Practical Wisdom in Aristotelian and Confucian Virtues — Epoche B2
Phronesis Is Not Quan: Two Structures of Moral Judgement Comparative virtue ethics has settled on a pairing. Aristotle's phronesis [1] , practical wisdom, is matched with the Confucian quan , the weighing of circumstances, and the two are presented as one insight reached twice: that general moral knowledge is useless without the capacity to judge the particular case. May Sim's Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius (2007 [2] ) and Jiyuan Yu's The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle (2007 [3] ) both build on some version of it. This essay argues that the pairing is a mistake, and that the mistake matters. Phronesis settles what the moral requirement is in a given case; quan operates where an already-settled requirement has to be set aside. Those are different architectures, and reading either through the other distorts it. What phronesis does in Aristotle Aristotle divides the excellences of the soul in two. Intellectual excellences belong to the part of the soul that reasons and are acquired by teaching: episteme , knowledge of what cannot be otherwise; techne , the knowledge involved in making; nous , the grasp of first principles; sophia , theoretical wisdom. The excellences of character belong to the part that can listen to reason and are acquired by habituation: courage, temperance, generosity, justice. Phronesis is classed among the intellectual excellences but is defined by its relation to action. In Nicomachean Ethics VI.5 (1140a24–31) Aristotle characterises the practically wise person as one who deliberates well about what conduces to living well in general, rather than about some restricted good such as health or strength. The step that matters comes earlier, in II.6. There Aristotle defines excellence of character as a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, and he adds that the mean is determined by reason, in the way the practically wise person would determine it (1106b36–1107a2). Read that carefully. The mean is not a quantity fixed in advance which the agent then locates. It is defined by reference to what the practically wise person would judge. There is no standard sitting behind phronesis against which its verdicts could be checked, because phronesis is what makes the standard determinate. This is why the reciprocity claim at VI.13 (1144b30–32) is not a curiosity. Aristotle holds that one cannot be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without excellence of character. The two are not means and end. Excellence of character without judgement is a natural tendency rather than a virtue, and judgement without the right desires is mere cleverness. What quan does in the Confucian texts Quan (權) is a scale-beam: the word names the weight one slides along the arm to find a balance. It appears in the Analects once [4] , in Book IX, in a saying that ranks four things one may or may not be able to share with a companion — study, the way, standing firm, and finally weighing. Weighing comes last and is hardest. That is the whole of the evidence in the Analects , and it is thin. The doctrine is built out in the Mencius [5] , at 4A17, and there its shape is unmistakable. A questioner asks whether it is a rule of li that men and women should not touch in handing things to one another. Mencius agrees that it is. The questioner then asks whether one should pull out a drowning sister-in-law by the hand. Mencius answers that a man who would not is a beast: the rule about touching is li , and pulling her out by the hand is quan . The passage defines quan against something. There is a standing requirement, it is genuine, it is not withdrawn, and the emergency licenses departing from it. Later commentators formalised the relation with the pair jing (經), the constant, and quan , the expedient, and the formalisation is a systematisation rather than an invention: the contrast is doing the work already at 4A17. The structural difference Set the two side by side. Aristotle's problem is indeterminacy: the agent knows that courage is called for and does not yet know what courage comes to here. Phronesis resolves that, and what it produces is the requirement itself. There is nothing for it to override, because before it operates there is nothing determinate enough to be overridden. The Mencian problem is conflict: the agent knows exactly what li requires — no touching — and knows equally that letting a woman drown is monstrous. Quan resolves that, and what it produces is a licensed exception. The rule stays in force for the next case. Two consequences follow. Attributing phronesis to the Confucian texts imports the idea that the requirement is indeterminate until judgement supplies it, which is exactly what the Mencius denies: the requirement about touching is perfectly determinate and remains so. Attributing quan to Aristotle imports the idea of a fixed standard that judgement may set aside, which the doctrine of the mean rules out. None of this shows the Confucian tradition lacks a counterpart to phronesis . There is a better candidate, and it is yi (義), rightness or appropriateness — the junzi's responsiveness to what a situation calls for, which is not a licence for exceptions and is not defined against any rule. The pairing worth pursuing is that one. It has been passed over because quan is the term that looks like discretion, and looking like discretion is not the same as playing the role discretion plays. A case where the two readings come apart The distinction is not merely scholastic, and a live example shows why. When a society emerges from a war or from organised political violence, it must decide what to do with those who committed the violence. The South African settlement of the mid-1990s offered amnesty in exchange for full disclosure, and the philosophical question raised by that arrangement is precisely the one at issue: was the ordinary requirement of punishment suspended for the sake of a greater good, or was punishment n