Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2015.11.28 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews
Erin M. Cline, Families of Virtue: Confucian and Western Views on Childhood Development, Columbia University Press, 2015, 342pp., $30.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780231171557 .
Reviewed by David B. Wong, Duke University
This book attributes to early Confucianism the view that the parent-child relationship has a “unique and irreplaceable” role in early moral development (xi) and goes on to argue that this view is right. In the course of making this argument Erin M. Cline provides careful and perceptive comparative readings of early Confucian texts and a very wide range of texts in the Western tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau to contemporary feminists, to show how unusual and in-depth the insights of Confucian thinkers were. She draws from a wide range of empirical studies to support the Confucian view. There is much in this book that will be of value to anyone with interests in the fields of the philosophy and psychology of moral development, feminist care ethics, and comparative ethics. Cline’s comparison of Confucian and feminist views, which have the most to say about parent-child relationships, is informative and balanced. It is not clear that she has fully established the unique and irreplaceable role of the parent-child relationship, but Cline surely has given enough argument to establish that the relationship is one of the most important factors, perhaps the most important single factor, in moral development, and she raises good questions as to why U.S. society largely neglects its importance in its public policies.
ppy to pass on the news that the Chinese translation of my book Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy: Toward Progressive Confucianism (Polity, 2013) has been published by Jiangxi People’s Press, as 《当代儒家政治哲学：进步儒学发凡》. More information, including the Preface to the Chinese Edition, can be found 