Justice in East Asian Thought

Three persons stand out as fulcrum figures in preimperial Confucian developments: the pioneer sage, Confucius; the apologist, Mencius (Master Meng; c. 371 B.C.E.–c. 289 B.C.E.); and the secular rationalist, Master Xun (Xunzi; active c. 298 B.C.E.–c. 230 B.C.E.). While the influence of Confucius's life and teachings overshadows the other two, the latter pair produced more systematic worldviews, including questions related to justice that continue to have historical significance.

Confucius, or "Master Kong."

Records about political policies and concepts in ancient China began at least five hundred years before Confucius, but his teachings provided the first philosophical basis for its ideological and institutional development. His political vision rested on these earlier sagely antecedents but sought to provide moral and political justifications for reestablishing the monarchical form during his own instable age. Conceiving of a ritually articulate group of intellectuals who could balance the interests of smaller political states and establish a larger and harmonious kingdom, Confucius promoted cultivated humaneness (ren) as the necessary cultural foundation for the king, government ministers, and his people. Any person who achieved this exemplary status knew how to properly subdue selfish interests in order to perform ritually appropriate services according to their given roles and duties (Analects 12:2). All these ritual actions (li) —whether among humans or toward spirits including a supreme deity known as "Heaven"—were consequently conditioned upon a sense of rightness (yi). Propriety between humans should always seek an appropriateness intuited through analogical projection (shu) and faithful consistency (zhong). Embodied in these two methods was a generalized sense of personhood, though ancient traditions indicate how Confucius recognized limitations in their application to women, slaves, and angry persons (Analects 14:34, 17:25).

Some scholars feel that this account of ritual-based personhood offers a generalizable humane alternative to modern human-rights-based litigation. So, for example, while Confucius did mediate in litigations (song), he sought to create social conditions where they would not be needed (Analects 12:13). In defining the roles of rulers and ministers, he deemphasized punishments (xing), seeking that they humanely fit the crimes rather than produce fear of authority (Analects 2:3; 4:11; 13:3). Nevertheless, later Confucian teachings in the Book of Rites advocated moral justifications for blood-revenge as a putative principle supported by Confucius, illustrating limits to this elitist form of fairness in later imperial history.

Mencius, or "Master Meng."

Political justifications for humane government were explored at greater length in the Mengzi, a work named after Mencius. Cultivated humaneness and rightness became twin virtues grounding all moral and political life, nurtured initially in familial relationships and extendable into other appropriate social ties. Both virtues were intended to be augmented by wise elaborations, ritual articulateness, and harmonious music (Mengzi 1A:7; 4A:27). Significantly, a society dominated by a humanely cultivated lifestyle would entail in Mencius's philosophy various claims and liabilities within relationships, even to the extent that a tyrannical ruler could be resisted and justifiably deposed (Mengzi 1B:1, 3). Maintaining rightness (yi) was more important than life itself, whenever dilemmas forced a choice between them (Mengzi 6A:10). In this emphasis there are tendencies toward asserting a humanely inspired form of social justice, based on a positive account of human nature.

According to Mencius, all persons are defined as humans because they possess four basic moral sensitivities without which they could not appropriately participate in human society: compassion, shame, respect or yielding, and discerning between right and wrong (Mengzi 2A:6; 6A:6). When these inward sensitivities are nurtured into full-fledged virtues (humane cultivation, rightness, propriety, and wisdom), any willing person becomes exemplary and may attain sagely status. Once these virtues are embodied in exemplary persons and leaders, social obligations are fulfilled and beneficent forms of government can be realized and sustained. The crucial social transformations they would inspire would be nurtured by worthy officers and cultivated scholars. This would result in a harmonious society expressing just and accountable relationships.

Mencius also offered details about how this elitist form of social justice would operate. He envisioned opportunities for fair treatment by providing public education and coordinating publicly and privately owned farming, so that government institutions were sustained by appropriately cultivated personnel and sufficient material resources, and no one family was overburdened by taxes. While there is no indication that these institutions were ever realized in his own time, they do reveal how Mencius's philosophy could bear a populist flair. Never democratic in polity, his political philosophy manifested demophilic (mínben) principles of regal concern for commoners, and so set limits to any ruler's authority by arguing for these moral restraints within a kingdom.

These early Confucian scholars promoted justice as arising from virtues cultivated among a chosen elite, in some ways like Plato's conception of a righteous city-state in his Republic. Aristotle's support for limited democracy also suggests that justice should produce harmony between different classes within society, but these early Confucian philosophers preferred monarchy, and their vision of social harmony was not worked out in detail. Both early Confucian and Greek visions of social justice rely on rational criticisms and selective adoptions of received traditions, but the former relies more heavily on sagely precedents, while the latter promoted rational development through education and practices leading to ethical competence. Clearly, the predominance of a rational method and rationalized ideal of human nature in Plato's discussion is qualified by the early Confucians' multidimensional account of human nature based on a harmony of emotive and rational constituents. Here Aristotle and these early Confucians have much in common, but Aristotle retains a preference for rationalized understandings of ethics and social justice, while the Confucians placed more emphasis on basic emotional sensitivities. All of them nevertheless agreed that the best form of society would be achieved through the guidance of cultivated rulers imbued with the virtues they promoted.

Master Xun.

Unlike previous Confucian philosophers, Master Xun conceived of ritual and role attunements as a result of teaching rather than of internal personal cultivation, so that sociocultural values were inculcated rather than nurtured from within. Believing that human beings were naturally bad, Master Xun highlighted the roles of cultural change agents—sages, teachers, good friends—in educating willing persons. He explained differences in cultivated attainments and social roles as a result of different intellectual capabilities and various degrees of courage (Xunzi 23). Consequently, his account of yi aligns well with Platonic understandings of justice: an enlightened ruler (ming jun) must clearly distinguish class divisions and their appropriate roles, supporting them by ritual principles, righteous laws, and uniform administrative policies (Xunzi 10). Standards of distributive justice, while providing certain privileges to the elite leadership class, operate generally under utilitarian conditions: the whole society (qun) is always more important than the ruler or any other member or clique within it. Consequently, what is good is "correct, in accord with natural principles, peaceful, and well-ordered"; what is bad is "wrong through partiality, wickedly contravenes natural principles, [is] perverse, and rebellious" (Xunzi 23). These standards are also applied economically in considering distribution of limited resources, fully recognizing that the ruler and the people will either thrive or devolve together because, even in spite of their class differences, each one constitutes only a part of the social whole.

Master Xun manifestly employs a more rationalized methodology in accounting for varieties in human personalities, social classes, and roles, as well as the methods for attaining and maintaining social order. In spite of his utilitarian standards for administrating distributive justice, his use of criminal justice is still inspired by a humanely cultivated ideal, that all persons can ultimately be transformed and become sagely. In this way he balances punitive and distributive justice by means of a rational appeal to a more secularized, but still firmly ritually oriented, form of harmonious society.

Given the importance of ritual orientations for Confucian society, women and slaves seem clearly to have been relegated to subservient roles in many settings. Ritual formalization became complete in the imperial period, greatly influenced (somewhat paradoxically) by the female politician Ban Zhao (c. 48–c. 120). These restrictive rites and their attendant values set the stage for later nonegalitarian developments.