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What Friendship Tells Us About Morality: a Confucian Ethics of Personal Relationships

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What Friendship Tells Us About Morality: a Confucian Ethics of Personal Relationships WHAT FRIENDSHIP TELLS US ABOUT MORALITY: A CONFUCIAN ETHICS OF PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY DECEMBER 2012 By Andrew Lambert Dissertation Committee: Roger Ames, Chairperson Arindam Chakrabarti Ron Bontekoe Vrinda Dalmiya David McCraw David Cooper Abstract Drawing on classical Confucian thought, this work investigates how the features of friendship, broadly construed, give rise to a conception of ethical living. I first argue that the demands of modern moral theories, such as consequentialism, and of friendship are incongruent and that, since friendship is necessary for a worthwhile life, there is reason to develop a conception of ethical conduct starting from the features of friendship. I show how the basic features of ethical life, such as justification, obligation, practical reasons and norms delimiting acceptable and unacceptable action, can be derived from the practices of personal relationships. To do this, I consider an ethical tradition that has placed personal relationships at the heart of its normative thought. I argue that the classical Confucian tradition yields novel conceptions of justification, obligation and so forth; further, these are integral to the conducting of personal relationships. Based on the premise that any conception of ethical conduct takes some account of human practical activity to be fundamental and builds an ethics from this, I defend the view offered by developing a conception of practical activity in which personal relationships are fundamental. Here, the most important kind of action arises within a rolling series of episodic interactions with people who are or can be familiar to some degree. Such interactions are, on account of the familiar and personal particulars integral to them, personal. They are acts of friendship because they aim at making these interactions go as well as possible, by creating shared affective experiences or moving and memorable events. I call such friendship event friendship. Finally, I address the objection that such an ethics applies only to a limited private realm and fails to guide conduct in the public realm. I argue that the basic practices and features outlined can coordinate conduct widely, across interpersonal social networks, and so create a stable social life. The relation between an ethics of personal relationships and moral theorising in the public realm is symbiotic; each is needed as a corrective for the other. ii Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Preface: An ethics of personal relationships with Confucian characteristics? ................... v Dissertation Chapter Outline....................................................................................................... x Chapter I. Locating personal relationships: the conflict between friendship and moral theory .................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Introduction............................................................................................................................. 1 2. The historical relationship between friendship and ethics ...................................................... 2 3. Resolving the puzzle: why Kant and Aristotle viewed the ethical status of friendship so differently.................................................................................................................................... 8 4. Contemporary disputes between friendship and moral theory.............................................. 15 5. Summary of the argument so far........................................................................................... 26 6. The difficulties of defining friendship .................................................................................. 27 7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 31 Chapter II. From Moral Theory to Ethical Vision: how the vagueness of friendship bedevils moral theory, and how personal relationships inform an ethical vision............. 32 1. Introduction........................................................................................................................... 32 2. The vagueness of friendship impedes the practice of justification according to moral theory. ................................................................................................................................................... 38 3. The risk of moral judgements harming personal relationships ............................................. 50 4. Objections and replies: problems with moral theory ............................................................ 61 5. The philial subject does not need moral theory: personal relationships as a source of justification................................................................................................................................ 68 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 76 Chapter III. From the Analects to an ethics of personal relationships .............................. 79 1. Introduction........................................................................................................................... 79 2. The Analects as an ethical text about personal relationships ................................................ 81 3. Ethical justification in the Analects....................................................................................... 85 4. Ethical norms of conduct as norms governing personal relationships; ethical obligation as the obligations of personal relationships................................................................................... 90 iii 5. Practical reasoning and practical judgment......................................................................... 108 6. An account of ideal character or virtues ............................................................................. 118 7. Problems with an ethical vision based on personal relationships ....................................... 125 Chapter IV. Personal Relationships as an ethical practical standpoint........................... 127 1. Introduction......................................................................................................................... 127 2. Personal relationships as a practical standpoint, based on aesthetic flourishing................. 128 3. The role of personal relationships in Confucian harmony .................................................. 148 4. Objections and replies......................................................................................................... 167 Chapter V. Personal relationships providing a stable social order ................................. 175 1. How personal relationships influence the public realm: possible strategies....................... 175 2: What is guanxi?................................................................................................................... 177 3. A puzzle about guanxi......................................................................................................... 180 4. Instrumental guanxi............................................................................................................. 181 5. Instrumental guanxi and ethical resistance to the state ....................................................... 182 6. Rehabilitating guanxi: sensibility guanxi as a form of ethical conduct .............................. 185 7. The Practices of sensibility guanxi ..................................................................................... 187 8. The practices of sensibility guanxi: coordinating conduct, lessening conflict.................... 198 9. Guanxi-derived social order resisting the state ................................................................... 201 10. Why guanxi practices constitute an ethical form of resistance ......................................... 204 11. Summarising the argument and the limitations of guanxi................................................. 210 12. Conclusion: what does guanxi tell us about ethics?.......................................................... 211 Conclusion: final thoughts .............................................................................................. 212 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 218 iv Preface: An ethics of personal relationships with Confucian characteristics? This project investigates the ethical status of personal relationships, by drawing on Confucian social and ethical thought. Some of its central themes are neatly expressed in the following extract. Describing his research in the Chinese coastal province of Shandong in 1988-90, anthropologist Andrew Kipnis describes the extreme confusion caused by the simple act of trying to confirm a villager’s name: During my first summer in Fengjia [the village where the author’s fieldwork was undertaken] I spent a fair amount of time updating our version of the village’s household registration booklet. Compiled in the early 1980s, the booklet listed the
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