Dao has established “The Annual Best Essay Award” since 2007. In addition to a certificate of achievement, the award comes along with a prize of US$1,000. The award winners will be noted in the website of the journal as well as the website of Springer, the publisher of the journal. The award ceremony is held each year at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting (Eastern Division) in early January, where a special panel on the theme of the award-winning essay is held. The critical comments and the author’s responses to them presented at the panel, after review and revision, will be published in the last issue of Dao each year.

The selection process consists of two stages. First, a nominating committee of three editorial board members, who have not published in Dao in the given year, is established. This committee is charged with the task of nominating three best essays from all those published in the previous year. These three essays are then sent to the whole editorial board for deliberation. The final winner is decided by a vote by all editorial board members who are not authors of the nominated essays.

The editorial board has just finished its deliberation on the best essay published in 2025, and the result is:

Robert A. Carleo III, “A More Confucian Path to Equality,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 24 (2025): 227–249.

Robert A. Carleo III’s “A More Confucian Path to Equality” offers an original reinterpretation of Mencian egalitarianism. Challenging influential attempts to ground Confucian equality in modern notions of rights and reciprocal respect, Carleo argues that Mencius instead advocates a form of equality rooted in compassion and nonreciprocal care. Combining close textual scholarship with philosophical creativity, the essay illuminates an alternative path to social and political equality and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Confucian thought to contemporary philosophical debates. It exemplifies the type of comparative philosophy Dao aims to promote.