Lead Them with Virtue
eBook - PDF

Lead Them with Virtue

A Confucian Alternative to War

  1. 181 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Lead Them with Virtue

A Confucian Alternative to War

About this book

Recent scholarship has framed early Confucians as just war theorists with relatively permissive criteria for the just use of violence. Lead Them with Virtue: A Confucian Alternative to War makes the case that such interpretations conflict with what Mencius and Xunzi were trying to do. Kurtis Hagen argues that they both strove to prevent war by contrasting the situations of their day with idealized versions of the semi-mythic activities of sage-kings, which represent appropriate use of the military. These stories imply support for the offensive use of the military only when actual war—with its characteristic horrors—would not ensue. Following this logic, military interventions are just only in circumstances that do not actually occur. Confucians advocate, instead, a long-term strategy of ameliorating unjust circumstances by leveraging the credibility and influence that stems from consistently practicing genuinely benevolent governance. Passages that imply pacifistic readings of these texts are routinely dismissed by scholars as too naïve to be taken seriously. Hagen argues that the relatively pacifistic position implied by these passages is not in fact naïve, but is rather reasonable, and indeed should be supported, at least by contemporary Confucians.

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Yes, you can access Lead Them with Virtue by Kurtis Hagen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Political Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2021
eBook ISBN
9781978779907

Table of contents

  1. Preface
  2. IntroductionConfucianism and NoncoerciveMoral Leadership
  3. Chapter One A Brief Overview of Confucianism
  4. Chapter Two Western and Chinese Attitudes Regarding Warfare
  5. Chapter Three Anticipating Confucian Just War Theory
  6. Chapter Four Mencius on War and Humanitarian Intervention
  7. Chapter Five Xunzi on War and Humanitarian Intervention
  8. Chapter Six Mencius and Xunzi on Tyranny and Humanitarian Intervention: A Response to Twiss and Chan
  9. Chapter Seven From Human Nature to the Clash of Civilizations
  10. Chapter Eight Two Visions of Confucian World Order
  11. Conclusion
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index