Many of us value autonomy in decision-making: we want to make our own choices and think for ourselves. But we also know that in many areas of life, it is well advised to have greater faith in people who know more than we do, in experts such as doctors, scientists, plumbers, chess coaches, teachers, and maybe even philosophers.
In this episode of This Is the Way, we explore moral autonomy and moral deference in Confucian philosophy, focusing on Xunzi’s powerful defense of trusting tradition, ritual, and moral experts. We also explore some powerful objections to Xunzi by later Confucians who worried that too much deference to external sources might make real moral understanding — and thus real moral virtue — impossible.
Key passages
Passage 1: Analogy to learning crafts
天下之人，唯各特意哉，然而有所共予也。言味者予易牙，言音者予師曠，言治者予三王。三王既以定法度，制禮樂而傳之，有不用而改自作，何以異於變易牙之和，更師曠之律？無三王之法，天下不待亡，國不待死。
With regard to all people in the world, it is indeed the case that they each have their own particular ideas. Nevertheless, there are some to whom they accede in common. Those who discourse on flavor accede to Yi Ya [a great cook]. Those who discourse on tones accede to Music Master Kuang [a great musician]. Those who discourse on order accede to the three kings [founders of the Confucian Way]. Since the three kings already fixed models and measures and established rituals and music and handed them down, then if there should be some who do not use them and instead change and create these themselves, how would this be any different from changing Yi Ya’s blends of flavors and altering Music Master Kuang’s musical scales? When the models of the three kings are absent, the empire will be lost without even a moment’s delay, and a state will perish without even a moment’s delay.
(Xunzi 荀子, chapter 27, lines 698-710, Eric Hutton’s translation)
Passage 2: Analogy to adopting pre-existing technology
公輸不能加於繩[墨]，聖人不能加於禮。禮者，眾人法而不知，聖人法而知之。
Gongshu [a great craftsperson] could not improve on the plumb line, and none of the sages can improve on ritual. The common people take ritual as their model but do not understand it. The sage takes ritual as his model and does understand it.
(Xunzi 荀子, chapter 30, lines 1-4, Eric Hutton’s translation)
Sources and phrases mentioned
- Justin’s short piece on moral deference and “getting it oneself” in Confucian philosophy
- Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States
- The Office (TV Show)
- “cases of moral deference” (sometimes treated as coextensive with “cases of reliance on moral testimony”)
- zide 自得 or zide zhi 自得之: “getting it oneself” (necessary for a certain kind of autonomy in ethical belief-formation)
- Confucian philosophers mentioned:
- Xunzi 荀子 (third century BCE): very strong proponent of moral deference
- Mencius (Mengzi 孟子, 372-289 BCE): another classical Confucian, strongly criticized by Xunzi for holding that human nature is good
- Later Confucians that strongly objected to Xunzi:
- Moderately pro-autonomy group: Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200 CE), Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-1777)
- Radically pro-autonomy group: Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1529), other late-Ming Confucians who saw themselves as in Wang’s philosophical lineage
- Gordan Ramsay (famous 21st-century chef)
- Jacques Pépin (another famous 21st-century chef)
- The Karate Kid (popular film from the 1980’s)
- Yi Ya 易牙, Music Master Kuang 師曠, Gong Shu 公輸
- sheng [mo] 繩[墨] “plumb line” (when the two-character phrase shengmo is used, it can also be translated as “ink-line”)
- daru 大儒 (person of great classical education – a very rare individual with enough moral understanding to form good beliefs autonomously)
- shi 士: scholar, person committed to a life of government or public service
- fa 法: a proper model of an ethical practice
- The “four sprouts” or “four beginnings of virtue” (pro-virtuous emotional dispositions, siduan 四端)
- PJ Ivanhoe (Philip J. Ivanhoe, who argues here and here that Xunzi’s pessimistic account of human nature is closely connected to his view that we are naturally morally blind at birth)
- Mencius 2A2, source of the “farmer of Song” story
- Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033-1107), source of a highly influential criticism of Xunzi, published in Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi lu 近思錄, a widely-read textbook or introduction to Neo-Confucian thought)
- Han Feizi 韓非子 (c. 280-233 BCE), Legalist philosopher, traditionally said to have been Xunzi’s student
- Justin’s more technical papers on issues mentioned in the episode: “Getting It Oneself” (Zide 自得) and Xunzi on Moral Expertise
- cheng 誠: sincerity, integrity (for many Neo-Confucians, cheng entails wholeheartedness)
- Philippa Foot (20th-century moral philosopher whose views about the virtues fluctuated, as Richard discussed near the end of the episode)
- suo dang ran er bu rong yi 所當然而不容已: the ethical norms that we cannot help but be motivated by, or more literally, “how things ought to be that one cannot stop” – an important basic ingredient of Zhu Xi’s moral epistemology (discussed at some length in Neo-Confucianism, by Stephen Angle and Justin Tiwald, chapter 6)
I’m a huge fan of the podcast and had a question about this episode. Though my orientation is generally scholarly, i.e. I try to read pieces that are as technical as I can grok and go down the rabbit hole of the related references, at my ripe old age I recently joined a practicing Daoist group (Parting Clouds a Quanchen Longmen sect) to see if I could force myself (engaging the rituals is a bit of a struggle for me) to go a little more deeply into the tradition.
One thing this group stresses is developing an understand of the historical context in which current Daoist groups function, and one thing they focus on is understanding the important threads of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism that thoroughly intermingled to form modern Quanchen Longmen Daoism. As part of studying that, we learned (or at least were told), in simplistic terms, that one of the motivations for the intellectuals of the Neo- Confucian tradition, was to provide a more rigorous philosophical basis for Confucian ethics. And they turned, in part, to Daoism for that, e.g. via interpretations of the Laotse and Zhuangzi.
So given the topic of this episode, and if any of the above is at all accurate, it might seem natural to assume that the moderate (or maybe even radical) reaction to Xunzi’s view is consistent with the Daoist view (to the extent I understand it) that rule following is actually antithetical to true moral behavior (I realize the danger of contradiction there :-)). And I just wanted to check if that way of thinking about it is way off base.
Great to hear from you, Karl! That’s all very interesting.
Yeah, the historical account you give strikes me as defensible in some form or another. If I understand you correctly, you (or your fellow Parting Clouds Daoists) are saying this: the fact that the Neo-Confucians were so consistent in rejecting Xunzi’s strong position on moral deference is due in part to the influence of Daoism on Neo-Confucianism. Daoism is also opposed to moral deference and recommends a kind of independence of thought or autonomy in ethical belief formation, and Daoism came to be quite popular in the Neo-Confucian era, so that people in general — including those who became Neo-Confucians — were primed to reject views that left very little room for autonomy. That’s the part that seems defensible to me, although I’ll add a bit of a caveat in the final paragraph below.
There’s another part of your historical account that I’m less certain about: that it was Daoism’s rejection of rule following that influenced the Neo-Confucians and made them less inclined to adopt Xunzi’s strong position on moral deference. First, Confucianism rejected strict rule-following ideals for ethics quite early on; even in the Xunzi there are serious doubts about the possibility of establishing rules or decision procedures that will work in all situations or all contexts. Second, one can reject strict rule following and still endorse strong moral deference. All you need is the view that there is some external source (say, an expert, a teacher, or a moral advisor) whom you see as a better judge than you on some particular matter, whose judgment you rightly trust better than your own. Even if that external source just gives you case-by-case judgments about what to do and doesn’t give you timeless and exceptionless rules of behavior (e.g., “bow to this elder on this particular occasion” and not “always bow to all elders”), that can still qualify as moral deference in the sense that matters most.
But I do think that Neo-Confucianism took on some characteristics of Daoism. On some prominent and influential readings of the Daoist classics, they recommend that you live by standards that you sincerely or wholeheartedly accept, and what I am calling moral deference isn’t very conducive to sincere or wholehearted acceptance of a standard.
But my caveat is this: it’s really hard to say whether Daoism played a pivotal role in shaping the overwhelming consensus against Xunzi. As Richard notes, there are plenty of resources in the Mencius to support the recommendation that we rely on our own natural ethical capacities in some domains of life (and build outward from those). If the claim is that later Confucians wouldn’t have come to such a strong consensus against Xunzi if it were not for the influence of Daoism, that’s a counterfactual historical claim that I have a hard time assessing. It’s very hard to say what would have happened in the absence of Daoism. And don’t forget that there’s also the Buddha-nature framework in the mix, which also tells against strong moral deference.
That basically sums up my mostly supportive but somewhat qualified views about the historical account. I quite enjoy thinking about the set of issues raised by your question. I do find it helpful to think about the lines of influence here, even if (unavoidably) its hard to substantiate claims about historical influence.
Hi Karl,
Thanks for these comments. You are certainly right that the neo-Confucians did take up significant ideas from Buddhism to give a more metaphysical basis for their ethical ideal. What I’m not sure about, historically, is how Daoism influenced their views. I also did think that the less deference based view could be found in Mengzi (due to the innate goodness of human nature), so there may be resources already in early Confucianism to criticize Xunzi.