A Chinese Ethics for the New Century: The Ch'ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture, and Other Essays on Science and Confucian Ethics (review)

A Chinese Ethics for the New Century argues that Confucianism has a healthy life in the new century if advocates of Confucianism learn from the new sciences and modify their assumptions accordingly. The ten chapters of this very short book are organized into three parts; the first consists of three lectures Donald Munro delivered in 2003 as the Ch'ien Mu Lecturer at the New Asia College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. These lectures focus on the values of equality and autonomy, and how these values could be promoted without sacrificing the core Confucian belief in the primacy of the family and preferential treatment of kin. Part two elaborates on what was mentioned briefly in the first Ch'ien Mu lecture, the link between Confucian ethics and twentieth-century evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. The last part on Western sinology includes a survey of "Recent Western Scholarship Relevant to Chinese Philosophy," a defense of a "core Confucianism," and an interview with Donald Munro, conducted by An Yanming and first published in a Chinese volume on "Confucianism and Liberalism." Whereas those who have kept up with Munro's scholarship will not find much that is new in this collection, it is a useful volume that could serve as an introduction to Munro's distinctive take on Chinese thought in undergraduate and graduate classes. Both the Introduction and the interview contextualizes the volume within Munro's other works and the development of his scholarship. And several ideas are provocative enough to stimulate interest in Munro's earlier, more detailed works for readers who have not read them.

The first Ch'ien Mu lecture on "Two Kinds of Equality" distinguishes between natural equality and equality of worth or value. It argues that the Mencian position that all people are born with the "the four minds" and exercising these four is the path to sagehood is a claim of natural equality, while the "common heavenly nature" Song thinkers attributed to all people serves as a new source of worth that introduces equality of worth into Chinese ethics. Munro sees significant intersections between the Chinese view of natural equality and Edward O. Wilson's and Steven Pinker's claims about a "common human nature" in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. Evolution has favored genes predisposing people to the primacy of family and to reciprocal altruism. Munro is careful to deny that he is making any reductionist claims of genetic determination.

Munro expands the content of equal worth by borrowing ideas from Western thought. Following utilitarianism, Munro proposes that the right and good consist of absence of suffering and presence of joy. The ability to feel joy and suffering is among the shared human traits that anchor equality of worth. These traits also include love, a major source of joy that "almost all humans" have experienced and recognize receiving or giving. Citing Raimond Gaita, Munro suggests developing in greater detail the idea that having been the object of someone's love bestows worth on all humans, which he claims is present in the passage of the Mencius advocating that people "[t]reat with reverence due to age the elders in your own family, so that elders in the families of others shall be similarly treated" (p. 15). Munro also believes that the Western idea of autonomy can enrich the Chinese idea of equal worth. However, he strips autonomy of its Western metaphysical baggage and simply defines it in terms of choosing one's actions, including conduct and deliberations, instead of them resulting from restraining threats or causes from others. His justification for autonomy as a value is pragmatic-with autonomy comes responsibility for acts, which deters socially harmful acts; autonomy also promotes good problem solving by...