The history of ideas and contemporary genocide studies conjointly suggests a meaningful secular conception of evil. I will show how the history of ideas supplies us with a cumulative pattern, or an eventual gestalt, of the sought-for conception of universal secular evil. This gestalt is a result of my examination of the history of ideas. The historical analysis of evil firmly grounds my research in the tradition of philosophical inquiry, where I shift the focus from the problem of evil, which (...) is indebted to theological discourse, to an analysis of the concept of evil. Next, I show how this gestalt applies to genocide studies. Specifically, I show how a secular concept of evil meaningfully functions in this research program. The examination of genocide studies serves as a test-bed for the fruit of my historical examination. There, I show, first, in what way a secular notion of evil is irreducible, or elementary; second, how the concept used in genocide studies compares to the cumulative historical pattern; and third, in what way genocide studies have progressively enriched the pattern. Armed with these results, I then engage with the contemporary literature that criticizes the possibility of a meaningful concept of evil, and attempts to reduce this notion of secular evil to relativistic particulars. Here, I describe relevant arguments and objections. It is interesting to explore whether, and if so, how, some aspects of the objections may lend themselves to an actual refinement of the concept of evil. Finally, then, I present a summary account of evil on the basis of my findings. (shrink)

An overview of Dai's ethics, highlighting some overlooked or misunderstood theses on moral deliberation and motivation.

This paper explores the Confucian value of authenticity. Taking as the starting point of the Confucian concept of becoming authentic persons of bo, da, jing, and shen, the paper first demonstrates that a high–far–firm zhixiang, creativity, an examined life, and sincerity are four necessary conditions for a self to be an authentic one of bo, da, jing, and shen. It then demonstrates that Confucian ethics operates with a metaphysical concept of a substantive self and Confucian self-cultivation implies authenticating such a (...) substantive self. Finally, it demonstrates that in Confucian ethics, cultivating a person’s self and cultivating the person’s humanity are not separable and entail one another. (shrink)

Xunzi was chronologically the third of the three great Confucian thinkers of China’s classical period, after Confucius and Mencius. Having produced the most comprehensive philosophical system of that period, he occupies a place in the development of Chinese philosophy comparable to that of Aristotle in the Western philosophical tradition. This essay reveals how Xunzi’s understanding of virtue and moral development dovetailed with his positions on ritual propriety, the attunement of names, the relation betweenli (patterns) andlei (categories), and his view ofdao (...) (the way) in general. I have argued for a constructivist understanding of each of these aspects of Xunzi’s philosophy in some detail elsewhere (see Hagen 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), and so here I will just briefly review a few key points before addressing their relation to moral development. (shrink)

This essay explores the Confucian concept of the space of the mind and the Confucian view on cultivation of the space of mind. It then argues that the distinction between the mind as a mental substance and the body as a material substance is that the mind can be infinitely extended while the body can only extended to a certain limit.