The book's significance is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy, and it demonstrates the value to Western ...

This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The article concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more (...) empirically responsible model of ethics than those currently dominant in Western philosophy. (shrink)

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally (...) damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the central aspect of Confucian politics lies in the sacred value it places on the moral rectification of the ruler. Confucians fused morality and politics---a mode of politics that I call Moralpolitik. In contrast to Max Weber's influential interpretation of Confucianism as this-worldly in accommodating to the power of the ruler, this dissertation proposes that Confucian morality clashed with the worldly interests of the ruler, leading to a counter-politics founded on moral principles. Moralpolitik is a politics (...) in which moral revulsion against politics or mundane power takes the form of zeal to subordinate politics to moral imperatives, as distinct from assigning politics to a separate, mundane sphere. Morality becomes a formidable political weapon and the ultimate political goal. ;Some forms of Moralpolitik are generally observed in traditional societies where religion is pervasive. The distinctive character of Confucian Moralpolitik is that it emphasizes a this-worldly imperative to rectify the ruler rather than other-worldly prospects of salvation. The deeper the Confucian belief that the virtues of the ruler were crucial for the realization of the Confucian Way, the more sacred became their mission to rectify the ruler's deviations from Confucian moral principles. The frequent instances of political martyrdom in Confucian politics can be understood from this perspective. This religious seriousness also underlies recurrent persecutions of Confucian factions by one another in terms of orthodoxy and heresy. ;The myth of the sage king constitutes the ideological core of Confucianism. The image of morally impeccable rule constrained the ruler. The wider the gap between the ideal and real rulership, the stronger became the Confucians' moral-political claims. The Confucian beliefs in the power of ritual to bring true moral order to the world led to a Moralpolitik in which ritual was the primary ideological-political means to constrain the ruler. This dissertation analyzes the means specific to Confucianism by which, in Nietzschean terms, priests dominated warriors. This dissertation interprets the great ritual disputes in Ming China and Choson Korea as expressions of Confucian morality in politics, illustrating their complete fusion. They show how the "this-worldly" character of Confucianism does not, contra Weber, lead to political accommodation and quiescence but, on the contrary, to tensions between religion and politics distinctive to Confucianism. (shrink)