Confucianism

Confucianism is an ethical system practiced in China and other East Asian countries such as Japan and Korea. Confucian ethics arose in the turbulent “axial age” in ancient China (ca. 600–200 BCE), when warring states violently fought for dominance, creating a climate for Confucius and other scholars to seek answers to questions about human nature, morality, and social harmony. In seeking to build a harmonious society, Confucius found his answer in Ren, humaneness, the highest level of virtue encompassing a variety of lesser virtues, such as reverence, tolerance, trustworthiness, keenness, and kindness. Attaining Ren, thus, involves achieving other virtues, such as courage, prudence, cautiousness in talking, and propriety. In short, Ren is a lofty ideal for people to aspire to. Confucius himself admitted that he had not entirely achieved Ren.

Confucianism can be categorized as virtue ethics, a teleological ethical system that inquires about the goal or end of the human person. Western virtue ethics mostly takes its inspiration from Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher. Aristotelian virtue ethics, embodied in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, aims at achieving personal eudaimonia, meaning “flourishing” or “success,” through the cultivation of moral traits such as prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Confucianism, however, differs from Aristotelian virtue ethics in significant ways. Instead of eudaimonia, Confucianism strives for interpersonal harmony in a hierarchical society. Confucian Ren, to a large extent, entails vertical virtues: Ren is not expected to be cultivated to an equal extent across social hierarchies. For instance, an emperor is expected to achieve a higher form of Ren than his subject does. Ren is, therefore, specific to one's social station in the society. Aristotelian virtue ethics, in contrast, having evolved in a democratic society, placed largely equal expectations on the citizens in the city-states in terms of cultivation of virtue ethics, although the citizens with full voting rights did not include women, slaves, foreigners, children, and senior citizens.

What exactly then is Ren? Simply put, Ren, humaneness (also translated as benevolence), is love. This concept is illustrated in Lunyu, one of the four books comprising Confucius's teachings, but Ren allows for different interpretations in different contexts.

There exists a convergence between Confucian ethics and Western ethics. A cornerstone of major Western ethical theories is impartiality—one's own interest is placed on a par with the interests of others. Egoism is discouraged and generally denounced. Like Western ethics, Confucian ethics is also built on curbing egoistic impulses. Confucian ethics, thus, is connected to Western ethics through its assertion of overcoming one's self.

Parallel to overcoming one's self is the return to propriety that enables one to achieve Ren. Propriety, Li, another central value of Confucian ethics, is the code of behavior prescribed to men and women based on their role, social station, and gender. In essence, it is respect for other members of the society and varies in form from one social station to another, and from gender to gender. Though it is also a vertical virtue like Ren, Li is in many ways similar to Donaldson and Dunfee's hypernorm of respect for human dignity. In fact, it is this form of respect or propriety that helped to build a cohesive and civilized ancient Chinese society.

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