Confucius, Rawls, and the Sense of Justice

Introduction

1 Introduction . . . the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. —john rawls (TJ §2, p. 7). In a state that has the Way, to be poor and of low status is a cause for shame; in a state that is without the Way, to be wealthy and honored is equally a cause for shame. —analects 8.13 As several scholars of Confucianism have noted, remarkable differences exist between the structure and content of the work of modern liberal philosophers like John Rawls, who concern themselves primarily with discussions of justice, equality, and freedom, and the work of classical Confucian philosophers, who focus mainly on self-cultivation and virtues that are nurtured , at least initially, largely in the context of the family. An awareness of these differences might lead one to doubt that there is any value in trying to compare these views. What might philosophers who devote enormous time to discussions of self-cultivation and the family have in common with a philosopher concerned primarily with “the fact of reasonable pluralism” in a modern liberal democracy? This book argues that the central concerns of the Confucian Analects and Rawls’s work intersect in their emphasis on the importance of developing a sense of justice, and that despite deep and important differences between their accounts of a sense of justice, this intersection is a source of significant philosophical agreement. However, this book does not simply compare and contrast two views by examining their similarities and differences; it also offers a larger argument concerning the 2 Introduction reasons why comparative work is worthwhile, the distinctive challenges comparative studies face and approaches to resolving those difficulties, and how comparative work can accomplish distinctive and significant ends— which is a necessity for and sheds light upon the central argument of the book. This work argues that a comparative study of the capacity for a sense of justice in the Analects and Rawls can help us not only to better understand each of their views but also to see new ways to apply their insights, especially with respect to the contemporary relevance of their accounts. Why should philosophers working in the distinct fields of political philosophy, ethics, and Chinese philosophy be interested in a comparative study of Rawls and early Confucianism, as opposed to independent studies of their views on a sense of justice? In order to appreciate the answer to this question, we must first delve a bit deeper into the respective backgrounds of the sources and thinkers under study. The influence of Rawls and Kongzi is unparalleled in some important respects. Rawls is the most important political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, and the Analects is the text that is most closely associated with the founder of Confucianism, which has had a remarkably wide-ranging and pervasive cultural influence in East Asia.1 Rawls, of course, is an American philosopher following in the contractarian tradition of liberalism that shaped the U.S. Constitution. As anyone familiar with his work knows, Rawls’s fifty-year career was guided by the belief that a just society is realistically possible.2 It is not an understatement to say that A Theory of Justice is one of the most influential works in moral and political philosophy written in the twentieth century. Considered as a whole, Rawls’s work has probably evoked more commentary and attracted wider attention than any other twentieth-century work in moral or political philosophy. Yet despite the enduring interest in Rawls’s work, there have so far been no in-depth studies of his moral psychology. This work aims to help to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on a neglected aspect of his view, namely his account of the capacity for a sense of justice. On the other side of this comparative study is Kongzi 孔子, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C.E.3 Born in the state of Lu, located in what is now Shandong Province in the People’s Republic of China, Kongzi lived and taught during the latter part of the Zhou 周 dynasty, also known as the “Eastern Zhou” (Dongzhou 東周 770–256 B.C.E.). Unlike the earlier part of the Zhou dynasty (the “Western Zhou,” Xizhou 西周 1122...