Confucianism is well known for prioritizing familial responsibilities and love over other competing demands such as public interest or duties to the state. In this episode we explore two of the best known passages from early Confucianism that some modern scholars believe makes Confucianism morally problematic. The first passage we discuss is the “Upright Gong” passage, Analects 13.18, which has Confucius advocating mutual “covering up” of crimes by fathers and sons. The second passage is Mengzi 7A35, in which Mengzi is asked what the sage king Shun would have done if his father had committed murder. Mengzi’s answer, briefly stated, is that Shun would have given up his throne and would have fled with his father to care for him for the rest of his life.
Through these passages we explore questions about justice, consequentialist ethics, and the nature of moral dilemmas (and Confucian ways of handling them).
Key passages
Analects 13.18
葉公語孔子曰：「吾黨有直躬者，其父攘羊，而子證之。」孔子曰：「吾黨之直者異於是。父為子隱，子為父隱，直在其中矣。」
The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is one we call ‘Upright Gong.’ When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.”
Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who we consider ‘upright’ are different from this: fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. ‘Uprightness’ is to be found in this.”
(Analects 13.18, Edward Slingerland’s translation)
Mencius 7A35
桃應問曰：「舜為天子，皋陶為士，瞽瞍殺人，則如之何？」
Mengzi’s disciple Tao Ying asked, “When Shun was Son of Heaven and Gao Yao was his Minister of Crime, if the Blind Man had murdered someone, what would they have done?”
孟子曰：「執之而已矣。」
Mengzi said, “Gao Yao would simply have arrested him.”
「然則舜不禁與？」
Tao Ying asked, “So Shun would not have forbidden it?”
曰：「夫舜惡得而禁之？夫有所受之也。」
Mengzi said, “How could Shun have forbidden it? Gao Yao had a sanction for his actions.”
「然則舜如之何？」
Tao Ying asked, “So what would Shun have done?”
曰：「舜視棄天下，猶棄敝蹝也。竊負而逃，遵海濱而處，終身訢然，樂而忘天下。」
Mengzi said, “Shun looked at casting aside the whole world like casting aside a worn sandal. He would have secretly carried him on his back and fled, to live in the coastland, happy to the end of his days, joyfully forgetting the world.”
(Mengzi 7A35, Van Norden’s translation)
Sources and phrases mentioned
Adaptive preferences
xiao 孝 (filial piety)
qinqin xiang rong yin 親親相容隱 (also qinqin xiangyin 親親相隱, the legal principle that family members are legally permitted to conceal one another’s crimes)
Wang Yangming 王陽明, “Questions on the Great Learning” (Daxue wen 大學問) §1 (on care for plants and broken tiles)
Plato, Euthyphro
Javert (the hyper-lawful character from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables)
zhi 直 (upright, uprightness)
Analects 8.2 (the passage that suggests that uprightness needs to be moderated or tempered by ritual propriety)
Mohists (Mojia 墨家, the school of thought that advocates for “promoting the worthy” and “impartial care”)
Yangism (ethical egoism, maybe privatism, named after Yang Zhu 楊朱)
ai you chadeng 愛有差等 (care with distinctions)
Shun 舜 (legendary emperor, exemplar of filial piety)
Stephen C. Angle, Sagehood and “No Supreme Principle” (defend the “harmony” reading of putative moral dilemmas)
Consequentialism (the normative ethical theory that says that the right action is the one that maximizes the [impartial, agent-neutral] good)
li 利 (benefit, profit, the good that is to maximized according to Mohists)
ren 仁 (humaneness, benevolence, Goodness)
Analects 1.2 (suggests that filial piety is the root or foundation of more comprehensive virtues)
While reading traditional commentaries in preparation for this episode, I came across the following remark by Xie Liangzuo 謝良佐 (1050-1103), one of the Song Confucians whose views were integrated into Zhu Xi’s “great synthesis.” I don’t normally say of the historical thinkers that they anticipated some move or position in 20th- or 21st-century philosophy. But I’ll make an exception for this one. Xie’s argument strikes me as coming quite close to Bernard Williams’s one-thought-too-many argument:
For the echoes Analects 13.18 in present-day criminal law, see Article 188 (第188條) in the Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, amended in 2012 (2012 年修訂版中華人民共和國刑事訴訟法).
My thanks to Junbo (Max) Tao for this reference, and to Max as well as Bryan Van Norden and PJ Ivanhoe for discussion of some of the issues that came up in the episode.
I think Justin and Richard are right to say that the Euthyphro’s complaint about Euthyphro is about his smug certainty rather than about his favoring the state or public interest over family.
An interesting detail not always appreciated in comparisons of the Euthyphro with Analects 13.18 is that the Euthyphro does not allude to any conflict or tension between family and state, nor any conflict between the interest of the family and other interests. Euthyphro is trying to sue his father in court for homicide; but he is not championing the criminal law, for there is no crime at issue (and a successful outcome would not exactly be “punishment”). Plato stresses this point early on (2a). Athenian law regarded homicide as a tort between families. The victim’s kin had the option (but not the duty) to sue the killer (and the killer’s close kin, I think) for restitution. Euthyphro’s standing to bring suit would have depended on the victim’s having been Euthyphro’s slave (a fact on which the dialogue hints at a doubt).
Euthyphro sees his lawsuit not as sacrificing family to any other interest, but as an attempt to protect his family from the gods, by removing the pollution (miasma) of the homicide from his family (and himself) (4c).
I think the conflict in the dialogue is about authority rather than interests. Euthyphro’s confidence in his own independent judgment about the gods gives too little weight to the authority of the community as a judge of what’s right. That’s how Plato sees the issue. Euthyphro’s view is that he is a highly educated expert on the matter, and the community is not; but Socrates shows that Euthyphro’s expertise has relevant holes.
This may be an interesting sidelight on utilitarianism and graded care.
In the Anglophone tradition, utilitarianism arose in the 1700s as an analysis of our moral sentiments. These were seen as having little interest in matters beyond our control or our ken. Outside of my circles I cannot as well appreciate what the effects of my actions would be, nor even well perceive (feel) the goodness of the distant happiness so as to be a responsible caretaker.
Everything below is quoted from Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Liberty Classics 1969. The first paragraph is from Smith’s 1759 edition; the remainder is from the 1790 edition, responding to people who took Smith’s economic theory to express individualistic values.
p. 237:
… The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.
pp. 359-361
… Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended to his own care; and every man is certainly in every respect fitter and abler to take care of himself than any other person. Every man feels his own pleasures and pains more sensibly that those of other people. …
After himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections. They are naturally and usually the persons upon whose happiness and misery his conduct must have the greatest influence. He is more habituated to sympathize with them: he knows better how every thing is likely to affect them, and his sympathy with them is more precise and determinate than it can be with the greater part of other people. It approaches nearer, in short, to what he feels for himself.
This sympathy, too, and the affections which are founded on it, are by nature more strongly directed towards his children than towards his parents, and his tenderness for the former seems generally a more active principle than his reverence and gratitude towards the latter. … In the eye of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy. It ought to do so. … The weakness of childhood interests the affections of the most brutal and hard-hearted. …
The earliest friendships, the friendships which are naturally contracted when the heart is most susceptible of that feeling, are those among brothers and sisters. Their good agreement, while they remain in the same family, is necessary for its tranquility and happiness. …
The children of brothers and sisters …
The children of cousins …
… The general rule is established, that persons related to another in a certain degree ought always to be affected towards one another in a certain manner, and that there is always the highest impropriety, and sometimes even a sort of impiety, in their being affected in a different manner. A parent without parental tenderness, a child devoid of all filial reverence, appear monsters, the objects, not of hatred only, but of horror.
President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, after repeatedly insisting he had no plans to grant such executive clemency, is an interesting case in the light of the Analects passage. In the many reactions to this pardon, we see both the (Confucian) stress on the importance of the father-son relationship and the (Duke of She) stress on the impartial functioning of the law.
Important here is that the father is also the president. There is some similarity to the case of Shun although he abdicated first, while Biden pardons first and then will abdicate. Would Mengzi sanction this (although he wouldn’t regard Biden as a sage)?
There is of course also the issue of the ongoing politicizing of the judicial processes in the US, and fear of partisan prosecution of his son was given a motive for President Biden. But this in turn politicizes the instrument of pardon even further than is already the case.
Hi Carlo, indeed, it is amazing how timeless this topic is. One issue is that Biden is utilizing a power that he legally possesses in virtue of his role as president, so in a way, he’s not actually doing anything is illegal. Of course, one could argue that the president shouldn’t have that power at all which seems quite reasonable. Still, the pardoning is certainly driven by his familial love and so I think the Confucians would have been quite sympathetic to it.
As I understand the contemporary commentaries that are going on (although I try not to pay too much attention to contemporary politics because I really loathe it) the issue is also about how Biden and the democrats were constantly (and justifiably) criticizing Trump for being nepotistic and not abiding by the natural democratic processes and it seems like Biden has now acted hypocritically (which to some extent he has). Biden has also claimed that his son has been unfairly prosecuted by the opponents in Congress, an all too familiar claim from the mouth of Trump; so perhaps some are upset that such accusations continue to undermine trust in the political system.
For what it’s worth, I sympathize with the pardon. I’m a parent and I get it. This is perhaps why such a power should not exist at all since most people are likely to use it. But I think people are more outraged by these other aspects.
Great talk as usual. You’re right that filial piety is not treated much in Western philosophy. One place where you’ll find it is in medieval discussions of the “order of charity” (ordo caritatis), where charity = selfless love, “agape” in the Greek Bible. The tension they’re trying to navigate is this: “love your neighbor as yourself” implies that you should care for everyone equally, while “honor your father and mother” implies that you should show special care to your parents. So they have to work out what special duties one owes to their parents and other relatives, and how you can carry out those duties without violating the principle of loving everyone as yourself. Aquinas discusses this in Disputed Questions on Virtue 2.9, for example: https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVirtutibus2.htm#9
I wonder also if you’d find something Roman philosophy, which I don’t know enough about. Romans had a virtue called pietas which translates 孝 pretty well. Aeneas is supposed to be the paragon of pietas: hence the statues and paintings of Aeneas carrying his father out of burning Troy. Actually, I was just talking to my Latin students about that this morning, and since some of them are Chinese, I showed them that depiction of Aeneas and connected it with the etymology of 孝. It was a great moment of crosscultural connection and I’m grateful for you two putting it into my mind as I walked to work this morning!