Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction

Chapter 4: Ethico-Political Orders

Chapter 4 Ethico-Political Orders The distinctive views of individuals and communities explored in the last two chapters have important implications for Dewey’s and Confucius’ conceptions of the relationship between ethics and politics. The inseparability of individual and social/communal means that ethics and politics also are inseparable. Ethics answers the question “How should one live?” Politics answers the question “How should we live together?” The questions may be distinct, but the answers involve one single ethico-political order in which individuals live together in harmony and personal fulfillment. This chapter explores how this view of ethics and politics differs from that in the “procedural republic” which, according to Michael Sandel, is characteristic of existing liberal democracies. A Confucian community, in deviating from the liberal ideal of political neutrality to conceptions of the good, is similar to a Deweyan community. Despite being different from existing liberal democracies, a Confucian community can be democratic in a Deweyan sense. The Political Domains of Procedural Republics In both Dewey’s and Confucius’ thinking, ethics has a critical role in politics, and vice versa. It is a belief reflected in the very way they live their own lives.1 In contrast, the politics of a procedural republic need not, and should not, concern itself with “how a person should live”; instead, it should ensure that each person has an equal opportunity to live life as she chooses, as long as that particular form of life does not interfere with a similar liberty for others. The 113 chosen form of life does not have to be good since, as John Stuart Mill puts it, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.”2 In a liberal democracy, a government should never impose a conception of the good life on its citizens. The procedural republic asserts the priority of fair procedures over particular ends; its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views that its citizens espouse. In the deontological liberalism criticized by Sandel, this neutrality presupposes the primacy of justice (i.e., the right is prior to the good). Some might challenge this claim of neutrality on the grounds that liberalism already presupposes a particular moral view, and some ways of life require social conditions that are excluded by liberal frameworks of justice. However, this mistakes the nature of liberal tolerance. No society can include within itself all forms of life. As Berlin points out, “Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”3 The most that could be hoped for is to minimize such losses, and liberalism, so its supporters argue, offers the best chances of doing so by accepting that there could be a large number of valid conceptions of the good instead of insisting on the validity of only one. Rawls strengthens liberalism’s claim to neutrality by arguing for a political liberalism centered on a political conception of justice. Conceptions of the good, moral or religious, belong not to political doctrines but to comprehensive doctrines. Political conceptions do not presuppose any one comprehensive doctrine, which “includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, as well as ideals of personal virtue and character, that are to inform much of our non-political conduct (in the limit of our life as a whole). . . . by definition , for a conception to be even partially comprehensive, it must extend beyond the political and include non-political values and virtues.”4 As a political conception, justice as fairness can be the focus of an overlapping consensus among diverse, reasonable, comprehensive doctrines. I shall argue that the separation of the political from the nonpolitical is tenuous at best; moreover, it is undermined by Rawls’s requirement of an overlapping consensus instead of a modus vivendi. Rawls identifies the political domain by two special features: it is neither voluntary, such as associations of various kinds, nor “affectional,” such as the personal or familial.5 It is the domain of what Kant described as man’s “unsocial sociability,” which binds him to those “whom he cannot bear, yet cannot bear to leave.”6 As an abstraction in political philosophy, it is undoubtedly possible to distinguish the political from the nonpolitical, but what is at issue is not the possibility of abstract...