Series editor: Diego A. von Vacano,Texas A&M University
Consulting editors: Andrew March, Harvard University, and Loubna El Amine, Northwestern University
Democracy after Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
Sungmoon Kim
Democracy after Virtue
Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
Sungmoon Kim
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Series: Studies in comparative political theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017046496 (print) | LCCN 2017060211 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190671242 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190671259 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190671235 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Philosophy. | Democracy—Religious aspects—Confucianism. | Democracy—East Asia. | Confucianism—Political aspects. | East Asia—Politics and government.
Conclusion: The Future of Confucian Political Theory— A Methodological Suggestion 189
Notes 197 Bibliography 235 Index 247
PREFACE
After the publication of my first book Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), I received two sets of comments from my critics. On the one hand, my fellow Confucian political theorists— scholars philosophically inspired by the (mainly preQin) Confucian classics—raised questions regarding the Confucian credential of my idea of Confucian democracy, wondering if the Confucianism in my theory is not playing merely an auxiliary role, like a “cheerleader,” for otherwise liberal democratic constitutional structures. The most frequent question I received was how distinctively “Confucian” my Confucian democratic theory is. My second book Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was motivated to offer a rejoinder to this pressing question by articulating my normative vision of democratic Confucianism in a way that is not only philosophically appealing but also socially relevant in contemporary East Asia. I presented this vision in terms of public reason Confucianism, a particular style of democratic perfectionism in which (partially) comprehensive Confucianism is connected with perfectionism via a distinctive form of public reason that is permeated by, among other things, Confucian moral sentiments.
On the other hand, my democratic critics, who are largely unfamiliar with Confucianism, raised a question of a different nature. While noting significant differences between my Confucian democratic theory and mainstream liberal democratic theory (thus acknowledging the distinctively Confucian nature of my theory), these scholars pressed me, as a democratic theorist working in the East Asian Confucian context, to clarify whether there is any generic mode of democracy in my idea of Confucian democracy, be it Schumpeterian minimal democracy, Habermasian deliberative democracy, Rousseauian populist democracy, or Lockean constitutional democracy. This book aims to answer this question by presenting pragmatic democracy (roughly in the Deweyan sense) as a conception of
x democracy that best describes the nature of Confucian democracy offered here. In offering pragmatic Confucian democracy as my normative conception of Confucian democracy and, as shall be shown, further exploring its implications for criminal, distributive, and international justice, my hope is to place Confucian democratic theory on firmer normative ground, thus without suffering internal incoherence, philosophical laxness, or practical irrelevance. Readers who have read my earlier books will also find this book fully engaging in several important normative questions that were previously left either untouched or insufficiently treated.
In writing this book, I have incurred numerous debts. As was the case with my earlier works, I benefited immensely from intermittent daily conversations with my colleagues at the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the Department of Public Policy of City University of Hong Kong. They include P. J. Ivanhoe, Ruiping Fan, Eirik Harris, Hsin- wen Lee, Youngsun Back, Lawrence Yung, Shea Robinson, Daniel Stephens, and Ellen Yan. Some colleagues in neighboring universities of Hong Kong made themselves available for conversation, and I am especially grateful to Joseph Chan, Jiwei Ci, and Yong Huang, for their open-mindedness and generosity. Jung In Kang at Sogang University in South Korea invited me twice to hold special seminars on Confucian political theory both for faculty and especially for graduate students in the Department of Political Science, and I am grateful to him and those who attended my seminars, especially for helping me to think more deeply on the justifiability of Confucian democracy to non- Confucians. Brooke Ackerly kindly invited me to present an earlier version of Chapter 1 at Vanderbilt University’s social and political thought workshop, and I would like to thank her and her colleagues and students including Emily Nacol and Kristin Michelitch for raising several important questions and making suggestions. A slightly different version of the same chapter was also presented in the mini- workshop organized at City University of Hong Kong on “Confucianism and political participation” as well as in the international conference on “Equality, Freedom, and Governance in the Making of Modern Democracy and Market Economy” organized by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at National Taiwan University, and I am grateful to Rogers Smith, Joseph Chan, P. J. Ivanhoe, Chun- chieh Huang, Kiril Thompson, Alan Wood, John Tucker, and Alan Patten for their written or oral comments on my paper and Confucian political theory in general. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was presented at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where I spent a
sabbatical year (2016–2017) as a Berggruen fellow and completed significant portions of this book, and I am grateful to both Melissa Williams and LaGina Gause, who formally discussed my paper, and those who participated in the seminar including, among others, Jenny Mansbridge, Meira Levinson, Tomer Perry, Tongdong Bai, Mathias Risse, and Danielle Allen. I deeply appreciate many useful suggestions and constructive criticisms offered by them. Chapter 4 was presented at the NeoConfucianism seminar at Columbia University, and I am grateful to Tao Jiang, Ari Borrel, Yung Kun Kim, and Zach Berge- Becker for their invitation and helpful comments. Versions of Chapter 6 have been presented at various institutions or academic venues such as University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Political Science, University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science, the Berggruen inaugural workshop at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, an international conference on “Democracy in Global Politics” held in Academia Sinica, and an international conference on “Political Theory in the East Asian Context” held at City University of Hong Kong. I am grateful to Rogers Smith, Anne Norton, Jeffrey Green, Loren Goldman, Juman Kim, Ronald Beiner, Joseph Carens, Ryan Balot, Ruth Marshall, Chia- Ming Chen, Jung In Kang, Brook Ackerly, Mathias Risse, Hui Wang, and Anna Sun, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The general philosophical framework and core claims of this book were also presented at the Berggruen fellow workshop at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of Stanford University and Fordham University’s social and political philosophy workshop. I thank Owen Flanagan, Chaihark Hahm, Robin Wang, Fenrong Liu, Jonathan Jansen, Johan van Benthem, Wenqing Zhao, Jeff Flynn, Nick Tampio, and Sam Haddad for their valuable comments and hospitality.
I am also grateful to many others who have read or discussed various parts of the manuscript and offered valuable comments, suggestions, or observations. These include Steve Angle, Eric Beerbohm, Daniel Bell, Elton Chan, Thomas Christiano, Joyce Dehli, Lisa Ellis, Archon Fung, Wenkai He, Nien-he Hsieh, Jimmy Hsu, David Kim, Richard Kim, Tae Wan Kim, Franz Mang, Frank Michelman, Sam Moyn, Andrew Nathan, Shaun O’Dwyer, Henry Richardson, Susan Shim, and Stephen Soldz. Special thanks go to Jenny Mansbridge and Melissa Williams (though mentioned earlier) who never grew tired of discussing my ideas and specific arguments during my stay at Harvard. I deeply appreciate their comments and suggestions. My gratitude also goes to Diego von Vacano, the editor of Oxford Studies in Comparative Political Theory, and Angela Chnapko, my editor at Oxford University Press.
As noted, several chapters of this book were completed during my fellowship year at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and I am grateful for a viable intellectual environment that Safra provided in which I could fully immerse myself in reading and writing. I am also grateful to the Berggruen Institute for financial support. City University of Hong Kong does not have a year-long leave policy, but I was able to take the Berggruen fellowship and spent nearly a year at Harvard thanks to the provost’s special approval. I am deeply grateful to the provost, the dean of College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and the head of the Department of Public Policy for approving this special arrangement. Lastly, I acknowledge that in writing this book, I was partly supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF- 2017S1A3A2065772).
Slightly different versions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 were previously published in the journals under different titles: “Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Rethinking the Value of Democracy in East Asia,” Journal of Politics 79:1 (2017), pp. 237–249 and “Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory,” Review of Politics 79:2 (2017), pp. 187– 213. I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press and the University of Notre Dame (via Cambridge University Press) for permission to reproduce these essays.
On April 25, 2017, I was notified that Benjamin R. Barber, one of the most vigorous champions of strong democracy of our time and my former teacher, mentor, and friend, had passed away a day before, after a fourmonth battle with cancer. I am deeply saddened by Ben’s sudden death. It was Ben who introduced me to democratic theory, and it is upon his endorsement and encouragement that I found my first job at the University of Richmond and later decided to move to Hong Kong. I even worked as his research associate at Demos, a New York-based liberal think tank, for about ten months during the hiatus between my PhD defense and moving to Richmond, working on what we called “the paradigm paper” on global democracy and interdependence, which became the groundwork for his book If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale University Press, 2013). Ben’s death was shocking news for me especially because I had just visited him in early December 2016 at his new office in Fordham University— which, as it turned out, was only several days before his diagnosis of cancer—and, as always, we had jovial conversations on many issues: my life in Cambridge, his upcoming book (now published by Yale University Press as Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming), the Trump presidency, and Global Parliament of Mayors, which was his last fascination. During that meeting we agreed to
[ xii ] Preface
spend several days together at his summer house when my family joined me from Hong Kong the following June. And now, June has come and my family is about to depart from Hong Kong but, alas, Ben is no longer here. Though Ben is gone, I am sure that his passion for democracy, civic education, and global interdependence will always remain with us. I am proud of having had Ben Barber as my teacher and friend who helped me to grow as his fellow democrat. I dedicate this book to him with love and deep gratitude.
Democracy after Virtue
Introduction Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
IN SEARCH OF NORMATIVE CONFUCIAN DEMOCRATIC THEORY
In the past two decades contemporary Confucian political theory has been propelled by the dialectical conversation between Confucianism and democracy— Confucian values, ethics, and social practices on one side and democratic ideals, principles, and institutions on the other. The result has been a vigorous search for “Confucian democracy” as a form of democracy best suitable for East Asia’s Confucian societal context and a cultural alternative to Western- style liberal democracy.1 Even those who assert that Confucian democracy should not only be a cultural alternative to liberal democracy but, more crucially, its formidable political rival, thus framing their normative position in terms of “(Confucian) political meritocracy,” never completely dismiss the (albeit limited) value of democracy. Often they incorporate certain democratic institutional components (election in particular) into their otherwise meritocratic political system and justify the hybrid system in terms of, as Daniel Bell aptly calls it, “democratic meritocracy.”2 Despite recent meritocratic challenges to democracy by some Confucian theorists (whom I call Confucian meritocrats in this book), which sometimes go beyond not just liberal democracy but democracy in toto,3 contemporary Confucian political theory largely revolves around democracy, more specifically what kind or how much of democracy is desirable in East Asian countries of Confucian heritage. Arguably, the main thrust of contemporary Confucian political theory has been democratic theory broadly construed.4
What is worth noting is that Confucian political theory has recently bifurcated into two competing political positions—one embracing democratic principles such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation as constitutive of its normative theory, and the other attempting to decouple selectively chosen democratic institutions and practices from democracy’s underlying moral principles. In addition to their contrasting attitudes to core democratic principles, it is also their differing orientations in theory building—moral perfectionism versus institutional reform— that characterize this bifurcation, although the latter contrast has not always been clear- cut. It is hard to deny that the emergence of these two competing normative positions has not only significantly reshaped the contemporary landscape of Confucian political theory, with all of its methodological differences and substantive disagreements, but it has enriched contemporary political theory in general by adding comparative perspectives.5
The mushrooming of new visions and ideas in Confucian democratic theory, however, did not come without cost. For one, the absence of a shared point of reference in developing Confucian democratic theory (encompassing its democratic-meritocratic critiques) has made it extremely difficult to understand the precise points of disagreement between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats, or whether the disagreement is merely a political one or is also of philosophical significance. Confucian democrats, generally inspired by John Dewey as much as by Confucius, stress the importance of the good community in which individual and society are in a harmonious relationship, the latter growing symbiotically with the former, immersed in a ceaseless process of moral self- cultivation, of which political participation, in their view, is an important part.6 This communitarian account of Confucian democracy, however, says nearly nothing about the institutional structure of democracy. Moreover, centrally concerned with the intimate connection between ritual/role practice and moral empowerment, Confucian democrats do not pay sufficient attention to social equality or common citizenship, the gist of which lies in objection to all sorts of social discrimination or political domination based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or economic class.7
Equally reticent about social equality, and actively opposing political equality expressed through the one person one vote principle, Confucian meritocrats in principle have no objection to the communitarian project suggested by Confucian democrats. Not only do most Confucian meritocrats enthusiastically support building of harmonious local communities, but they, at least some of them, also value rituals’ potential
contribution to both the constructing of social identity and the alleviation of economic inequality that threatens social harmony.8 Furthermore, Confucian meritocrats are increasingly persuaded that full democratic participation may be acceptable in the context of local politics. In short, the Confucian meritocratic critique of democracy is generally concentrated on democratic authority exercised in the central government and on a national level as it works through what they deem to be the universal and mechanical implementation of popular sovereignty by means of one person one vote.9
Then, what exactly is the disagreement? One problem with Confucian democrats is that it is far from clear whether the community they have in mind refers to a local community in rural areas, where some Confucianstyle rituals have survived, or whether it extends to an entire political community with a moral requirement that the polity’s constitutionalpolitical structure be completely reconstructed into a democracy, which in turn calls for a transformation of the polity’s public culture into a democratic civic culture. In the former case, Confucian democrats’ core argument is perfectly compatible with that of Confucian meritocrats, whereas in the latter their lack of interest in democracy as a political system, on top of a communitarian way of life, is hardly justified. Equally unclear is the Confucian democrats’ attitude toward political meritocracy, especially in its relation to democracy, which they advocate wholeheartedly, as they sometimes seem inclined toward rule by virtuous people without illuminating how such an inclination, if not an active espousal, can cohere with their underlying commitment to democratic equality. 10
Confucian meritocracy, too, is exposed to similar challenges insomuch as it presents itself in terms of democratic meritocracy. On what moral ground can election, operating on the one person one vote mechanism, be taken apart from its underlying moral principles such as political equality and popular sovereignty? How can one justify meritocratic institutional apparatuses such as the nondemocratically selected upper house in the legislature while simultaneously valorizing the good effects commonly associated with democratic institutions such as transparency, accountability, and reciprocity? And, most importantly, can a new mode of public life and its associated social norms, which follow from the institutionalization of even partially democratic decision-making processes and related social practices, be compatible with political meritocracy? Put differently, is it possible for democracy and meritocracy to be mixed in a philosophically non-arbitrary manner so that Confucian meritocracy can enjoy the merits of both democracy and meritocracy?
That being said, one important reason that a productive conversation between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats toward theory building is frequently baffled, and both parties are often driven to the infelicitous state of cross-purposes, has to do strongly with their widely different understandings (and in some cases, their less than principled usage) of the term democracy. As I elaborate later in this book (Chapter 2 more precisely), while Confucian democrats understand democracy almost exclusively as a way of life and tend to identify it in terms of what Dewey calls the “Great Community,” Confucian meritocrats hold to a minimal and overtly institutional definition of democracy with glaring focus on election, hence without any salient interest in the mode of public life or that of citizenship. Neither camp, however, has paid (due) attention to the normative dimension of democracy understood as collective self-government by free and equal citizens, as well as the questions that this capacious normative definition of democracy naturally entails: What does collective self-government mean? Why does it matter? Under what circumstances does it matter more, both practically and normatively? How can collective self-government be (more) effective and (more) legitimate? What does “citizens being free and equal” mean, especially in the Confucian societal context? These questions can hardly be answered intelligently unless, first, democracy’s two dimensions—as a way of life and as a political system—are analytically distinguished, then reintegrated coherently into a single conception of democracy.
This book attempts to address, though not resolve, these critical normative and philosophical challenges for Confucian democratic theory by constructing an overarching theoretical framework— what I call pragmatic Confucian democracy that can enable us to identify a deeper normative ground of disagreement between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats, which undergirds their practical disagreement with regard to institutional design and political leadership. By “an overarching framework” I mean a comprehensive philosophical account of Confucian democracy that (1) identifies the social circumstances that require a democracy as a political system in a Confucian society in the first place, (2) explains the internal connection between two dimensions of democracy that are commonly presented in political science as being at odds with one another, (3) makes sense of the value of democracy with reference to its two dimensions, (4) illuminates the theoretical connection between democratic procedures and the outcomes they produce, and (5) articulates distinctively Confucian-democratic principles of justice in criminal punishment, economic distribution, and international relations (humanitarian intervention in particular) from a pragmatic standpoint.
In proposing pragmatic Confucian democracy as a new point of reference in Confucian democratic theory, I have no presumption that its approach and substantive arguments are neutral, especially vis-à- vis Confucian meritocratic theory, as it is clearly predisposed to advancement of a more robust democratic theory of Confucian democracy than the existing proposals. In fact, as far as its specific contents are concerned, pragmatic Confucian democracy may be found quite controversial even among Confucian communitarian democrats similarly inspired by Dewey. Nevertheless, I believe that the merit of constructing a comprehensive normative framework that is thoroughly democratic and develops and integrates within it democratic accounts of criminal, distributive, and international justice, outweighs whatever problems that might be associated with this approach.11
On the one hand, when recast from the normative questions engaged by pragmatic Confucian democracy, such as democracy’s intrinsic and instrumental values and democratic procedures and their substantive outcomes, Confucian meritocratic theory can be understood not so much as the direct opponent of democracy— a problematic view, given its qualified democratic dimension— but as a kind of democratic theory that takes a distinctive normative stance with regard to (1) the (instrumental or intrinsic) value of democracy, (2) the (instrumental or non- instrumental) relationship between democratic procedure and its outcomes, and (3) the (individualistic or social) conception of desert or merit in relation to criminal and distributive justice. In this way, we can come to better grips with what kind of democratic theory Confucian meritocracy is as a democratic meritocracy, whether this concept as employed by Confucian meritocrats is philosophically meaningful (or precisely in what respect it is undemocratic), and whether its democratic and nondemocratic components are connected in a philosophically plausible and normatively compelling manner.
Confucian democratic theory, on the other hand, would be given a firmer normative ground not only for its controversial (from the traditional Confucian perspective) embracing of key democratic principles such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation, but also for its endorsement of the substantively democratic conception of justice. As will be demonstrated in this book, pragmatic Confucian democracy offers not merely a cultural and communitarian alternative to liberal rights-based democracy but a morally attractive model of democracy under the circumstances of modern politics marked by value disagreement and moral conflict.
Then, what is pragmatic democracy, of which pragmatic Confucian democracy is a particular cultural instantiation? Throughout this book I define pragmatic democracy as a mode of democracy whose political institutions and social practices, which together make democracy a way of life, are justified on pragmatic grounds under the circumstances of modern politics. Pragmatic Confucian democracy is a pragmatic democracy suited for a pluralist society whose civic culture remains characteristically Confucian. Since pragmatic Confucian democracy has both institutional and cultural components, however, its pragmatic justification has two dimensions accordingly.
First, so far as its institutional structures are concerned, which constitute democracy as a distinct political system, pragmatic Confucian democracy is justified on moderately consequentialist grounds, that is, on the grounds of good consequences that democratic political institutions bring about. Here “good consequences” do not mean the good life or specific moral or cultural goods typically associated with Confucianism. Rather, they refer to political goods such as legitimacy and order acquired through an effective and sustained coordination of complex social, economic, and political interactions among citizens who have profound moral and economic disagreement among themselves. Being most effective in authoritatively coordinating social interactions under the circumstances of modern politics among existing sociopolitical arrangements, democracy holds, before anything else, an instrumental value for citizens who are publicly governed by its institutions. In this book, following Jack Knight and James Johnson, I call this instrumental value of democracy that works through its institutions democracy’s second-order value 12 I will offer more clarity on the nature of democracy’s second-order value later.
The second component of pragmatic Confucian democracy is concerned with various sorts of social practices that express an equal social relationship among citizens and enable collective self-determination on equal terms. Together with democracy’s formal political institutions, such social practices make democracy a distinct way of life. However, there is no fantasy route to a democratic way of life, which according to political scientists requires not only constitutional but, more critically, behavioral and attitudinal changes13 to be wholeheartedly embraced and cherished by the people upon democratic transition, whose social life is still soaked in Confucian culture despite their strong desire for a new political life. A series of tensions arise inevitably between democratic practices, which would render citizens’ participation in formal democratic institutions socially meaningful, and the existing cultural way of life that is replete with
undemocratic elements including, most notably, gender inequality. In the absence of a long process of cultural communication between democratic and Confucian social practices that facilitates their mutual accommodation, thereby transforming the otherwise abstract ideal of democracy into a Confucian democracy, democracy can hardly become the citizens’ way of life in the genuine sense, and so- called democratic practices in which they routinely engage can never be made intelligent to them. Such a process of mutual accommodation in civil society is pragmatic in nature because it is subject to numerous sorts of social experiments and multiple rounds of public deliberation under no antecedent rule or pre-politically given authority that would dictate its mode or direction. For Confucian democratic citizens, the incongruence between formal democratic political institutions, introduced chiefly on pragmatic- consequentialist grounds, and ongoing social practices that still define the character of their social life, is a problem, which should be solved provisionally or pragmatically at each stage of their public life through “social inquiry” informed by Confucian public reasoning.14 When thusly made intelligent to citizens, democracy then becomes intrinsically valuable to them.
Thus understood, one of the most important philosophical aims of this book is to investigate how these two kinds of pragmatic justifications that simultaneously endorse democracy’s instrumental and intrinsic values can be coherently integrated within a single normative political theory. Part I is generally devoted to this question. Here I offer a preliminary explanation for three key background assumptions that underpin pragmatic Confucian democracy. This will help illuminate the distinctive features of pragmatic Confucian democracy as a political theory relative to the existing proposals of Confucian democracy.15 Those background assumptions are (1) circumstances of modern politics, (2) second-order value of democracy, and (3) democracy as a social experience.
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF MODERN POLITICS IN EAST ASIA
Pre-modern politics in both West and East are characterized by broad social acceptance of the moral-political authority over the matters concerning people’s moral conduct and political decision making, be it God or Heaven (tian 天), their human delegates, or traditions, rituals, and customs that are believed to embody sacred authority. In pre-modern politics where politics is often inextricably intertwined with religion or morals, the relationship between the ruler, whose mandate to rule is neither subject to authorization by nor accountable to the people via any formal institutional
mechanisms, and the ruled, who are not politically organized as citizens equipped with civil and political rights, is both epistemic and moral—not so different from the relationship between teacher and student.
In the Confucian world in particular, the ideal kings, called sage-kings (shengwang 聖王), were routinely envisaged as teachers (shi 師) who had discovered the right Way (dao 道) toward which to educate the people mainly by means of rituals (li 禮) and to bring them, otherwise stuck in a boorish situation either because of their bad human nature (as Xunzi claimed) or adverse external conditions (as Mencius contended), to a refined civil culture (wen 文) in which they can live a materially sufficient and morally flourishing life.16 Although religious persecution rarely happened throughout East Asian history since the firm establishment of Confucianism as the state ideology, and the ruling elites (the king and the members of the royal house in particular) in otherwise Confucian East Asia were occasionally drawn to more overtly religious traditions such as Daoism and, especially, Buddhism, Confucian orthodoxy in state and society were seldom challenged by such so- called “popular religions.” For instance, when Cheng-Zhu Neo- Confucianism had been permeated deep into every nook and cranny of the Korean society by the late eighteenth- century, both as state ideology and intellectual orthodoxy,17 lingering Buddhist social practices were strictly prohibited among the yangban elite class, although social and religious practices associated with popular religions were implicitly condoned as long as they did not pose an eminent threat to Confucianbased moral order and sociopolitical harmony.18 Therefore, in pre-modern Confucian East Asia, value pluralism, which neither posits a hierarchy between values nor accepts a higher moral standard by which to harmonize them,19 was never acknowledged as the basic social condition to which political authority ought to be adapted.20 Not surprisingly, moral conflict, the natural accompaniment of value pluralism, was also never taken seriously by the ruling elites as something for them to have to address in order to make sure political power and authority was justified to the ruled.21 For them, any presence of moral conflict only signified their failure to rule according to the Way, which would naturally achieve social harmony, and thus their failure to rule authoritatively.22 As singularly committed to one right Way, Confucians valued only one particular conception of the good life—a life toward Confucian sagehood— that is incommensurable with other conceptions of the good life, and this ethical monism was strongly vindicated by a specific mode of politics that the Confucians pursued, namely, “virtue politics” (dezhi 德治).23
Virtue politics, as classical Confucians understood it, is propelled by the ruler’s moral virtue, while aiming at the people’s moral cultivation. What
is central to virtue politics is its monistic nature and structure: not only are all the targeted virtues such as benevolence (ren 仁), righteousness (yi 義), ritual propriety (li 禮), and the ability to tell right from wrong (zhi 智) understood to be essential to realization of Confucian sagehood,24 but in principle there is no qualitative difference between the virtues with which the ruler pulls the people toward the gambit of his “benevolent government” (ren zheng 仁政) and the virtues at which the people are to arrive through the process of moral cultivation.25 This latter aspect of Confucian virtue monism makes it possible that ordinary people, if morally cultivated, can participate in government by transforming themselves from passive to active subjects. In fact, all three ancient Confucian masters (Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi) were unswervingly convinced that virtue is the most important criterion of merit by which to select public officials and that there exists a morally noncontroversial way to distinguish the virtuous from those who are not. All three Confucians agreed that only if the king— who has a Heaven-bestowed mandate (tianming 天命) to reign all under Heaven (tianxia 天下)—is virtuous, hence called “the son of Heaven” (tianzi 天子), can he then identify those who are best qualified for public service (starting with the prime minister, who will then carry out the actual selection of public officials)26 and establish political meritocracy understood as, as Bell puts it, the rule in which “political power [is] distributed in accordance with ability and virtue.”27 In the most profound sense, the recent proposals for Confucian meritocracy are an attempt to rehabilitate the traditional Confucian ideal of virtue politics in modern East Asia by separating the vision of political meritocracy implied in Confucian virtue politics from its underlying metaphysical and political-theological assumptions.28
However, the modern context in which a Confucian alternative to liberal democracy is being pursued is dramatically different from that in which traditional Confucian political perfectionism premised on virtue monism was devised, then eventually prevailed. Today, very few East Asians believe in Heaven as the bastion of human morality or its mandate as the ultimate source of political authority and legitimacy, even when their social lives are still significantly shaped by Confucian values, rituals, and social practices.29 Confucianism no longer enjoys the status as a dominant state ideology or state religion, nor is it affiliated with one-man monarchy, the visible carrier of the Mandate of Heaven and the institutional backbone of Confucian virtue politics. With the collapse of the monistic moral-political basis of Confucianism, the moral and political hierarchy between Confucianism and other religious and social values has also been completely dismantled, rendering Confucianism as traditionally formulated and practiced to be just
