Confucian Virtue Through Charles Taylor's Constitutive Narrative — Epoche C2
The assimilation at issue, and what would settle it Comparative ethics routinely treats the Confucian virtues as a virtue ethics of broadly Aristotelian type: dispositions cultivated because a life exhibiting them is a flourishing one, with flourishing serving as the end that explains why the dispositions are worth having. Bryan Van Norden defends exactly this reading in Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (2007), arguing that early Confucian texts contain the components a virtue ethics requires — an account of human nature, a conception of the good life, a catalogue of traits and a theory of their cultivation — and that the fit is substantive rather than a translator's convenience. Against it, Roger Ames has argued in Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011) that the fit is an artefact: that Confucian persons are constituted by their roles and relations rather than being individuals who then occupy roles, and that the vocabulary of virtue ethics imports an agent the texts do not contain. This essay sides with the second reading, but only after narrowing the claim to something that can be tested. The two central terms are ren (仁), conventionally rendered benevolence, humaneness or authoritative conduct, and li (禮), the inherited repertoire of ritual, ceremony and prescribed propriety governing how people conduct themselves towards one another. The question is whether li stands to the good as a means or as a constituent, and the test I shall use is substitutability. A means is in principle replaceable: if I can specify the end independently, I can ask whether some other procedure would reach it, and the question is intelligible even when the answer is no. A constituent is not replaceable, because the end cannot be specified without it, and the question of substitution therefore fails to arise rather than receiving a negative answer. That is a criterion one can take to a text. Which of Taylor's claims are being used, and which phrase is not his Before applying it, a correction about the apparatus. This essay's title speaks of a "constitutive narrative", and that phrase as a term of art belongs to Robert Bellah and his co-authors in Habits of the Heart (1985), where a community of memory is defined as one constituted by a past that it retells. Charles Taylor's vocabulary in Sources of the Self (1989) is different, and it is his specific claims, not the label, that do the work here. Four of them matter. The first is strong evaluation: discriminations of worth that are not reducible to what one happens to want, and by which wants are themselves judged higher or lower. Taylor's point is that we cannot describe our own agency without them; a being with preferences but no qualitative rankings among them would not be recognisably a self. The second is the framework: the background of such distinctions against which anything counts as worth doing at all. Taylor's claim about frameworks is transcendental in form rather than empirical — not that people happen to have them, but that having one is a condition of being able to answer the question of who one is. The third is orientation in moral space: to know who you are is to know where you stand with respect to those distinctions, which is why identity crises present themselves as disorientation rather than as ignorance of a fact. The fourth is the web of interlocution: one is a self only among other selves, and the languages of self-understanding are acquired from and sustained by particular others. Two consequences follow that the Confucian case will need. If frameworks are conditions of agency rather than optional adoptions, then one cannot step outside a framework in order to compare it with alternatives on some neutral scale of efficiency — which is precisely the standpoint the instrumental reading of li requires. And if the languages of strong evaluation are supplied by a community, then the community's practices are not merely where the goods are pursued; they are where the goods are articulable. Applying the test to the Analects The strongest single piece of evidence is a passage the earlier version of this essay did not use, and it is strong because it appears at first to say the opposite of what is wanted. At Analects 1.12, Youzi says that in the use of li, harmony ( he , 和) is what is valuable. Taken alone that is a plainly instrumental statement: li is the procedure, harmony the product. But the passage continues, and its second half withdraws the reading: to know harmony and to pursue harmony without regulating it by li is also unworkable. Harmony pursued directly is not harmony. Apply the substitutability test and the result is unambiguous — one cannot specify the end and then canvass procedures for reaching it, because a state of affairs reached without li does not count as the end. That is what it is for a practice to be constitutive rather than instrumental, stated in the text itself rather than imposed on it. The famous definition at 12.1 then reads differently from the way it is usually quoted. Confucius tells Yan Hui that to discipline oneself and return to li is ren, and adds that if one could do so for a single day, the world would return to ren. The sentence is not a recipe in which li is the input and ren the output; the copula is doing the work, and the passage goes on to specify ren wholly in terms of li — not looking, listening, speaking or moving contrary to it. There is no residue of ren left over once the ritual specification is given. The developmental passage at 2.4 supplies the shape of a life on this account, and it is where Taylor's narrative claim earns its place. Confucius describes six markers spanning fifty-five years, from setting his heart on learning at fifteen to seventy, at which age he could follow what his heart desired without overstepping the bounds. The endpoint is not a further state attained by means of the earlier stages. It is the coincidence of inclination with form —