Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-Being

Richard Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351710886
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Well-being is topic of perennial concern. It has been of significant interest to scholars across disciplines, culture, and time. But like morality, conceptions of well-being are deeply shaped and influenced by one's particular social and cultural context. We ought to pursue, therefore, a cross-cultural understanding of well-being and moral psychology by taking seriously reflections from a variety of moral traditions.

This book develops a Confucian account of well-being, considering contemporary accounts of ethics and virtue in light of early Confucian thought and philosophy. Its distinctive approach lies in the integration of Confucian moral philosophy, contemporary empirical psychology, and contemporary philosophical accounts of well-being.

Richard Kim organizes the book around four main areas: the conception of virtues in early Confucianism and the way that they advance both individual and communal well-being; the role of Confucian ritual practices in familial and communal ties; the developmental structure of human life and its culmination in the achievement of sagehood; and the sense of joy that the early Confucians believed was central to the virtuous and happy life.

1
Concept, theory, and framework

If we are to investigate the early Confucian account of well-being, we need to begin by clarifying what we mean by the term ‘well-being.’ This is especially important because well-being has been used by philosophers in a variety of ways, and furthermore, it is not clear that there is any specific Chinese character or concept that corresponds to this term.¹ This chapter seeks to clarify the concept of well-being and some related notions and to establish well-being as a framework for understanding the values and practices of the early Confucian tradition. While there remain significant challenges for understanding the concept of well-being, some contemporary conceptual distinctions have advanced our studies. By introducing these distinctions, I hope that we will gain a better grasp of what the early Confucian account of well-being is an account of. We will also see the early Confucian thinkers as challenging the way contemporary philosophers separate virtues from well-being by distinguishing well-being from the good life. After clarifying the concept of well-being, I will discuss how the Confucian account of well-being is connected to the various contemporary theories of well-being that have developed in recent years. Finally, I will argue that the concept of well-being can provide a way of organizing the ethical thoughts of early Confucians by providing a structure and aim to their ideas, making their philosophical views clearer and more attractive.

It is worth addressing a more general objection to reflecting on the Confucian account of well-being, which is that ‘well-being’ and its cognates are English terms and that applying them to the Confucian tradition requires imposing an alien concept that does not really fit and may distort the original Chinese views. This is an instance of a more general worry about connecting historical thinkers to contemporary problems and about carrying out comparative work with thinkers from radically different traditions. While the worry is legitimate, whether it is applicable ought to be judged on a case-by-case basis.² There probably are concepts so culturally embedded and unique that these kinds of cross-cultural or cross-historical connections may not help us further develop our own moral understanding. But while this is a real possibility, there are a variety of concepts and ideas shared across cultures connected to contemporary inquiries. The following question might be helpful: is there a recognizable phenomenon of lives that are flourishing or going well that we find discussed in the Confucian texts? I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Recent philosophers working on well-being have distinguished between thinking about the well-being of individuals at a particular moment in time on the one hand and thinking about well-being of individuals considering their life as a whole on the other. Following Ben Bramble’s recent work, we might dub the first notion ‘temporal well-being’ and the latter ‘lifetime well-being.’ Later in this book (especially in Chapter 5), I will explain why the Confucians understood lifetime well-being as the more important and fundamental notion. As we will see, the different goods constitutive of the Confucian account of well-being are realized at different stages of one’s life, and those activities and qualities that play a pivotal role in this realization can only be developed in the course of a complete life. For example, while filial piety—a central Confucian good—can be practiced as a young child, it is fully expressed as an adult by attending to the needs of one’s aging parents and properly mourning after their passing.

Probing the Confucian account of well-being might even challenge the very aim of finding a single theory that can capture the complexities of necessary goods within a human life. On the Confucian view, the human self is substantially constituted by the fundamental roles we occupy in the course of a complete life (e.g. daughter, son, parent, wife, husband, grandparent, teacher, or friend). Different roles will require different goods to flourish within that capacity. (I return to this point in Chapter 4.) From this perspective, given the rich diversity of roles and how they are indexed to radically different stages of human life, it is hard to see how a single theory can completely capture what it is to do well during different various stretches of one’s life. Moreover, reflecting again on filial piety, there are times when, on the Confucian view, one ought to grieve and be displeased about some event in one’s life, most clearly when one’s parent has died. From the Confucian perspective, such grief is ineliminable from human life given that we are creatures of affection and love, so certain negative emotions must be properly expressed through Confucian rituals, rather than eliminated, even though they may contribute to a reduction of temporal or momentary well-being.

The concept of well-being

A cluster of concepts is typically employed to help clarify the concept of well-being, such as the notions of ‘happiness,’ ‘self-interest,’ ‘good for,’ ‘good life,’ and ‘flourishing.’ Unfortunately, just how these various concepts—themselves often in need of elucidation—are linked to each other is a difficult issue requiring its own separate treatment. We can perhaps begin by noting broader and narrower senses of ‘well-being’ that admit of thicker and thinner specifications.

In the thickest sense, well-being is taken as referring to a range of external goods such as wealth, reputation, power, and comfort. Here the term li (利) or ‘profit’ seems closest to this sense.³ In fact, the early Confucians often attached this narrow sense of well-being to the term li, which I will translate as ‘profit’ in line with the standard translation. The beginning of the Mengzi begins with the text’s namesake chastising the king for being preoccupied with profit rather than virtues such as righteousness. This distinction between what profits oneself and what virtue requires might seem to already indicate that for Mencius, virtue and one’s interests are clearly distinct and potentially in conflict. But here and in other passages we will examine, profit seems narrowly construed as material goods or certain significant external goods such as power or reputation, and so should be distinguished from the more formal, broader concept of well-being. Xunzi also uses the term ‘profit’ to mark out the concept of material or external goods, although we can see that he also recognizes a different notion of overall benefit distinct from a narrower concept of profit:

He comes to the point where he loves it [virtue or goodness], and then his eyes love it more than the five colors, his ears love it more than the five tones, his mouth loves it more than the five flavors, and his heart considers it more profitable than possessing the whole world. For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.

(Xunzi, Ch. 1: 8)⁴

Xunzi shifts here between two senses of profit (li 利). The first is a broader sense which allows him to claim that the virtuous person (or the person on the road to virtue) takes the path of virtue as more “profitable than possessing the whole world.” In other words, the virtuous person sees virtue as more advantageous than goods such as wealth or power. But Xunzi also recognizes a sense of li (profit) that is constituted by material goods such as wealth. In ordinary talk and even in academic English discourse, we can find both senses of ‘well-being’ or ‘welfare’ at work.

It is important, then, to make sure that the concept of well-being is not simply equated with any particular conception (or account) of well-being such as health, wealth, or subjective satisfaction.⁵ But in a variety of disciplines, this is precisely how the term ‘well-being’ appears to be used. In psychology, for example, well-being is often equated with subjective or psychological well-being, what philosophers nowadays tend to call ‘happiness.’ In economics, well-being is usually equated with preference satisfaction or desire-fulfillment. But whether the best account of well-being is psychological happiness or desire-fulfillment is a deeply contentious matter that cannot be settled through fiat. In fact, the Confucian account of well-being developed in this book will be in conflict with such accounts by taking virtues and certain objectively worthwhile activities (as identified by the early Confucians) as constitutive of well-being.⁶

Well-being is a large, complex, and unwieldy topic, and asking a question like what makes someone’s life go well on the whole, all things considered, may just be too complex to answer. As Alexandrova (2017) has recently suggested, it may be more fruitful to focus on specific areas of well-being such as child or elderly well-being and make headway through a more fine-grained, piecemeal process. By circumscribing our reflections on well-being to a specific context such as child well-being, we can also draw on the wealth of empirical research that has been carried out to build a theory of child well-being that is grounded in empirical observations of the empirical sciences—a methodological outlook that chimes with my approach.

But to what extent did the early Confucians employ a concept of well-being at all? We need first to distinguish the concept of happiness from the concept of well-being. For while happiness and well-being are sometimes used interchangeably, the common use of happiness as a psychological condition indicates the need to separate these concepts. In our discussions we will restrict the term ‘happiness’ to a positive psychological or emotional state rather than the life that is best for someone. Of course, happiness has been used to refer to the highest prudential good by philosophers of the past, and as long as one is clear on what they mean by the term, this is a legitimate way to go on.⁷ But in this book, I will follow the current practice and reserve the term ‘happiness’ to refer to a positive, enduring emotional state.

One might, as Daniel Haybron has done, distinguish well-being from the good life by identifying well-being with one category of value—namely, the prudential or ‘good for’—and the good life with a broader class that includes every dimension of value that can be exemplified in one’s life.⁸ I believe this distinction is much more subtle and difficult than the distinction between happiness and well-being. In fact, it’s not a distinction we find among either ancient Greek or Chinese thinkers. For while eudaimonia is usually taken as the life that is best for someone (i.e. the highest prudential good), it is also explicitly stated by Aristotle as the most choice-worthy life for humans that combines both virtue or excellence and a host of external goods including friendship and beauty. Within the Confucian tradition, following the dao (道 Way) offers us the best human life—the life that all of us ought to aim for—but the Confucians do not make a conceptual distinction between a life that realizes the dao and the prudentially best life (i.e. the life that is best for someone).

It is possible that the Confucians or the Aristotelians were only reflecting on the good life and simply didn’t care all that much about the life that is good for a person.⁹ A more likely explanation is that they simply thought the best life for you just was the good life (i.e. well-being and the good life are substantially the same). After all, what more can you do you for yourself than obtain a good life? Nevertheless, one might follow Haybron here in wanting to draw a distinction between well-being and the good life because, one might think, one could achieve well-being but not the good life because one is lacking in moral goodness or virtue. This is the main motivation, I take it, for making this distinction. For there are cases, many would claim, where virtue and well-being come apart, which shows that well-being cannot simply be a matter of moral goodness. Edgar Allan Poe captures this point with characteristic elegance:

In looking at the world as it is, we shall find it folly to deny that, to worldly success, a surer path is Villainy than Virtue. What the Scriptures mean by the “leaven of unrighteousness” is that leaven by which men rise.¹⁰

On Poe’s picture, the vicious, contrary to what ancient thinkers might have thought, can flourish by any reasonable standard. Here the early Confucians, as well as Plato and Aristotle, would contend that while it is true the vicious can gain certain kinds of goods such as wealth, power, fame—what Poe called “worldly success”—they are still missing out on the goods of virtue which are even more central to our well-being. Nothing precludes these thinkers from acknowledging that the vicious can obtain certain desirable goods.

But what really hangs on this dispute? What difference does it make, exactly, if virtue or moral goodness is a fundamental component of well-being, or if it is a fundamental component of the good life but not well-being? A part of the disagreement seems to be rooted in two divergent views about whether moral goodness is non-instrumentally good for you. But determining whether some good is non-instrumentally good for you or merely instrumentally good for you is not always easy. In fact, although this distinction seems to play a key role in every discussion of theorizing about well-being, nobody to my mind has offered a reliable way of distinguishing between these two goods.¹¹ This is not to deny that these are clearly distinct concepts. But if such a test were available, we could quickly settle certain core disagreements among various well-being theorists. For by using the test to identify any non-pleasure-based goods as carrying non-instrumental value for us, we can clearly rule out (or support) hedonism. A similar strategy would help us de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Concept, theory, and framework
• 2 Confucian moral psychology and well-being
• 3 Confucian virtue
• 4 Family and well-being
• 5 Joy and equanimity: the happy sage
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index