The Humanist Ethics Of Li Zehou

Li Zehou's thought has achieved wide popularity and influence among both academic readers and the broader Chinese-reading public. His culminating views on ethics are collected here in a series of essays that highlight the importance of Confucian philosophy today. Li's groundbreaking ethics presents a powerful contemporary theory—one that inventively reconciles longstanding oppositions between relativism and absolutism, emotions and rationalism, and relationality and individuality. Seeing ethical values and principles as embedded in human psychology, society, and history, Li affirms their relativity; he also affirms the objective rightness and wrongness of beliefs, norms, and acts through their contribution to human progress and flourishing. Li thereby endorses modern Enlightenment liberal values, including individualism, rights, and freedoms, but from an original philosophical foundation. By drawing on classical Confucianism to prioritize the situated, relational, emotional constitution of human life, this concrete brand of humanism offers unique modern conceptions of the nature of reason, the source of morality, selfhood, virtue, and much more.

Presents Li Zehou's culminating views on ethics in a series of works that highlight the importance of Confucian philosophy today.

The book Becoming Human: Li Zehou’s Ethics offers a critical introduction and in-depth analysis of Li Zehou’s moral philosophy and ethics. Li Zehou, who is one of the most influential contemporary Chinese philosophers, believes that ethics is the most important philosophical discipline. He aims to revive, modernize, develop, and complement Chinese traditional ethics through what he calls “transformative creation” (轉化性的創造). He takes Chinese ethics, which represents the main pillar of Chinese philosophy, as a vital basis for his elaborations on certain aspects of Kant’s, Marx’s and other Western theoreticians’ thoughts on ethics, and hopes to contribute in this way to the development of a new global ethics for all of humankind.

Can we endorse valuable rights and freedoms—the cherished forms of equality and liberty we might call liberality—without liberalism? This book outlines such a possibility. Humane liberality upholds and deliberates equality, freedom, and justice through the Mencian virtue of humaneness, based in care and compassion. In positing humaneness to be the first virtue of government, Mencius directs us to formulate policies that are responsive to and promote the wellbeing of the people understood in terms of their actual lived and felt experience—their feelings and their flourishing. Rights and freedoms can and should be affirmed in ways that facilitate that flourishing. This pushes against the usual approaches to valuing rights and liberties of both Confucians and liberals, who tend to reason from abstract first principles rather than through care for people and responsiveness to their actual wants and needs. In setting out this vision, Humane Liberality first critically analyzes the broader problems and possibilities of affirming freedom, equality, and pluralism through Confucianism. It then outlines and promotes an underappreciated concrete humanist account of Mencian morality and politics, which has been overshadowed by more metaphysical orthodox interpretations of Mencius. Concrete humanism insists we adjudicate what is right not through eternal abstractions but instead through situated assessment of human emotions. In this way, humaneness offers a unique and uniquely compelling approach to reasoning about rights and liberties, and humane liberality recasts how we understand and practice Confucian values, liberal principles, and the promise and potential of incorporating the two.

This book explores how the human-scientific mode of spiritual resources may be reorganized to balance the extremely materialist civilization of today. It discusses the dominance of the high-tech commercialization of the Earth and the serious weakening of rational-spiritual stamina, as well as institutional rigidity in the humanities. The book also considers traditional Chinese intellectual history inspired by the classical Chinese humanist-ethical spirit as revealing the cross-historical universality of humanist-lined ethics rooted in human nature. Although the natural sciences and social sciences have led to the unprecedented progress of material human civilization, the fundamental factor that determines the rational orientation of spiritual civilization should be the modern human sciences that are reorganized in terms of semiotic strategy and humanistic ethics, leading hopefully to a new era of enlightenment for mankind. The book asserts that humanistic ethics, as the central spirit of the humanities, includes both epistemology and action dynamics. The pertinent activation of both depends definitively on the subject’s free willpower.

This book makes Chinese ethics theoretically more understandable through an interdisciplinary approach, from the perspectives of hermeneutics and semiotics. The author structurally analyzes the Analects of Confucius are structurally analyzed so as to reveal the epistemological preconditions and pragmatic rationality implied in the maxims of this important classic. The composition, constitution, and structure of the Han Academic system are studied; other pre-Qin Chinese ideologies, like Taoist nihilism and Mencian-Confucian ethics are also discussed. Volume 1 and 2 The Structure of the Chinese Ethical Archetype 1. The Background and Foundation of Confucian Ethical Rationality 2. The Pragmatic Aesthetics of Ethical Choice 3. The Political Turn of Mencian-Confucian Ethics against Taoist Nihilism and Legalist Philosophy of Power

This book introduces into the current global ethics debate models of humanism developed in classical Chinese traditions, which have not yet been comprehensively presented to Western scholarship or integrated into the framework of global discourses on social ethics and morality. It creates new paradigms for an understanding of humanism that meets the demands of our time. It begins by presenting European descriptions and critical assessments of this discourse, and then moves to an exploration of humanistic ideas shaped through historical developments in Asia, with a focus on the Chinese tradition. In this sense, the book is written from a transcivilizational perspective. The methods used in the research transcend---that is, surpass and overcome---the rigid, isolating, and essentialist concept of civilization. At the same time, the book points to the possibility of transformation through the exchange of knowledge and ideas between different civilizations. Within this framework, the book starts from the assumption that the ontology of civilizations and cultures is not based on immutable substances, but on the relations between different factors that constitute them as categories. The transcivilizational perspective rooted in transcultural dialogues between philosophies that originated in different cultures and civilizations is particularly valuable because of the globalized world in which we live today. This means that the problems that affect people in different parts of the world and the issues that are embedded in different geopolitical and developmental frameworks also affect all of humanity. This book is of particular interest to scholars and students of global ethics, globalization, Asian philosophy and Sinology.