Moral Obligation and Moral Motivation in Confucian Role-Based Ethics

How is the Confucian moral agent motivated to do what he or she judges to be right or good? In western philosophy, the answer to a question such as this depends on whether one is an internalist or externalist concerning moral motivation. In this article, I will first interpret Confucian ethics as role-based ethics and then argue that we can attribute to Confucianism a position on moral motivation that is neither internalist nor externalist but somewhere in between. I will then illustrate my claim with my reading of Mencius 6A4, showing that it is superior to readings found in the literature, which typically assume that Mencius is an internalist.     

Chinese philosophy and western capitalism

It is commonly supposed that people of Asia, particularly the ethnic Chinese, subscribe to values which are not conducive to economic progress. The gap between the capitalist West and Asia is often attributed to the ‘cultural’ factor. Behind such perception is the supposition that capitalism is wholly a product of the West, alien to Asia and cannot be successfully embraced without doing violence to its cultural traditions. Against this position, I argue that classical capitalism is perfectly compatible with the key elements of Chinese philosophy. Whether or not there is anything in the suggestion of some historians that Quesnay borrowed from Confucianism, I argue that his economic doctrine could have developed from the fundamentals of Chinese philosophy. If I am right, the economic gap between the West and Asia has to be explained in terms other than the ‘cultural’ factor, such as, perhaps, colonialism and post‐colonialist ideologies.     

The Politics of Emancipation: From Self to Society

Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists in an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there. Contrary to Foucault's strategy, Habermas argues that what we need is a communicative rationality capable of correcting discursive distortions. Coming from a different angle, Lyotard argues that what we need at the community level is a set of rules that prevent any one discourse totalizing all others. Such rules would ensure just gaming. Together, Lyotard and Habermas offer us an ethics that has the potential to serve the human interest in emancipation.     

Book reviews

Confucianism and the Family. Walter H. Slote & George A. Devos, 1998, Albany, State University of New York Press, xiv + 390 pp.

Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Lawrence A. Babb & Susan S. Wadley (Eds), 1997, (1st edn, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, viii + 298 pp., hb Rs 295, ISBN 81 208 1448 7; pb Rs 195, ISBN 81 208 1453 3

Yoga. Discipline of freedom. The Yoga Sutra attributed to Patañjali (A translation of the text, with commentary, introduction and glossary of key words), Barbara Stoler Miller (Trans. & Ed.), 1996, Berkeley, University of California Press, xiv + 114 pp., ISBN 0 520 20190 6