Abstract
In Confucius, Rawls and the Sense of Justice, in addition to making an interesting comparison between Rawls’ and Confucius’ sense of justice, Erin M. Cline also tried to seek elements of distributive justice, or at least concern for distributive matters, in the Analects. I shall, in this essay, try to pursue the subject even further, by examining Confucianism’s attitude towards the contemporary distributive ideals in the analytical philosophy literature—egalitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism. This will be done by first closely examining Cline’s interpretation of certain passages of the Analects, showing that there might be other possible interpretations of these passages. From these parts of the Analects, I will attempt to demonstrate that Confucius has not given us sufficient normative discussion of the economic matters of society for our purpose. I will therefore turn to Mencius and Xunzi for better understanding of distributive justice in Confucianism, and then argue against Joseph Chan’s thesis that Confucian distributive justice can be characterized as simply sufficientarianism, providing evidence that Confucianism may also care about equality and priority in general.
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Notes
- 1.
Taken from Casal (2007: 296).
- 2.
Translation of Mencius follows Irene Bloom (2009) unless otherwise stated.
- 3.
For discussions of socialist principle of distributive justice, see for example Carens (2003).
- 4.
Translation of the Analects follows Burton Watson (2010) unless otherwise stated.
- 5.
See for example Analects 4.11, 5.1, 13.18 and Cline’s discussion of these passages in Cline 2013: Ch 2.
- 6.
Ch’ien Mu is slightly suspicious of the literary consistency of book 16 with the remaining books of the Analects. I shall, however, ignore these suspicions here and throughout the essay (Ch’ien 2008: 462).
- 7.
Translation of Ch’ien’s essay is my own.
- 8.
There are generally not many close readings into this sentence. Ch’ien Mu (2008), for example, does not comment much other than restating the original text into modern Chinese. Yang Bojun (2011) comments that this is a demonstration of humanitarianism—a plausible interpretation, but one that does not give us sufficient information to narrow down the exact position of Confucian distributive justice. For the relevant criteria for that, see the next section.
- 9.
- 10.
A disciple of Confucius (see Ch’ien 2008: 156).
- 11.
A disciple of Confucius (see Ch’ien 2008: 6).
- 12.
See also the description of historical events in the twelfth year of Duke Ai in ZuoZhuan (Durrant et al. 2016).
- 13.
Note that Cline interprets passage 8.10 to indicate that “there is a right way and a wrong way to go about addressing the problem of poverty”, which is similar to the first type of passage I have characterized (Cline 2013: 146).
- 14.
See for example El Amine (2015).
- 15.
- 16.
This attack is in fact suffered only by the telic form of egalitarianism, but not the deontic form. Unless otherwise specified, all three distributive principles are taken to mean their telic form (Parfit 2000: 88).
- 17.
Although we have mentioned that Rawls need not be our focus, it might be good to see how he fits in among the three ideals. Parfit (2000) discusses Rawls’s standing in regard to egalitarianism and prioritarianism.
- 18.
See for example Cohen and Otsuka (2011) for relevant discussions.
- 19.
See for example Sen (1980).
- 20.
As I have written elsewhere, the investigation of distributive convictions is multi-layered, and this includes only part of that global picture. There are at least six independent layers of convictions we could check:
-
1.
Currency: what is to be equalized in a distribution.
-
2.
Actuality vs. opportunity/access: whether it is the actual level of possession or the level available for the individual that matters.
-
3.
Relative strength of currencies: how the currencies, if more than one demands consideration, are compared to each other.
-
4.
Spheres of justice: how are distribution in different aspects compared to each other.
-
5.
Equality vs. priority vs. sufficiency: whether the motivation to redistribute is motivated by the relative difference between persons or the level of moral urgency derived from their well-being.
-
6.
Distribution vs. aggregation: how the concerns of distributive justice and aggregative well-being compare to each other.
-
1.
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Tsoi, C.H. (2021). Distributive Justice in Pre-Qin Confucianism: Equality, Priority, and Sufficiency. In: Carleo III, R.A., Huang, Y. (eds) Confucian Political Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70611-1_7
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