others what you do not want for yourself.”
(Analects 15.24)
Here shu is elevated to the exalted status of a lifelong guide to a moral life or “a general maxim,” as Heiner Roetz puts it (Roetz 1993, 133) in Confucius’s teaching. It is also a difficult one to practice, possibly beyond the capacity of some disciples like Zigong (Analects 5.12).
However, Analects 15.24 is rather controversial in current Sinological scholarship. As Mark Csikszentmihalyi points out, many interpreters are “skeptical about either the claim that reciprocity is so central or the original nature of the passage itself” (2008, 161). Indeed, many scholars of classical Confucianism, such as Bryan Van Norden, E. Bruce Brooks, and to some extent Mark Csikszentmihalyi, dismiss the central importance of the Golden Rule in the Analects because it does not quite “fit” with the general orientation of the text or with the Confucian tradition, which tends to be virtue-based rather than rule-based. This approach raises an important question about the general orientation of the Analects that is key to this essay. If we interpret the Confucian project as centering on humaneness, those justice-oriented passages might indeed appear out of place. But as a general interpretative rule I think it is preferable, to the extent possible, to resist the temptation to explain away conceptual tensions within the Analects through Sinological maneuvers since such an approach can potentially undermine the integrity of philosophical interpretations of Chinese classics.7
Another strand of contemporary discussion about the Confucian Golden Rule, represented by Fung Yulan, D. C. Lau, Herbert Fingarette, David Nivison, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, accepts its centrality in the Confucian project and tries to creatively explore ways in which the Golden Rule might fit with the general contour of the Analects and classical Confucian thought. Their central verse is Analects 4.15, the famous “one-thread” teaching that supposedly runs through all of the Master’s teachings:
The Master said, “Zeng, my Way can be strung together in one thread.”
Zengzi answered, “Yes.”
The Master left.
Other disciples asked, “What did he mean?”
Zengzi said, “The Way of the Master is nothing more than loyalty (zhong 忠) and reciprocity (shu 恕).”
(Analects 4.15)
There has also been much disputation about the authenticity and the proper interpretation of this passage.8 What is relevant to our discussion here is not so much the historical authenticity of this passage, in terms of whether it really represents the teaching of Confucius9 himself, as the less controversial issue of its pertinence to the overall Confucian project during the classical period.
Among the second group of scholars we can see two distinct approaches to the Golden Rule, with Fung, Lau, and Fingarette favoring a universalist treatment of zhong and shu on a more egalitarian ground and Nivison and Ivanhoe paying more attention to the hierarchical subtext of the Golden Rule in the Confucian context.10 I am more sympathetic to the effort to interpret the Golden Rule as central to the Confucian project, especially by Nivison and Ivanhoe, due to their historical and textual sensitivity to the Analects. However, I do not think hierarchy exhausts the Golden Rule in the Analects and I will argue that hierarchy is only one way Confucius’s iteration of the Golden Rule can be employed and interpreted.
In many ways, the emphasis on the hierarchical subtext of Confucius’s Golden Rule has to do with the juxtaposition of zhong and shu in the Analects as the single thread in the Master’s teaching. However, leaving aside for now whether zhong shu is single or dual, I would note that the Confucian Golden Rule is not necessarily defined by zhong and shu together since it is the way shu is defined in the Analects that has prompted the Golden Rule comparison whereas zhong by itself would not have invited any obvious parallelism with the biblical Golden Rule. Furthermore, shu is also used independently of zhong in the Analects, so the two are hardly inseparable. This is important because if zhong presupposes the embedded social and ritual hierarchy, as Nivison and Ivanhoe have convincingly argued, shu does not carry a similar assumption. Therefore, I would like to separate shu from zhong and focus on shu here.
In Roetz’s analysis, the Confucian Golden Rule is linked to the Axial Age discourse that highlights a spiritual and intellectual breakthrough around the time of Confucius across the globe. More specifically, Roetz treats the Confucian Golden Rule as more universalistic and less embedded in the social hierarchy of Confucius’s time, at least in its aspiration and potential in the Analects (Roetz 1993, 145). As he perceptively observes, what is remarkable about the Golden Rule articulated by Confucius is that it alone has the status of the “one pervading all” in the Analects (Roetz 1993, 134–35). Such an exalted status is not accorded to any of the familiar aspects of Confucian ethics in the Western (and Chinese) scholarly iterations, such as “tradition or a casuistry which tells us to act like certain models from the past did in comparable situations, parental authority, the judgment of the community, or the conventional normality of what ‘one does’ or ‘one does not do’ ” (Roetz 1993, 134–35). This can partially explain the first group of scholars mentioned earlier who dismiss the Golden Rule as not belonging to the Analects or at least not fitting the general orientation of Confucius’s teachings.
In his article “Reweaving the ‘One Thread’ of the Analects,” Ivanhoe (1990, 17) highlights reversibility in Confucius’s formulation of the Golden Rule.11 As Ivanhoe explains, “One sees that one’s actions should be reversible—that I should treat others as I would want to be treated by them, were we to exchange our position” (17, italics in original). Such a reversal of roles between a moral agent and a moral recipient can, potentially, have a leveling effect in neutralizing the moral agent’s personal preference and privileged status when it comes to the determination of what it is and is not proper. Lau relies on Analects 6.30 to interpret shu as the method of ren in that shu “consists in taking oneself—‘what is near at hand’—as an analogy and asking oneself what one would like or dislike were one in the position of the person at the receiving end” (1983, xiii). This reversibility lies at the heart of any conception of justice. The constitution of the Golden Rule in some of Confucius’s iterations of ren points to the dimension of justice in the consummate virtue of ren.
However, as pointed out earlier in the essay, there is another powerful sentiment expressed in the Analects that is also registered in ren, namely, a moral agent’s attachment to their family (Analects 1.2) as well as commitment to their role in the ritual-based sociopolitical hierarchy (Analects 12.1) celebrated by the Master. In fact, the humaneness-centered interpretation of ren is the dominant approach in contemporary scholarship. In Analects 1.2, Confucius identifies the familial virtue of filial piety and respect for elder brothers as the root of ren (孝弟也者，其為仁之本與). The implication is that from filial piety and respect for elder brothers one would gradually develop the capacity to love and care for people more generally. That is, ren is rooted in the familial sentiments of filial piety and brotherly love that then develop into a more general care for people. This means that ren is understood as both a particular virtue and a general virtue in the Analects, as Wing-tsit Chan (1955, 297–98) observes. Still, the tension between familial obligations (particular) and the sense of justice (general) is palpable in the Analects, crystallized in Confucius’s endorsement of a son covering up his father’s theft, cited at the beginning of this essay.
At the center of the difficulty is the extent to which the moral agent can extend their care. That is, the Golden Rule entails the actual practice of extending care to others through an imagined role reversal by putting oneself in another’s shoes in order to achieve ren. In other words, the Golden Rule is not only a rule, but also requires the willingness on the part of a moral agent to extend care to others. This is why Confucius’s definition of ren as caring for people (ai ren 愛人, Analects 12.22) is critical for understanding what is being extended in the practice the Golden Rule. However, it is precisely in the actual practice of extending one’s care to others entailed by the Golden Rule where potentially insurmountable problems are encountered. This has to do with the scope of reversibility, constrained by the practice of extending one’s care.
In the Analects, one’s attachment to family constitutes the most serious limit in the extension of care. If the Golden Rule uses the self as the barometer for measuring how to treat others, in the Confucian moral universe family belongs to an ambiguous category between the self and other. This is because family is neither self nor other. It is in between. The Golden Rule offers a way to extend one’s care to those beyond our circle of family (and friends), but the Confucians cannot give up the special status or the root of care accorded to those close to the moral agent because for the Confucians that would violate our humanity.
By contrast, Mozi and the Mohists develop an account of the general virtue of ren by applying the reversibility principle in the Golden Rule to ren, pushing the latter from “loving or caring for people” (Analects 12.22) to its logical conclusion of impartial care (jian ai 兼愛) and thereby pioneering the radical idea of universal justice in Chinese history.
Ren and the Golden Rule in the Mozi
To many contemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy, it is Mozi who represents the true beginning of Chinese philosophical thinking. Unlike most other major thinkers of the classical period, Mozi came from the lower strata of Chinese society, likely a craftsman and a self-made thinker. He was also the head of a major religious and social movement at the time, challenging the established social and moral norms of the aristocracy. As Chris Fraser acutely observes, “search for objective moral standards to guide action and reform society lies at the heart of the Mohist philosophical and political project” (2009, 143). This would have major implications in the ways Mohist thought develops, especially when compared with its Confucian rival. Mozi is said to have studied Confucius’s teachings early on. Mozi might have seen himself as developing Confucius’s teachings in some respect and his understanding of ren can be seen as a good example of his development of Confucius’s thought.
The teaching of impartial care is universally recognized as the single most important ethical teaching of Mozi and the Mohists. There is a clear conceptual connection between ren qua ai in the Analects and jian ai in the Mozi. In fact, Mozi and the Mohists reach the doctrine of jian ai by taking reversibility in the Golden Rule much more seriously than the self-professed followers of Confucius and interpreting ren more as an agent-neutral virtue of justice than an agent-dependent virtue of humaneness. That is, Mozi and the Mohists vigorously apply the Golden Rule to ren and push Confucius’s idea of loving/caring for people to its logical conclusion of loving/caring for all, often to the exasperation of later Confucians like Mencius, who accuse the Mohists of being unfilial (無父, Mencius 3B/9).12
If justice is an important aspect of ren in the Analects, it becomes identified with ren in the Mozi. In “Jian Ai” III 兼愛下 (16.6), the virtue of jian 兼 (impartiality) is explicitly linked to the virtues of ren and yi (兼即仁矣義矣). Clearly, the idea of jian is conceptually connected to the more established term of ren and pushes ren further in the direction of impartiality, namely, the agent-neutral virtue of justice. As an example, let us take a look at the “Fa Yi” 法儀 chapter wherein Mozi uses ren in the sense of justice:
This being the case, what then is the proper model for governing? Supposing everyone were to model themselves on their parents, what would that be like? There are many parents in the world, but very few of them are ren. If we were to model ourselves on our parents, the model we chose would not be one of ren. A model that is not ren cannot serve as a model. Supposing everyone were to model themselves on their teachers, what would that be like? There are many teachers in the world, but very few of them are ren. If we were to model ourselves on our teachers, the model would not be one of ren. A model that is not ren cannot serve as a model. Supposing everyone were to model themselves on their rulers, what would that be like? There are many rulers in the world, but very few of them are ren. If we were to model ourselves on our rulers, then the model would not be one of ren. A model that is not ren cannot serve as a true model. Therefore of the three—parents, teachers, and rulers—not one can be regarded as the model for governing.
(Knoblock and Riegel 2013, 4.2, with modifications)
In this passage, Mozi deals with the problem of standard/criterion/model in governance by refuting parents, scholars, and rulers as possible candidates. His reasoning is simple and straightforward, namely, given the plurality and heterogeneity of parents, scholars, and rulers in the world, following any of them would entail setting up standards, criteria, or models that are not ren. As Ivanhoe points out, “The fundamental problem [for the Mohists] is a fragmentation of values. Hence the most pressing task is to get people to agree on a single notion of what is right” (1998, 453).
However, what particularly interests us in this passage is the notion of ren. Given the context here, it is much more intuitive to translate ren as just, rather than humane. To translate ren as humane here is awkward since it makes little sense to say that the law/standard/model is not humane when there is no uniformity in it. On the other hand, it makes much more sense to say that the law/standard/model cannot be just if it is inconsistent, as it would then lead to differential treatments of people, which is unjust. Clearly, the idea of ren in the Mozi is a much more justice-oriented concept than it is in the Analects.
More importantly, for our purpose in this essay, Mozi and the Mohists can be seen as using the Golden Rule to push the element of ai in the Confucian moral universe to its logical conclusion, resulting in the ideal of impartial care (jian ai). Many scholars have pointed out the relative scarcity of ai in Confucius’s iterations of ren in the Analects. This means that Mozi and his followers develop the seed of ai planted in the Analects into a full-blown notion of jian ai. For example, in “Jian Ai” I 兼愛上 Mozi appeals to the Golden Rule to explain impartial care:
If we could induce everyone in the world to love others impartially, so that each person loved others just as he loved himself, would there be any person who failed to be obedient to superiors? If each person regarded his father and elder brothers as well as his lord just as he did himself, how could he do anything that was disobedient? And would there be any person who failed to be affectionate to inferiors? If each person regarded his younger brothers and sons as well as ministers just as he did himself, how could he do anything that was unaffectionate? Thus disobedient and unaffectionate conduct would cases to exist. And would there be robbery and murder? If each person regarded the families of other men just as he regards his own family, from whom would he steal? And if he regarded other men’s bodies just as he regards his own, on whom would he inflict injury? Thus robbers and murderers would cease to exist. And would there be grand officers who bring disorder to teach other’s houses and lords of the various states who attack each other’s states? If a grand officer regarded other men’s houses just as he regards his own, to whom would he bring disorder? If the lord of a state regarded another lord’s state just as he regards his own, whom would he attack? Thus grand officers who bring disorder to each other’s houses and the lords of the various states who attack each other’s states would both cease to exist. If we could induce everyone in the world to love others impartially, states wouldn’t attack each other, houses would not bring disorder to each other, there would be neither robbers nor murderers, and every lord and minister, father and son, would be capable of behaving obediently and affectionately. If the world were like this, then it would be well ordered.
(Knoblock and Riegel 2013, 14.3)
In this passage, Mozi explicitly appeals to the Golden Rule in arguing for the impartial care of all in the world. More specifically, he states that if we could care about others the way we care about ourselves, there would be no unfilial son, no unloving parent, no theft, no attack on another’s house, no aggression among states, and so on. As Carine Defoort points out, there is a major flaw in the Mohist argument “since the scope of caring is inherently ambiguous: very often, egoism or ‘care for oneself’ coincides with altruism or ‘care for others,’ such as when it benefits more than just oneself” (2013, 48).13 Defoort does not think there are conceptual resources in the Mozi to deal with such a challenge.
However, the center of controversy concerning the Mohist ideal of jian ai has to do with its perceived impossibility and lack of a credible account for its moral motivation. Modern scholars have generally followed Mencius in interpreting the Mohist ideal of jian ai as incompatible with filial obligations. Against this interpretation, Dan Robins argues that the Mohist teachings of jian ai, rather than challenging the familial obligations, “consistently took for granted the value of the family, sometimes defending their core doctrines on its basis” (2008, 386–87). Defoort, in her recent essay, reaffirms the more traditional reading of the Mohist teaching of jian ai that highlights the tension between filial piety and impartial care. More interestingly, however, Defoort’s study of the evolution of jian ai in the Mozi is helpful in our deliberations on the role reciprocity plays in the Mohist teachings as well as in providing an account of the moral motivation for jian ai.
Defoort observes a rather curious fact, that the term jian ai does not appear much in the three chapters with the title “Jian ai” but that it appears more frequently in later “Tian Zhi” 天志 chapters. After reviewing various hypotheses offered by A. C. Graham, Ding Weixiang, Watanabe Takashi, A. Taeko Brooks, Chris Fraser, and others to account for the differences among the three chapters, she offers her own solution to accommodate the textual and conceptual differences among the “Jian ai” triplet, which includes chapter 14, 15, and 16. Defoort argues that there is a gradual evolution from chapter 14 to chapter 16 that culminates in the notion of jian ai (2013, 41). As she elaborates,
In the whole triplet, “care” in itself is never an object of controversy, but only its scope and specific content: the value of reciprocity (xiang) that was prominent in chapter 14 was slowly replaced by inclusiveness (jian)14 from the middle of chapter 15 onward, and most explicitly so in chapter 16. The deep-rooted idea of reciprocity has not disappeared but has become a part of the explicit argument in favor of impartiality: those who are not shortsighted realize that being good to others will involve compensation for themselves (chapter 15) and for their loved ones (chapter 16). But this is clearly not the final stage of jian ai: its occurrence in chapter 16 as well as in other Core Chapters illustrates the inherent dynamics of the Mohist idea: the new demand for inclusive caring moves further on, almost leaving behind all reflections in terms of reciprocity.
(Defoort 2013, 57–58)
The concern about the scope of care in the “Jian ai” chapters echoes our previous discussion of Confucius’s take on the Golden Rule. In Defoort’s observation of the doctrinal development of the notion of jian ai in the evolving Mohist moral thinking, reciprocity is seen as an important step from an agent-dependent moral universe to an agent-neutral moral universe. While the Mohists would make the leap to the agent-neutral moral universe, the Confucians remain reluctant to embrace the full implications of the Golden Rule and follow it to its logical conclusion.
Furthermore, Defoort argues that the idea of jian ai would be further radicalized in the “Tian Zhi” chapters in two ways, both having to do with reciprocity: “First, they establish a reciprocity between Heaven and all human beings, as a new way to motivate the inclusion of strangers in one’s scope of caring. Second, they further radicalize their moral stance to the extent that reciprocity becomes a duty toward Heaven rather than something to be expected from others. Here the obligation of ‘inclusive caring’ is for the first time explicitly identified as the will of Heaven (tian zhi yi 天之意)” (Defoort 2013, 61). This means that jian ai is evolving into a transcendent notion as the will of Heaven, with the result that jian ai is expanded to include everybody as the expression of Heaven’s will. In so doing, the Mohists put Heaven as the foundation of jian ai (62). Consequently, reciprocity is now considered too limited “to contain the ever-growing moral demands of the Mohists and to support the absolute duty to care for everybody without expecting anything in return” (63). In other words, truly universal justice ultimately transcends human reciprocity, which inevitably retains the residue of agent-dependency, whereas true universal impartiality is completely agent-neutral since Heaven is its true agent. Indeed, such an account of the evolution of jian ai in the Mozi can be seen as a later stage in the intellectual development of the Golden Rule in early Chinese intellectual history.
However, it is one thing to observe the power and cogency of an ethical theory, but quite another to judge whether anybody can use it to guide their moral actions. In this connection, the most frequent critique of the Mohist ideal of jian ai is that it lacks a credible account of the motivation for moral actions within the Mohist jian ai framework. That is, how can someone be motivated to embrace jian ai, especially when there is conflict in benefit between oneself or one’s family and someone else or their family? The virtue of humaneness can more easily account for this by arguing that sentiments of partiality to those close to us, especially our family, are natural expressions of our humanity whereas it is unclear what could motivate anybody to save someone else’s parents when one’s own parents are in danger. The Mohists counter that if everyone can be uniformly motivated to save everybody else’s parents our own parents will also be taken care of. David Wong (1989) and Van Norden (2007) have convincingly demonstrated the near impossibility of any person not morally prioritizing their loved ones over strangers. This very much echoes Mencius’s accusation that the Mohists are unfilial. In other words, the consensus verdict for the Mohist teaching of jian ai is that it is beyond the limit of humanity (Mencius 3A/5).
This is where Defoort’s account of jian ai can be helpful. What Defoort’s interpretation has demonstrated is that the motivation for the Mohist vision of universal justice is fundamentally religious, with Heaven as its foundation.15 In this connection, it is important to observe the extraordinary lengths to which the Mohists take the teaching of jian ai, in that they would come to the defense of a city unjustly attacked when they have no obvious ties with that city. Furthermore, the Mohists share with the Confucians the idea that there would be peace in the world if everybody treated one another’s family as they would treat their own (Mencius 1A/7), but the Confucians do not take this idea as literally as the Mohists. As such, the Mohist teaching calls for a much more robust sense of communal and reciprocal commitment among its members whereas the Confucian position is considered more humanly possible and reasonable (and more secular by comparison). This is how we should interpret the Mohist teaching in the “Shang Tong” 尚同 chapters, wherein Mozi touts the leader of a community, whether village (li 里), district (xiang 鄉), or state (guo 國), as a ren ren 仁人 and advocates the idea that everybody in a given community conform him- or herself to the leader by taking his ideas, speech, and actions as the sole criterion in that community. Given the context here, it is much more intuitive to translate ren ren as a just person than as a humane person. The Mohist concern here is precisely how a robust community can be constituted with uniform standards and models such that jian ai can be put into practice within such a vigorously disciplined community.
To conclude, in this essay I have attempted to make the case that there is serious conceptual tension between humaneness and justice in Chinese philosophical discourse during the classical period. It is done through an investigation of the relationship between ren and the Golden Rule in the Analects and the Mozi. Essentially, what I am proposing here is that if we problematize the tensions in the classical texts, instead of explaining them away, we can potentially open up hitherto unexplored dimensions of the projects classical thinkers like Confucius and Mozi were engaged in, and we can thereby acquire a better appreciation of the intellectual struggles they faced.
Mencius is clearly aware of the tension between humaneness and justice, as evidenced by his solution to Shun’s predicament about whether to prosecute his criminal father (Mencius 7A/35). According to Mencius, Shun, an ancient sage king idolized in Confucianism, did not stop his justice minister’s persecution of his father, but before he allowed that to happen, Shun abdicated his throne and carried his father to a faraway land to live there forever happily with no regret. Shun’s refusal to stand by and allow his father to be prosecuted is humane but unjust to most people, yet his abdication removed the element of injustice since it would be the equivalent of Shun recusing himself in the case of a conflict of interest and duty, even though it has been construed as the demonstration of his selfless filial act to save his father regardless of the cost to himself (loss of empire). The example in the Annals of Lü Buwei cited in the beginning of this essay, wherein an ideal Mohist magistrate executed his criminal son, provides a sharp contrast to the story of Shun and his father. In the Mohist example, the magistrate is just but inhumane.
This unresolved tension between humaneness and justice has a direct bearing on the Confucian idea of moral cultivation. More specifically, in order to solve the inherent tension in the Confucian project between concerns for humaneness and justice, the Confucians eventually settled on the idea of moral cultivation, with the hope that a morally cultivated agent alone will be best positioned to handle a particular moral dilemma that might be unsolvable at the level of doctrines and generalities. In other words, the irreducibility of human subjectivity in the Confucian moral universe can be seen as directly related to their unwillingness to entertain the possibility of a singular uniform moral system that allows for no exceptions or discretions.16 In this respect, it is perhaps not a historical coincidence that, unlike the Confucians, the Mohists did not develop an elaborate system for moral cultivation in the way the Confucians did, since they did not place all their hope on idealized moral exemplars. Rather, their hope is to establish a uniform moral standard and norm that is applicable to everyone under all circumstances and allows for no special considerations or discretions. The radicality of the Mohist moral project is simply breathtaking, especially within the context of the classical Chinese intellectual environment and the social conditions of the time. For complex social and political reasons, Mohism did not survive as a philosophical school in postclassical China. Nonetheless it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact of the Mohists within subsequent Chinese intellectual history. The ideal of universal justice heralded by the Mohists lived on through various mutations in the hands of later Chinese thinkers, including many Confucians.
Notes
I would like to thank Philip J. Ivanhoe and Victoria Harrison for their detailed comments and suggestions on this essay. I would also like to thank the participants of the “International Conference on Oneness in Philosophy and Religion,” held in the City University of Hong Kong, April 25–27, 2015, for their comments on an earlier version of this article. Needless to say, all errors and inadequacies remain mine alone.
1. In her fascinating book, Confucius, Rawls, and the Senses of Justice, Erin Cline (2013) rightly emphasizes the role of moral cultivation in discussing the Confucian sense of justice and clearly regards justice as a personal virtue appreciated by Confucius. She lists the virtues touted by Confucius in the Analects as expressing the sentiment of justice, such as yi 義 (rightness), shu 恕 (reciprocity), bu bi 不比 (not partial or biased), and zhou 周 (associate widely), and so on (2013, 152–53). Cline’s book has made an important contribution to the recognition of the importance of justice in Confucius’s teaching, especially the judicial aspect of personal virtues a committed Confucian should cultivate and strive for. However, her book does not address the conceptual tension between her own justice-centered interpretation and the more traditional humaneness-centered interpretation of the classical Confucian project. In fact, Cline includes humaneness as one of the expressions of justice in the Analects, without looking into the tension between the two. On the contrary, Cline devotes a great deal of effort to explaining away the tension in Analects 13.18, cited earlier, wherein Confucius famously claims that an upright son should cover for his father if his father commits theft (157–67).
2. Another common translation of ren is humaneness, but as we will see in the following this essay is meant to contest such an interpretation. Some early scholars also used “benevolence” to translate ren in the Analects, but more recent scholarly discussion has reached a consensus that “benevolence” is more appropriate for Mencius’s use of ren. James Legge’s translation of ren in the Mencius as benevolence has been extremely influential in modern scholarship. Legge’s translation is influenced by what he perceives as striking similarities between Mencius and Bishop Butler in their understandings of human nature. Benevolence is the first natural principle of human nature in Butler’s Sermons Upon Human Nature (Legge 1960, 60–64). I will leave ren untranslated in this essay in order to highlight its ambiguity.
3. All translations in this essay are mine, unless noted otherwise.
4. Ivanhoe points out to me that the kind of justice I am referring to here, each receiving his or her due, is Aristotelian rather than distributive (fairness) as the latter implies excellence in social institutions.
5. There are two versions of the five hegemons, but Duke Huan of Qi is recognized in both as the first on the list.
6. The best-known Chinese historian, Sima Qian (司馬遷 c. 145–c. 87 BCE), wrote a glowing biography of Guan Zhong (Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 7, pp. 9–14). The translators of volume 5.1 provide an interesting note on Sima Qian’s own attitude toward Guan Zhong:
Ssu-ma Ch’ien (Sima Qian), who himself wrote that “establishing one’s fame is the endpoint of all action,” certainly identifies with the alleged reasons underlying Kuan Chung’s (Guan Zhong) decision to not commit ritual suicide along with Shao Hu 召忽 (d. 685 B.C.) when their lord Tzu Chiu 子糾 was killed by his brother Duke Huan. Together with Kuan Chung’s great friend, Pao Shu, the Grand Scribe no doubt well understood why Kuan Chung may have said “I would not be ashamed by the trivial principle (chieh 節; of committing suicide), but I would be disgraced if my merit and fame were not made known to the world.” Similarly, Ssu-ma Ch’ien justifies his own decision to not take the nobler path of suicide after the disgrace of castration citing reasons including he “despises leaving the world without letting the glory of [his] writings be shown to posterity.” Kuan Chung would also probably agree with Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s assessment of the Ch’u minister Wu Tzu Hsü (伍子胥 d. 485 B.C.) that had he “accompanied [his father] She 奢 in death, how would he differ from an ant or a mole-cricket? Casting aside the trivial rightness (yi 義; of committing suicide), he wiped clean a great disgrace, and his name has been handed down to later generations.
(Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 5.1, p. 127)
7. I address the Sinological challenge to Chinese philosophy more extensively in Jiang 2016.
8. Cf. Van Norden 2007, 72–74.
9. Van Norden (2007, 75) thinks it represents more of the Zengzi’s school of Confucius’s teaching. See Ivanhoe’s (2008) response.
10. Nivison sheds a critical light on the traditional hierarchy deeply embedded in the teaching of the Golden Rule, even though he still insists that the Confucian Golden Rule undergirds the vision of a common humanity, a conclusion Martha Nussbaum (2003) is skeptical about given the unchallenged status of hierarchy embedded in Nivison’s interpretation of the Confucian Golden Rule.
11. In his more recent article on the Golden Rule, Ivanhoe interprets shu as having to do with moral discretion that “helps me to be sensitive to the lives of those who are directly affected by my actions” (2008, 96). I am more sympathetic to his earlier interpretation, which emphasizes reversibility. Ivanhoe points out to me that his two accounts are compatible: “The notion of discretion is connected with the obligation to do my duty as described by the rites, which is critical for making sure people get what they are due. Discretion is the ability to emend, bend, or suspend the rites when sympathetic consideration moves me to do so. But making such exceptions is what I would want others to do for me and something I discover through the practice of SHU (imaginatively putting myself in another’s place)” (private comments).
12. Chad Hansen (1992, 168) is baffled by the inconsistency of Mencius’s ideas in the latter’s reluctance to embrace the universalist conclusion of his own teaching.
13. Ivanhoe disputes Defoort’s point here: “Moral altruism is about the aim or focus of one’s care. If I keep myself healthy and alive in order to donate my kidneys to my twin sisters, it would be odd to accuse me of being selfish in tending to myself” (private comment).
14. Defoort translates jian as inclusive or inclusiveness whereas I have used impartial or impartiality as the translation of jian in this essay. Ivanhoe observes that inclusiveness “describes a result of impartiality but that is not the meaning of the term jian. The term jian describes the type of ai (“care”) being advocated, not its consequences” (private comment).
15. Ivanhoe presents a more nuanced account of the Mohist motivation. While critiquing the lack of discussion of the psychological dimension of human actions in Mohist theories, Ivanhoe (1998) takes much more seriously the religious aspect of the Mohist moral teaching.
16. In Mencius 7A/26, Mencius expresses his exasperation toward no allowance of discretion or taking circumstances into consideration.
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