This is a contemporary comparative analysis of the various moral-political systems of thought constructed by the most famous philosophers of the pre-Qin (xianqin) era. “The collapse of the normative Zhou order, which had represented the ideal of peace and prosperity, was the backdrop of all classical thinkers during the pre-Qin period. Almost all classical thinkers were trying to reconstitute such a lost order by appealing to ritual (or tradition), (human) nature, objective standards that included moral and penal codes, or some combination of these, in order to imagine, conceptualize, and construct a new world that was morally compelling and/or politically alluring.”
Jiang begins with Confucius. “The most important contribution by Confucius in Chinese history was his attempt to start formulating a coherent and compelling moral universe that could regulate personal virtues, familial-social relationships, and political governance, under the general rubric of Dao, the Way…. [The period] from the founding of Zhou in 1045 to the early ninth century BCE was [for Confucius] the epitome of culture and order, represented by wen and li, respectively, in the Analects, with the former referring to the cultural patterns of the Zhou and the latter to its ritual system.” Confucius claimed, “When human beings perform ritual, they put the things of the world in synchronization with the dao.” Jiang continues, “Ren, a homophone and cognate of human (ren), has been universally recognized as the singular moral virtue touted in the Analects.” Ren was a kind of meta-virtue, “frequently translated as humaneness, humanity, human-heartedness, authoritative or consummate conduct, virtue, or the Good.” Classical Chinese moral philosophy was concerned with the differences between particularist and universalist virtues, especially when the values of family and politics conflicted. Confucius tried to extend certain particularist familial virtues to the universal political sphere. “His focus was on the extension of familial sentiment of xiao ti to the more universalist sentiment of caring for people (ai ren).”
Mencius was a Confucian, who, nonetheless, formed his own unique moral project. “Between Confucius and Mencius the ground for reasoning shifted from a ritual- and tradition-based moral-political norm to a human-nature based one…. Mencius turned to (ethicized) human nature as the ground of moral reasoning and refashioning a humane world order. Essentially, the conceptual anchor of the Mencian political thought is human nature (xing), not institutional order (li)…. Ren, which is the singular virtue and moral ideal in the Analects, appears to have been “demoted” to one of four cardinal virtues, along with righteousness (yi), propriety (li), and wisdom (zhi), that are constitutive of the heavenly endowed human nature.” Furthermore, “whereas Confucius connects sacrifice with ren (humaneness) (Analects 15.9), Mencius associates sacrifice with yi (righteousness) (Mengzi 6A10)…. Like ren, yi also has two dimensions in the Mencius: familial and political. In the familial domain, it is understood as deference to one’s elder brother (4A27) or one’s elders (7A15); in the political arena, it refers to the virtue of a minister being fiercely loyal to his lord (1A1).” Jiang elaborates, “The extensionist Mencius operates on the assumption of congruity among desirable goods, whether material or moral, whereas the sacrificialist Mencius is much more clear-eyed about the tension involved among desirable goods, as well as that between the familial and political domains…. The more radical strand of Mencian thought… is premised upon the sacrificialist virtue of yi, as opposed to the extensionist virtue of ren.” Mencius claimed, “When the Way prevails in the world, the Way accompanies the gentleman (in all his conducts). When the Way does not prevail in the world, the gentleman follows the Way to the grave (or sacrifices himself to the Way).”
Mozi believed in a universalist moral-political project. “One of the greatest contributions of the Mohists to Chinese philosophy lies in their remarkable endeavor to move the gravity of philosophical reasoning from a debate focusing on personal intuitions or inclinations to one emphasizing objective criteria that are publicly accessible and defendable…. The Mohist Heaven is an omniscient, benevolent, and impartial supernatural agent…. For the Mohists, Heaven’s intent is not a primarily voluntarist concept, but rather a rational one. Heaven’s supremacy lies not in its arbitrariness and ultimate unintelligibility, but in its rationality and objectiveness which is universal and not biased in favor of the privileged…. The idea of jian ai is one of the most, if not the single most, fundamental moral teachings of Mozi…. Jian ai has been translated as universal love, universal care, concern for everybody, inclusive care, and impartial care…. Mohists embraced justice and impartiality, on the one hand, while advocating rather heavy-handed means to enforce universal standards of impartiality, on the other…. Youwei justice, a human vision of impartiality enshrined in the Mohist project, would require a high degree of socialization and socio-political engineering…. It was Mozi and the Mohists who vigorously applied the Golden Rule to ren and pushed Confucius’ idea of caring for the people to its logical conclusion of caring for all, often to the exasperation of later Confucians like Mencius who accused the Mohists of being unfilial (Mencius 3B/9).”
The Laoists also started from a universalist framework, but took it in a very different direction. “Normatively, wuwei is aligned with justice, impartiality, accommodations, and non-interference, whereas youwei is aligned with humaneness, partiality, differentiation, and interference. The Laoists were on the side of wuwei and its associated normative values…. Wuwei justice, touted in the Laozi, is naturally operative in the cosmos and, from this perspective, human effort is seen as disruptive to such an operation due to the inherent limitation of human knowledge, capability, and partialist inclinations…. Ideally for Laozi, justice should be left to Heaven as any human effort at justice would be too heavy-handed, on the one hand, while forcing humans to forsake naturally endowed human inclinations, on the other. Humans should aim at preserving our natural inclinations within the familial, kinship, or small local communal environment…. Laozi only recognized the familial as naturally human, making large societies undesirable and unnatural for humans.” Laozi stated, “The world is a sacred vessel (shen qi) and nothing should be done to it. Whoever does anything to it will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it (DDJ 29).”
Jiang explicitly compares the Laoist and Mohist conceptions of justice. “Whereas Mohist justice appeals to publicly articulated and uniformly applied standards, the Laoist justice operates in the darkness or in mystery; whereas the Mohist justice requires heavy intervention from leaders to impose uniform standards, the Laoist justice abhors such heavy-handedness; whereas the Mohist justice anticipates a large and unified political entity in their pursuit of universal justice, the Laoists call for small communities in order to save humanity from the onslaught of mass socialization and the corruption of the benign natural human inclinations in service to nefarious objectives while leaving the project of universal justice to Heaven/Dao since it is beyond human capacity…. For Laozi, the impartiality of Heaven and the partiality of human sentiments render the universalist ambition in the Mohist project untenable, since only Heaven is impartial and universal, whereas humans are not.”
Jiang refers to the Legalist School as the fajia thinkers. These thinkers were interested in constructing a universalist system, but their means would entail massive state intervention and blind deference from the people. “The fajia thinkers effort to formulate an impartial political order for the sake of all people points to the critical value of justice and impartiality in their political thought. Moreover, many of the fajia thinkers problematized personal virtues they considered to be at odds with the interest of the state and instead touted professional virtues of specialization and impersonal application of standards when an official was acting on behalf of the state…. What made Shen Dao’s call for the sagely emulation of nature radically different from Laozi’s was the former’s attempt to engineer the entire political apparatus so that it was modeled after the way nature was perceived to operate…. Shen Dao’s attitude toward human dispositions (qing), widely shared among the fajia thinkers, was that they should be taken as given, rather than obsessing over whether they can be reformed or not…. An effective political system is one that channels those dispositions for public good…. [The fajia thinkers’] ambitious and daring sociopolitical engineering of the entire human realm to model after the natural world was one of the most consequential developments in Chinese political history…. Fa in the Shenzi fragments focused on “the standards or laws instituted by the ruler” (2016, 46), whose “defining features is its fixity and lack of bias” (2016, 47)…. For Shen Dao, an enforced procedure, without bias or favors, was more important than the particular result it generated.” Shen Dao stated, “If one discards the Way and [its proper] techniques and gives up standards and measurements, seeking to understand all under heaven through the understanding of one man, whose understanding could be sufficient for this (Shenzi 107)?”
Zhuangzi was a Daoist, who lived towards the end of the Classical period. “Zhuangzi’s overarching intellectual project is that of personal freedom…. Zhuangist freedom is best understood as a critique of the Confucian (and by extension Mohist) way of structuring and ordering the world through rituals (and laws or standards in the case of Mohists)…. Zhuangzi stood out as someone who prioritized and privileged the personal over the familial and the political domains…. Zhuangzi tries to redeem the heartmind, attuning it to the Dao, so that it can be liberated from the ritually regulated lifeworld in the pursuit of personal freedom…. For Zhuangzi, personal freedom and ritual-based ethical norms were fundamentally incommensurable…. Whereas the Confucians are preoccupied with the imperative of humaneness and the Mohists with justice, the Zhuangists are resisting such an all-pervasive understanding of moral-political norms which are fundamentally relational in nature. Instead, the Zhuangists want to preserve a domain that is unregulated/undifferentiated (hundun) and open (tong) wherein one can roam freely (you).” In a passage in the Zhuangzi, he puts into the mouth of Confucius this distinction, “They [the Zhuangists] are the sort that roams beyond the guidelines (fangwai). I am the sort that roams within the guidelines (fangnei).” Zhuangzi stated, “The sage, taking Heaven as his model, values the genuine and is untrammeled by custom.”
Xunzi was a Confucian, who, nonetheless, incorporated aspects of Mohist and fajia thought into his philosophical system. He was most concerned with ritual and, compared to Confucius and Mencius, was more universalist and less beholden to particularist familial virtues. Along with other Confucians, however, Xunzi was concerned with cultivating and elevating personal humanist virtues, at least amongst the wise. “Xunzi touted the human qualities of distinction-making, righteousness, and community-building to counter disruptive human qualities, such as desires, competition, and chaos…. Xunzi highlighted the givenness of desire as well as its chaotic nature in the human condition, similar to views about human nature by the early fajia thinkers, but he saw ritual as the most effective way to cope with such a condition in bringing about orderliness through making right distinction, distribution, and division in the constitution of a flourishing human community that emulates the cosmic order characterized as hierarchical and constant…. Xunzi could no longer take for granted that there was a Heaven that cared about human affairs or that humans should model themselves after Heaven in search for solutions to the deepening moral, social, and political crises. Instead, he made a powerful case that humans were completely responsible for their own world. His rejection of human nature as a source of moral-political order was part of his effort to maintain a link between the heavenly and the human due to his understanding of human nature as given by Heaven and the indifference of Heaven to human affairs….. Xunzi’s ritual is the synthesis of these heavenly and humanly attributes, the product of the sagely deliberate efforts, that result in the establishment of a moral order. This synthesized moral order (li) is characterized by orderliness (zhi), humaneness (ren), rightness (yi), hierarchy (fen), taking positive attributes from the Heavenly (orderliness and hierarchy) and the humanly (humaneness and rightness). Such a ritual-based moral order represents the ideal of humane justice in Xunzi’s formation…. The nourishing function of ritual is front and center in Xunzi’s conception of ritual.” Xunzi claimed, “Heaven does not stop producing winter because humans dislike cold, Earth does not stop being broad because humans dislike huge distances, and the gentleman does not cease his conduct because of the chatter of petty men…. The gentleman makes his way based on what is constant, whereas the petty man calculates what he can accomplish.” Furthermore, Xunzi advised, “The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.”
Jiang closes with the paramount fajia thinker, Han Feizi, who lived just before the consolidation of the warring states into a unified empire by the Qin. Han Feizi incorporated Mohist ideas of a universalist Heaven with previous fajia thought on the role of the State, its ruler, its ministers, and its bureaucracy. “The fajia thinkers, including Han Feizi, believed that there was no moral solution to the crisis at hand due to tensions or even conflicts among moral ideals, on the one hand, and the failure of moral education in inculcating even those non-disputed moral virtues, on the other. Furthermore, the fajia thinkers saw morals as politically irrelevant at best and politically disruptive or subversive at worst. For them, morals were little more than the facade employed by cunning people, especially powerful ones in proximity to the ruler, to obfuscate their selfishness by appealing to high-sounding ideals…. A political order should not be built on the ideal of a morally perfect sage because the source of political authority should not derive from moral virtues of a ruler at all…. The virtues touted in Han Feizi’s philosophy in a ruler were humility and self-constraint, rather than benevolence and righteousness…. The highest moral value in Han Feizi’s philosophy was the institutional virtue of impartiality. Han Feizi claimed, “Hardly ten men of true integrity and good faith can be found today, and yet the offices of the state number in the hundreds. If they must be filled by men of integrity and good faith, then there will never be enough men to go around…. Therefore the way of the enlightened ruler is to unify the laws instead of seeking wise men.”
Jiang concludes historically, with how these competing philosophies were merged and practically implemented across Chinese imperial rule, “Confucianism, with its accommodationist philosophical disposition and partialist moral orientation, was best positioned, politically and intellectually, to deal with the universal state that was set up to operate on the fajia impersonal and bureaucratic framework under mostly mediocre and often deeply flawed rulers.”
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