Starting an Ethics Class with Confucius

Most of my thinking has been provoked by teaching. I came to my interest in Confucius partly through  teaching ethics, trying to find a way to express coherently the view that many students brought to the course initially. People keep trying to conjure that  away, as if the ethical lives of students begin when the course begins, but that is just nonsense: people live within a valuable way of thinking which academic ethics can honor, and develop, and also challenge -- by presenting alternative approaches. This paper explores this use of Confucius in introductory ethics.

Peter Shea

September 11, 2009

Starting an ethics class by talking about Confucius

Abstract: I argue that including Confucius in an introductory class in ethics gives students an important perspective on the varieties of moral reasoning, helping them to find appropriate ways of reflecting on their own experience.

The philosopher Yu said, "They are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors. There have been none, who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion.

The superior man bends his attention to what is radical. That being established, all practical courses naturally grow up. Filial piety and fraternal submission, -- are they not the root of all benevolent actions? – Confucius, Analects, Book I

Socrates: . ...you would call a man courageous who remains at his post, and fights with the enemy?    

Laches: Certainly I should.    

Socrates: And so should I; but what would you say of another man, who fights flying, instead of remaining?    

Laches: How flying?    

Socrates: Why, as the Scythians are said to fight, flying as well as pursuing… Plato, Laches, Jowett translation.

These quotes represent two approaches to moral thinking. The citation from the Laches is familiar; some such argument is presented as a central case of good moral reasoning – reasoning by counter-example – in introductory classes at colleges and universities across the western world. The citation from Confucius is odd, and seems out of place in a philosophy discussion; it seems more like a religious saying or sermon. In this paper, I will argue for a conception of introductory ethics teaching that has a  place for both of these kinds of reasoning, and that places them into provocative relationship to each other.

In Plato’s Laches, Socrates engages two famous generals, Laches and Nicias, in conversation. They have all been invited to advise two fathers about teaching human excellence to their sons; their hosts claim to have fallen far short of the standard set by their fathers, and they look to their sons to retrieve the family honor. At the beginning of the dialogue, a character-education consultant has just given a demonstration of his product, “fighting in armor,” and the hosts ask for their guests’ opinion about this approach to building moral excellence in their boys. When the generals disagree, Socrates suggests more basic starting questions: “Can virtue be taught, and, if so, who are the expert teachers?” This leads them to ask about the nature of virtue, and then to an examination of that virtue with which the generals are most concerned, courage. In the dialogue that follows, both Laches and Nicias come to see that their accounts of courage are inadequate.

The historical setting of this dialogue gives particular weight to the discussion; it is written in the decades following Athens’ defeat in the long war with Sparta, and portrays a time before Athens began its long decline. Both Nicias and Laches presided over crucial defeats; both were killed in losing battles. Any Athenian, seeing them at the height of their fame, will ask what thinking or preparation might have prevented their failures. The generals have been called in to consult about the education of two young boys; Plato calls in the readers of the Laches to consult on the moral education of the two generals, to ask, “Is there anything that could have happened in this conversation with Socrates that might have saved these men from humiliating defeat?”

One possible answer is contained in the development of the dialogue. Accounts of courage become more and more general. The initial account identifies courage with a particular battlefield strategy: holding one’s position. Socrates counters this by reminding the generals of the range of strategies they have used, and the kinds of courage required for each of those strategies. As the dialogue progresses, the possibilities for courage beyond the battlefield are mentioned, and the accounts given begin to take notice of such non-military courage. One remembers that Laches folded to pressure from his own soldiers at Mantinea; they executed a disastrous attack on a large Spartan force when they could have waited for reinforcements in a fortified city. One remembers that Nicias yielded to the Athenian assembly in assuming joint command of the Syracuse expedition, after having spoken powerfully against it. He accepts as co-leader of the enterprise a man for whom he has very little respect. One wonders whether Laches and Nicias would have done better had their examples of courage included resisting pressure from one’s friends, as well as standing fast against enemy soldiers. It seems that the narrowness manifested by them in the dialogue contributed to the disasters that followed a few years later. 

This discussion of courage in the Laches is a promising starting point for an historically organized “Introduction to Ethics” course. It gives an accessible picture of Socrates and his method, so that students can begin to practice that method on their own. It shows why Socratic questioning might be valuable in our own projects. It introduces some of the radical questions that shape Greek philosophical discussion and that persist into the present: what is virtue, can virtue be taught, do the virtues form some unified system? From a practical and theoretical standpoint, beginning an introductory ethics class with the Laches makes good sense. I began that way for several years.

By contrast, material from Confucius’ Analects seems to derive from the fortune cookie tradition of moral thinking: unsupported pronouncements, presuming the value and integrity of Chinese institutions and customs. There’s little questioning, little attempt to get at the bottom of anything. What seems most common is the kind of comment quoted above: a recommendation that, by taking relationships at one level seriously in a particular way, one will rectify relationships at other levels: fixing the family will fix the kingdom. One might hope this is true. But surely it depends on the context, on the cultural connections within Chinese society. Socrates begins a universal discussion; Confucius advises people within a particular cultural world, one that has largely disappeared.

Such objections surely have some force. Confucius’ teachings are more closely tied to a particular culture than are Socrates’ questions. And, at a distance from that culture, it may be quite difficult to estimate the truth of his pronouncements. Despite these difficulties, I have come to think that a general introductory course in ethics is well served by beginning with the ethics of Confucius, and that understanding the contrast between the approaches of Socrates and Confucius is important for the moral education of beginning students.

I once thought that Socrates’ timeless questions about knowledge and virtue were the only doorway to thinking about ethics, to getting beyond merely learning the rules of one’s own tribe. I have changed my mind on that.  I now think that Socrates’ approach is one way of thinking about how to live, a way made necessary by a particular kind of ever-recurring circumstance – the collapse of usable cultural forms. His approach is one instance within a range of promising approaches for thinking about one’s life and one’s community. One short-changes one’s students when one does not make that range of options clear to them. The philosophy of Confucius is an important contrast case for understanding the limits of the Socratic approach.

Confucius starts out as a moral historian who has developed a deep respect for Chinese culture, looking back to a Golden Age of peace, happiness, and prosperity. His experience in government has convinced him that this culture is still viable, though he has experienced the disruption of the cultural forms and attitudes that served China well in the past, as rulers have become selfish and greedy. He seeks in his teaching to identify the essential requirements of the good life portrayed in Chinese literature, custom, and ritual. He works to involve people at every level of society in restoring and maintaining a high culture. Such an approach answers the question that Socrates asks – “How can virtue be taught?” -- in a way that would seem very strange to Socrates.

One might dismiss Confucius as a non-philosopher, someone who accepts what should be questioned, who never gets to fundamental matters. He starts out with a deep respect for what he has received, and that respect disqualifies him as a deep thinker, or as a model for students in an introductory ethics class.

But why should deep or radical thinking be the requirement for thoughtful approaches to ethics? One has only limited time to think, and one knows that fundamental investigations can be very long. It is practically reasonable, in any area of life that has a history, to ask whether the products or results of that history are admirable and worthy of emulation. If not, one may need to think things through from the ground up. But if the history has somehow or other produced admirable results, it seems crazy to try to go behind it – at least for practical purposes. The most natural first questions are: how well has the present system worked, why has the present system worked so well, and how can we develop and extend it, so that we can continue to enjoy its advantages? At every level of human life – in families, corporations, communities, friendships, religious bodies, personal disciplines – where some success has been achieved, some admirable state attained, these are the natural questions. Why should this whole line of inquiry remain outside the scope of a general introductory ethics course?

The deep questions raised in Plato’s dialogues are natural for Athens in the Fourth Century BCE. A hundred years earlier, an unprecedented form of social organization emerged in Athens, promoting rapid growth in all cultural areas. The technology of warfare developed quickly with the rise of the trireme, giving advantages to new kinds of military and strategic intelligence. Cleverness and invention competed with steadfastness and loyalty as winning virtues in the new wars. Athens won its first war, with Persia, in part by giving up the city, putting its faith in the navy. Its successful strategy in early years of the war with Sparta was to refuse to engage on the battlefield, to concede to Spartans military superiority, as that had been traditionally understood. Athens’ prominence as a trading nation brought new ideas and even new gods to the city, and so the authority of the old religious traditions was called into question. Athens’ military and economic power secured her an empire, and raised new questions about appropriate relations among independent cities of unequal power. It is natural that Socrates would say: the old ways don’t apply any more. Circumstances have changed, and we must rethink our basic way of living.

But such a stance is not universally in place. My worry about beginning an ethics class with Socrates alone, in some accessible dialogue like the Laches, is that such a beginning suggests that any reasonable person, faced with moral perplexity, properly asks the fundamental questions about human life. But, while it is most urgent to ask such questions in a context in which there are no viable traditions available to interpret or develop, one doesn’t undertake to reinvent whole areas of human life unless one has given up on respected models, on ways of living passed down from the distant past. Perhaps Athenians had to give up on the military models they had inherited; the old heroic tradition had little relevance to their needs as a rich imperial power with cutting-edge technology but fairly small population. The old rules applied to combat between roughly equal forces with the same weapons and strategies.  In a similar way, the old religious ideas, the old ideas of justice and friendship, might require radical rethinking in the new context. But it seems just crazy to take a plausible intellectual response to 100 years of rapid social, political, economic, technological change and make it normative for moral thinking generally, for students in all the different situations from which they come to college.

Consider this analogy: Wes Jackson studies the native prairie that preceded agriculture in North America. He finds there relationships that make the ecosystems vastly efficient users of sunlight, vastly productive, and resilient against disease and insects. He takes his job to be: to understand the relationships that have in fact worked well. He doesn’t claim to understand the principles that govern those relations, the underlying biology. What’s important is that this prairie has evolved with advantages that human beings cannot reconstruct, except by mimicking the relationships among the species represented there.

An historical approach to ethics makes a similar point. Some cultural forms promoted obviously beneficial ways of life, and obviously valuable individual lives. It is not clear that we can get at the underlying principles, in the time we have available. It is not likely that, if we had such principles, we could implement a better alternative than history has presented to us. Our job – when we are lucky enough to have access to a promising culture -- is to study what has worked, summarize the basic structures it contains, and then figure out how to maintain and strengthen those structures. 

As teachers of ethics, we confront students with very different kinds of experience. Some have come from disrupted homes, disrupted communities; they have no clue what a satisfying life or a satisfying set of human relationships might look like. Others have a deep commitment to family traditions, to church traditions, to small, close-knit communities. They know where they come from, and they want to somehow recover what is best in that life, as they go forward into adulthood. For them, what Confucius offers, a model of moral thinking that takes its starting point from culture that is seen to work, is far more important than any philosophical reconstruction effort. Of course, any responsible Western philosophy course will also introduce them to Socrates and Plato and the grand project of thinking through human life from basic principles. But there is no need or justification for presenting that project as the only reasonable approach to moral thinking. Indeed, that project can only be fully understood in comparison and contrast to other defensible approaches to moral reasoning.

Taking the Confucian approach has risks; one may be grossly deceived about the value of the society one undertakes to develop and maintain. But the project of thinking things through from basic principles has its own risks: it may produce an unlivable ideal, so that one is always a discontented stranger in any society one enters, never able to invest in the social forms around one. I am not arguing that either of these approaches is without difficulties; I am arguing that they are both promising enough to be presented to students as alternative models of basic moral reasoning.