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211 c h a p t e r 5 The Contemporary Relevance of a Sense of Justice One of the main goals of this work has been to uncover the sense of justice in the Analects and to argue that an understanding of a sense of justice deepens our understanding of the Analects as a whole. This chapter aims to show that this ancient idea is important for us today as well and that the different views of a sense of justice found in the Analects and in Rawls help to show why. In Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy, Bryan W. Van Norden draws upon Lee Yearley’s work to point out that if we are to retrieve historical views—such as the view of a sense of justice found in the Analects—and apply them in a contemporary setting , certain criteria should be met. According to Yearley, early philosophical views must be “credible,” “appropriate,” and “inspiring.”1 Van Norden writes, “A credible appropriation of an earlier philosophical view is one that is a ‘live option’ for contemporary thinkers, given our knowledge of cultural diversity, historical change, modern science, and at least some of the values and institutional forms that have been emphasized as a result of the Western Enlightenment.”2 For the present purposes, this would mean that the idea of a sense of justice must be plausible for us today—that is, it must be something that we could reasonably learn from or apply in a 212 The Contemporary Relevance of a Sense of Justice contemporary setting. This is something that the comparative dimension of this study has helped to establish, and although many challenges are involved in comparing an ancient text with the work of a contemporary philosopher, one of the outcomes of this type of comparative study is that the potential contemporary application of the ideas under study, at least in some cases, becomes more readily accessible. Because we have already seen that the idea of a sense of justice is found not only in the Analects but also in Rawls’s work, the credibility criterion seems clearly to have been met. Substantial evidence shows that a sense of justice functions in a wide range of settings—although in diverse and remarkably different ways—in both the ancient society discussed in the Analects and in the modern liberal democratic societies that are the focus of Rawls’s work. As far as Yearley’s credibility criterion is concerned, the important feature of a sense of justice in this case is that it is not an ancient practice or idea that could not plausibly be recovered and accepted or implemented in the contemporary societies we are concerned with in this chapter. Indeed, we have good reasons to think that it is not merely an ancient idea but a basic human capacity. In addition to being credible, according to Yearley, the position that is outlined for a contemporary setting based on the retrieval of ancient philosophical views should be “appropriate” in that it should be “faithful to the philosophy that inspires it. It must be recognizable as being, at some fundamental level, a version of the original philosophy.”3 If this chapter is to meet the appropriateness criterion in its discussion of the sense of justice in the Analects, then the sense of justice that is described as having contemporary relevance must be faithful to the view presented in the Analects. At the same time, this project is constructive and not purely descriptive, because my aim is to take the sense of justice as it is seen in the Analects—as well as the sense of justice in Rawls’s work—and use it as a starting place or resource for recognizing, understanding, and developing potential solutions to some of the challenges facing Chinese and Western societies today. A critical aspect of this work is that its aim is not to suggest how the views presented in these two texts can be appropriated in their entirety and implemented or to argue for a return to the sort of society described in the Analects but rather to suggest that at least some aspects of these two senses of justice can be helpful to us today. The third criterion discussed by Van Norden is that the resulting position should be “inspiring.” This means that it should be clear “why the reconstructed position offers something distinctive and valuable to ongoing philosophical debates.”4 Indeed, the main argument of this...

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