Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights: A Mencian Perspective

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12084
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015

Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human

Rights: A Mencian Perspective

By SUNGMOON KIM

ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to show the compatibility between

Confucianism and human rights, first by revisiting the moral philoso-

phy of Mencius, a key founder of the Confucian tradition, then by

reconstructing the Mencian-Confucian idea of human rights from

the perspective of his moral philosophy. One of my central claims is

that not only did Mencius acknowledge core human rights—

socioeconomic as well as civil-political—justified by his foundational

faith in universal moral equality and human dignity, but he further

understood the right to subsistence as an essential part of Confucian-

constitutional rights. Contrary to the widely received notion that in

Mencian-Confucianism the right to subsistence has an overriding value

vis-a-vis civil-political rights, I argue that Mencius (and Confucians in

general for that matter) never stipulated such a lexical ranking among

rights. I conclude by discussing how the type of Confucian moral

reasoning that Mencius employs in justifying the moral value of

human rights can be re-appropriated to produce Confucian rights

suitable for today.

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Introduction:

The Ongoing Debate Over Confucianism and Human Rights

In the past few decades, there have been a plethora of studies on the

compatibility between Confucianism and human rights. The purposes

of these studies vary. Some aim to rediscover and revivify Confucian-

ism’s humanist tradition, which in their view has been hijacked and

further exploited by authoritarian regimes in East Asia, as a cultural

resource for liberalism and democracy by making human rights an

integral part of modern Confucianism (de Bary 1983, 1998a; Tu 2002).

Others find this sort of attempt a poor representative of the authentic

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 1 (January, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12084

© 2015 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Confucian tradition, whose strong emphasis on human relationships

and particularized role ethics allows no room for the modern Western

conception of the free and autonomous self on which the rights

discourse is predicated (Rosemont 1988, 1991, 1998, 2004; Ames 1988,

2011; Hall and Ames 1987, 1999; Ihara 2004). Philosophical advocates

of the compatibility thesis take pains to differentiate Confucianism as

a tradition of philosophical thought from Confucianism as a political

ideology or actual state practices and attempt to reconstruct a modern

Confucianism that is fully compatible with the discourse and practice

of human rights (Chan 1999, 2014; Tiwald 2011). Still, skeptics of the

compatibility thesis, especially those who are keen on particular

economic and political contexts in which the East Asian governments

are situated, do not necessarily deny that Confucianism would

endorse a certain type of rights, particularly socioecomomic rights

such as a right to subsistence or a right to be fed, but they are

uncertain as to whether there is any room for civil-political rights in

the Confucian tradition; even if there is, they argue, the Confucian

tradition firmly establishes that socioeconomic rights have an overrid-

ing value via-a-vis civil-political rights (Bell 2006).

Though these studies have undoubtedly advanced our understand-

ing of Confucianism as well as whether or not Confucianism is

compatible with human rights (and if so, then, with what kind of

human rights in particular), there are two problems in existing studies.

First, participants in this compatibility debate tend to assume Confu-

cianism as a monolithic philosophical tradition, neglecting its varie-

gated sub-traditions with various philosophical doctrines, political

platforms, and policy orientations. As William de Bary (1998b) once

complained, scholars who draw attention to the humanist tradition in

traditional Confucianism often dismiss the important difference

between ancient Confucianism (created by the founders of the tradi-

tion such as Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi) and Neo-Confucianism,

particularly of version advocated by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his

followers during the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties

in China and the Choso˘n dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea, which gave

rise to what some scholars call “constitutional culture” in the Confu-

cian political tradition (Chu 1998; Hahm 2009). I propose that even

among the three ancient Confucian masters there are still meaningful

150 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

differences as to whether there is room for the notion of human rights

in their respective philosophical thought, given their different concep-

tions of human nature (Ivanhoe 2000; Van Norden 2000), different

ideas of the origin of the civil state, and, albeit arguably, different

conceptualizations of the constitutional polity (Kim 2011). Since Con-

fucianism as a philosophical tradition never constituted its political

theory in terms of human rights, it is crucial to refrain from attributing

a (seminal) notion of rights to the tradition in general, even if we find

what may seem like “rights” in an individual thinker’s philosophical

thought, especially when dealing with ancient Confucians, to whom

both compatibilists and incompatibilists turn in order to make their

cases.

Second and relatedly, when we are relating the notion of human

rights to the Confucian tradition, we should be clear about in what

intellectual context we are introducing the notion—are we engaging

primarily in an interpretive task (i.e., to discover the notion of

rights, or its equivalent, in Confucian philosophical thought) or are

we trying to advocate human rights in modern East Asian countries

that have a Confucian heritage, to which the concept (especially the

philosophical concept of rights) has been completely unknown until

the late 19th century (Angle 2002)? In the existing literature, these

otherwise distinct philosophical tasks (i.e., interpretive or normative)

are often conflated, inviting many questions, theoretical as well as

practical. For instance, noting the virtual absence of the concept of

rights in core Confucian classics, some incompatibilists boldly assert

that, in contemporary China, the notion of rights is completely irrel-

evant. But why should the observation that ancient Confucianism

was not constituted around the idea of rights lead to the complete

denial of the significance of human rights in modern China, where

citizens are now fully aware of the crucial importance of a variety

of rights?1

Compatibilists have their own problems when they claim that

Confucian rights discovered in classical texts comprehensively define

contemporary life in East Asian, historically Confucian, societies. This

is a problematic presumption because even though, evidently, East

Asians are saturated with Confucian habits and mores, they are not

Confucians in a philosophically monist and culturally monolithic

Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights 151