This panel aims to explicitly connect Chinese political thought with the study of ethics. We, as panelist, understand that politic and ethics are not separated, particularly in many pre-modern Chinese schools of thought. The question of “how to live a good life” and “how should people organize their society/state” are, in fact, connected.
The papers in the panel explore these questions by engaging with social political theories that are from or related to different Chinese philosophical traditions. Paper topics includes: comparative moral pedagogy, exploring the concept of "political progress" through examining classical Chinese texts, syncretic philosophical approach to answer the question of “how to live a good life,” and democratization of political knowledge. With these papers, we hope to both shed light on political thinking in China and engage them with other traditions of political philosophy.
This paper argues that Tao Yuanming’s work provides distinct methodological resources that we can employ as we face challenges in our lives. The first is the creative use of moral exemplars from the past; the second is grounding ethical reflection in everyday experience. Tao never arrived at a single definitive resolution to human problems. What he did develop, however, was a distinctive way of living with these challenges.
This paper builds on previous scholarship that sees Tao as a philosopher of humanistic endurance by arguing that Tao makes an important and distinctive contribution to ethical and existential thought through his orchestration of methodological approaches. Tao draws on multiple philosophical traditions as well as his own lived experience to develop responses to the vicissitudes of life. While I do not argue that Tao’s conclusions are universally applicable, I do argue that the methodology he employs is worthy of emulation.
The role of common people within the ethical and socio-political framework of early Chinese thought remains largely underexplored, partly because they are often assumed to have been treated merely as passive subjects within a meritocratic order. Yet the two major early Chinese traditions, Confucianism and Mohism, propose markedly different forms of meritocratic governance. Mozi portrays ordinary people as participants in political life, arguing that the ruler should be a virtuous worthy whom everyone can recognize and endorse. By contrast, Confucian thinkers such as Xunzi emphasizes the ruler's duty to ensure the basic welfare of the common people instead of recognizing their political agency. Many scholars attribute this difference to their distinct ethical theories. I argue instead that the key divergence lies in their political epistemologies—specifically, whether ordinary people can understand the proper organization of socio-political life in accordance with Heaven’s processes.
There is a plurality of work dealing with the concept of moral progress, but from among these texts we can isolate two main camps. On the one hand, you have teleological conceptions of progress. Moral progress, these thinkers, involves transformations in social practices that move us closer to some defined end. On the other hand, you have pragmatic conceptions of progress, which see moral progress as movement away from problems into an open-ended future, not constrained by definite ends.
My paper seeks to bring Confucius into the scholarly debate, in order to complicate the narrative of progress. Specifically, this paper posits that Confucius’ relationship to the Zhou dynasty provides a model for thinking about progress that is not cleanly captured by either the teleological or the pragmatic models of moral progress.
Aaron Stalnaker states in his book, Mastery and Dependence, that many people question the existence of “ethical experts” (Stalnaker, 2). Stalnaker pushes back on this sentiment and argue for the existence of (also the need for) ethical masters. Even with the existence of moral experts, however, the question of “what motivates people to want to learn from them” remains to be answered. I argue the answer is in seeing moral teachers as idols.
Agreeing with Stalnaker on the belief that moral teachers are important for society, I explore the gravitas of moral excellence, which some ancient Greek and Confucian thinkers see as motivation to follow moral teachers. This attraction evolves into idolization for one’s teacher, which is key to moral pedagogy.