Confucian Perfectionism

A Political Philosophy for Modern Times

Joseph Chan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400848690
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of the right. Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice. Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era.

PART I

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Political Authority and Institution

CHAPTER 1

What Is Political Authority?

In this and the following chapters, I shall attempt to develop a Confucian conception of political authority by answering a number of questions, namely: What is political authority? What are its purposes? How can it be justified? Do people who are ruled play any role in the justification? What scope of authority should a state or government have? What institutional structure of authority should a state adopt? Viewed together, the answers to these questions will form the backbone of a theory of political authority. Although the texts of early Confucian thinkers do not outline anything close to a systematic theory of political authority, they share similar core ideas and views that can be reconstructed and developed into a more or less coherent perspective. My aim is to expound this perspective and assess its philosophical plausibility.

This chapter deals with the first four questions of authority—its nature, its purposes, its justifications, and the role of the people in these justifications. It develops a perfectionist perspective that takes the well-being of the people and their willing acceptance of political rule as fundamental to the legitimacy of political authority. In the first section I start with the Western Zhou dynasty conception of Heaven’s Mandate (tianming), which says that the right to rule is based on Heaven’s Mandate.¹ I reject two interpretations that treat the right bestowed by Heaven as a dominium or ownership right. The second section argues that for early Confucians, political authority exists for the benefit of the governed and is justified by its ability to protect and promote the people’s well-being. I call this view of authority the service conception and explain its main features and implications. The third section argues that according to the service conception, political rights are justified instrumentally by the contribution they make to the betterment of people’s lives, and thus no persons, be they rulers or the people, have any natural political right to rule. I defend this view of political rights and point out problems with the opposing idea of popular sovereignty. The fourth section argues that early Confucianism also contains a noninstrumental justification of authority, in the sense that an authoritative political relation is constituted in part by the people’s willing acceptance of and compliance with the political rule. The final section integrates the instrumental and constitutive aspects of political authority by developing a perfectionist approach and laying out the approach’s key features. This approach, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4, plays a critical role in my strategy to relate the Confucian ideal to democratic political institutions.

The Dominium Conception

Political authority is taken here in a normative sense, namely, as a legitimate right to rule at the highest level within a jurisdiction. What is the source of political authority for early Confucians? The best starting point is the idea of tianming, arguably the single most important political idea of the Western Zhou period and one that shaped the subsequent political thinking of the entire traditional Chinese political thought.² The term tianming expresses the notion that the right to rule is based on Heaven’s Mandate. In The Book of History (Shang shu), the Duke of Zhou frequently invokes this idea to justify his country’s revolt against the Shang regime. This shows that the people in Zhou already knew the distinction between sheer might and legitimate authority to rule. Might was thought to be necessary for authority, but it was Heaven’s Mandate that ultimately conferred legitimacy on rulership.

However, what does political authority or the right to rule amount to? What rights and duties are associated with political authority in this theory of Heaven’s Mandate? There seems to be textual support for two interpretations of tianming—the ownership interpretation and the democratic rights interpretation—and scholars have argued for both interpretations. The first interpretation says that Heaven bestows on the chosen ruler an ownership right to the people and land over which the ruler rules. The second interpretation holds an opposite view, namely, that Heaven bestows a fundamental moral right to rule to the people themselves, with the right to own the territory in which they live. These two incompatible interpretations, however, share the same conception of political authority (or sovereignty) as an entitlement of dominium or ownership. They differ only in the identity of the dominus or owner—that is, whether those entitled to political authority are the rulers or the people. On this dominium conception, political authority is something that can be owned and passed on, and it contains entitlements to resources within the jurisdiction of the dominus. Since an examination of these two interpretations requires detailed textual analyses that might detract from the thrust of the overall argument in this chapter, I shall only state the main conclusions of this examination here and leave the exegetical arguments to appendix 2. I argue there that early Confucianism does not endorse the dominium conception of political authority, whether the dominium is vested in a person or a people. Political authority, or the right to rule, according to the Confucian view, does not contain any ownership claim over the people, land, or authority itself. It is not a dominium but an imperium—that is, the legitimate right to govern within a jurisdiction. When a ruler is said to have received Heaven’s Mandate, it is this right to rule that he has received. This right is no more than the power to make and implement laws and policies within a certain territorial jurisdiction and is conditional on the ability of the ruler to protect and promote the people’s well-being. Political authority exists for this purpose, and its justification depends on its ability to serve this purpose well. In appendix 2 I also argue that early Confucian texts, especially Mencius, do not take the people as the natural dominus—the people do not possess any natural fundamental right to rule. The democratic idea of popular sovereignty cannot be found in the texts. While the conclusions of my analysis in appendix 2 are primarily about what Confucianism is not, they also point toward a highly interesting, albeit rudimentary, alternative conception of political authority. The rest of this chapter is devoted to a further analysis and development of this conception.

The Service Conception

The Zhou dynasty concept of Heaven’s Mandate says that Heaven gave the right to rule to the Zhou dynasty in order that the people could receive proper protection under its authority. And it is the protection of the people that is also the key condition for Zhou being able to keep the mandate.³ A similar idea can be found in a passage of a lost chapter of The Book of History, which is quoted in Mencius: “The Book of History says, ‘Heaven populated the earth below, made the people a lord, and made him their teacher, that he might assist Heaven in loving them’ ” (1B.3). Zhou’s idea that the purpose of tianming is to protect the people has been further developed in later periods, for example, in this well-known passage by Mencius which states that the people are more important than the ruler: “The people are of supreme importance; the altars to the gods of earth and grain come next; last comes the ruler” (Mencius 7B.14), and in Xunzi’s often cited idea that “Heaven did not create the people for the sake of the lord; Heaven established the lord for the sake of the people.” Xunzi writes,

Heaven did not create the people for the sake of the lord; Heaven established the lord for the sake of the people. Hence, in antiquity land was not granted in fiefs of ranked sizes just to give honored position to the feudal lords and for no other purpose. Offices and ranks were not arranged in hierarchical order and provided with suitable titles and emoluments just to give honored status to the grand officers and for no other purpose. (Xunzi 27.68)

If we combine the ideas of these two thinkers, we have the following view of political authority: the people have independent worth (Mencius), and the authority of the ruler and all other officials is an instrument to serve them (Xunzi). Borrowing a term from the contemporary British legal and political philosopher Joseph Raz, I shall call this combined idea the “service conception” of political authority. The service conception states that the point of setting up political authority, and more generally a regime, is to serve the ruled, who have worth in themselves.⁴ Political offices of all levels—along with the associated power, status, and emoluments—are created to benefit the ruled rather than the officeholders themselves.

The Confucian service conception of authority has several important implications that are worth exploring here. First, there are two hierarchies in the ruler-ruled relationship as understood by this conception. One is the hierarchy of power—the ruler rules while the ruled respects and obeys. However, there is also a more fundamental hierarchy of value or worth. The service conception states that the people—the ruled—have worth independent of the ruler-ruled relationship, whereas the ruler’s worth is only derivative. Of course, we need to distinguish between the ruler as an office and the ruler as a person holding the office. The service conception states that the office’s value is entirely instrumental to, or derived from, the worth of the people, and the features of the office—the power, respect, and emolument that come with it—are justified ultimately with reference to its instrumental function. But the service conception does not deny that the person holding that office has independent worth, who may indeed have great worth if he possesses superior abilities and virtues to effectively discharge his office. It also does not deny that the ruler (rather than the office) should develop a noninstrumental, ethical relationship with the ruled—a point I shall develop later in this chapter.

Second, the service conception is clearly in opposition to the ownership interpretation of tianming, namely, that tianming grants the ruler an ownership right to the land and people. The service conception not only rejects this but also affirms the instrumentality of political authority, namely, that political authority serves the interests of the people (in today’s terms, the public interest or common good) rather than the private interests of the ruler. A similar notion that appears in Shuo yuan states that Heaven establishes rulership for the sake of the people and not for the sake of the position itself; if the ruler governs for his private interests (si yu) and not for the interests of others, he has failed to act according to Heaven’s decree and has forgotten what it truly means to be a ruler.⁵

Third, according to the service conception, the raison d’être of political authority—to serve the people—is also the very basis for Heaven’s Mandate and hence the ruler’s legitimacy. The following passage from Chun qiu fan lu expounds Xunzi’s idea and explicitly links the ruler’s service to the people to the basis of Heaven’s Mandate: “If a person’s virtue is sufficient to ensure peace and contentment for the people, Heaven will give its mandate to him to govern, but if the vice of a serving ruler is sufficient to seriously harm the people, Heaven will take away the mandate from him.”⁶ This apparently religious justification of legitimacy has a thoroughly worldly character—what ultimately matters is the well-being of the people and whether they are well served by the ruler. It is important to note that although this justification of authority is instrumental and consequentialist, it is not the maximizing form of consequentialism. The passage does not imply that if a serving ruler is less than perfect in terms of virtue and competence, we must keep searching for a better one. It implies that the criterion for legitimacy is one of sufficiency—a ruler should possess sufficient virtues and abilities (which should be reflected by a good track record)—and that any vices demonstrated by a ruler must be serious enough to significantly harm the people’s interests in order for him to be removed.⁷ This makes good political sense as continuity and stability are fundamentally important in politics and constant changes of leadership only cause confusion and undermine effective governance. This point also has important bearing upon the evaluation of regime types, especially the principle of monarchical heredity, as I discuss in appendix 2.

A Non-Rights-Based Justification

According to the service conception I have developed thus far, political authority exists to serve the ruled, and the political rights attached to this authority are justified instrumentally by the contribution they make to the betterment of people’s lives. These political rights are not fundamental moral rights that belong to individuals but are more on a par with the rights of officials such as the police, who have rights because their proper exercise of them can protect and promote the well-being of the people. Theoretically one could extend this view to a general view about all political rights, a view that is not articulated in Confucianism but which can be regarded as a natural extension of, or at least fully compatible with, its core political ideas. The general view is that the distribution of political rights or powers, and the institutional form that these rights or powers take, should be evaluated by the service conception. A person possessing political rights or a share in an institution of political authority must have this possession justified by reference to the good of the people. In this sense there is no natural right to political power as such. There is no natural ruler whose right requires no justification with regard to the interests or needs of other people.

But this idea applies even to the governed insofar as they also possess certain political rights. When the ruled take turns to rule (as in classical Athens), or when citizens cast votes to elect their leaders (as in a democracy), they are sharing in and exercising political power and are therefore actively engaging in the act of ruling. However ...