he Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics:
Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Response
HUANG Yong
Abstract. As virtue ethics has developed into maturity, it has also met with a number
of objections. his essay focuses on the self-centeredness objection: since virtue ethics recommends that we be concerned with our own virtues or virtuous characters,
it is self-centered. In response, I irst argue that, for Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism,
the character that a virtuous person is concerned with consists largely in precisely
those virtues that incline him or her to be concerned with the good of others. While
such an answer is also available to the Aristotelian virtue ethics, I argue that Zhu
Xi’s neo-Confucianism can better respond to the objection on two deeper levels:
(1) a virtuous person is not only concerned with others’ external well-being but
also their virtuous characters, and (2) a virtuous person’s concern with others’ wellbeing, both internal and external, is neither self-indulgent nor self-efacing.
I.
I
ntroduction. While there has been an impressive revival of virtue ethics in
the last few decades as an alternative to consequentialism in general and
utilitarianism in particular on the one hand and deontology in general
and Kant’s ethics of duty in particular on the other, there have also been some
serious objections to it. Some of them, for example, the one about uncodiiability
(the inability of virtue ethics to provide people with practical action guides),
have been persuasively responded to by leading virtue ethicists.1 However, one of
the central objections to virtue ethics, the so-called self-centeredness objection,
particularly on its deep levels, has not been adequately responded to and, it seems
to me, can hardly be responded to adequately if we are limited to drawing on
resources available in the Western philosophical traditions. In contrast, I shall
argue, a philosophically signiicant response to this objection can be found in
the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the greatest synthesizer of neoConfucianism, whose place in Confucian tradition is often compared to that
See Rosalind Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–44.
1
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of homas Aquinas in the Christian tradition. In Section II, I shall argue that
Zhu Xi responds to this objection, on the irst level, by showing that the self
that a virtuous person is centered on is that constituted by his or her virtues,
which require him or her to be concerned with the interests of others, as all the
four cardinal Confucian virtues—humanity, rightness, propriety, and (moral)
wisdom (as well as the ifth one added to the list later, trustworthiness)—are
other-regarding ones. While this response is also available to Aristotelians, I shall
argue, in Sections III and IV, that Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can provide a better response than Aristotelians to this self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics
on a deeper level, namely: while a virtuous person may be concerned with the
good of others in terms of less important external and material interests, when it
comes to greater goods (internal traits of character), she is concerned only with
her own. Section V deals with the self-centeredness objection on a foundational
level: the virtuous person is concerned with others’ well-being, whether external
or internal, ultimately because the person wants to develop his or her own virtue.
I shall conclude this essay with a brief summary in Section VI.
II.
he Self-Centeredness Objection on the First Level. he self-centeredness
objection, as summarized by David Solomon,
alleges that an EV [ethics of virtue] tends to focus too much attention
on the agent. . . . Such theories demand a focus on the character of the
individual agent. What gives the point to the task of acquiring the virtues
is that one supposes that one should become a person of a particular kind.
. . . his view demands that the moral agent keep his or her own character
at the center of his or her practical attention . . . [while] the point of
moral relection essentially involves a concern for others.2
Solomon himself does not specify who raises this self-centeredness objection,
except for saying that this objection, or at least its spirit, can be found largely in
Kant and contemporary Kantian philosophers. Indeed, Solomon is not attacking
a straw man, as we do ind Kant stating that “all material principles, which place
the determining ground of choice in the pleasure or displeasure to be received
from the reality of any object whatsoever, are entirely of one kind. Without
exception they belong under the principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.”3
In another place, Kant states that all eudaemonists are egoists:
2
David Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” in Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader,
ed. Daniel Statman (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1997), 169.
3
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 22 (cited according to the inserted standard pagination of the Prussian Academy
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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he moral egoist limits all purposes to himself; as a eudaemonist, he
concentrates the highest motives of his will merely on proit and his own
happiness, but not on the concept of duty. Because every other person has
a diferent concept of what he counts as happiness, it is exactly egoism
which causes him to have no touchstone of a genuine concept of duty
which truly must be a universally valid principle. All eudaemonists are
consequently practical egoists.4
Kant here does not direct his attack speciically to the Aristotelian ethics but
talks about ancient Greek schools of ethics generally.5 his is because, in Kant’s
view, all these schools are eudaemonist, sharing the view that happiness is
identical with morality. he only distinction between them is that, while some
(Aristotelians and Stoics) take morality as happiness, others (Epicureans) take
happiness as morality, but they all think that to be moral is to be happy;6 such
a morality is, therefore, self-centered, since it takes one’s own happiness as the
motivation to be moral.
his criticism, in appearance, is also applicable to Confucianism in general
and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism in particular. Confucius claims that “the learners of the ancient are for the sake of themselves [weiji 為己], while the learners
of today are for the sake of others [weiren 為人].”7 As an admirer of the golden
age in the past, Confucius is here praising ancient learners, who are for the sake
edition).
4
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 130.
5
Indeed, as Allen W. Wood points out, “Kant’s knowledge of Aristotle’s ethical writings
may have been largely indirect and was in any case not deep. To him, Aristotle was . . . one of the
many eudaemonists of antiquity whose views were to be rejected” (Allen W. Wood, “Self-love,
Self-Benevolence, and Self-Conceit,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and
Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996], 141). For a detailed examination of Kant’s criticism of the ancient eudaemonist ethics
in general, see T. H. Irwin, “Kant’s Criticism of Eudaemonism,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
6
hus, Kant states, “[O]f the ancient Greek schools, there were only two opposing each
other on this issue. But so far as the deinition of the concept of the highest good is concerned,
they followed one and the same method, since neither held virtue and happiness to be two different elements of the highest good, but seeking the unity of principle under the rule of identity.
But again they difered in that each selected a diferent principle as the fundamental one. he
Epicurean said: To be conscious of one’s maxims as leading to happiness is virtue. he Stoic said:
To be conscious of one’s virtue is happiness. To the former, prudence amounted to morality; to
the latter, who chose a higher term for virtue, morality alone was true wisdom” (Kant, Critique
of Practical Reason, 111).
7
Analects, in Translation and Annotations of the Analects 論語譯注, annotated and trans. Yang
Bojun 楊伯峻 (Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 1980), 14.24.
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of themselves, and looking down upon learners of his time, who are for the sake
of others. Zhu Xi himself also puts a great emphasis on learning for the sake of
oneself. For example, he claims that “a learner has to be for the sake of oneself,”8
and “the learning for the sake of one’s self has nothing to do with others at all.”9
In this sense, Confucianism might indeed be regarded as self-centered. However,
we need to understand in what sense Confucius advocates such an apparently
self-centered ideal. In Zhu Xi’s view, Confucius’s contrast between for the sake of
oneself and for the sake of others can be understood in three diferent senses.
First, Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s (one of the founders of the neo-Confucian
movement in the Song dynasty) interpretation of “for the sake of oneself ” as
acquiring virtues for oneself and of “for the sake of others” as showing of what
one has learned. hus, immediately after saying that “the learner has to be for
oneself,” Zhu Xi claims that “all teachings of sages are crystallized in the irst
sentence of the Great Learning: ‘Brighten your [originally] bright [and currently
obscured] virtue’. . . . To brighten one’s bright virtues is an efort to learn for
the sake of oneself.”10 Similarly, right after claiming that “learning for the sake
of oneself has nothing to do with others,” Zhu Xi states that “sages teach us so
many things, but the key is to let us return to and restore our original human
nature.”11 he original human nature that sages ask us to restore and virtues that
sages ask us to brighten, for Zhu Xi, is nothing but humanity, rightness, propriety, and wisdom, the four cardinal Confucian virtues. As all these Confucian
virtues, unlike some Aristotelian virtues that are self-regarding, are essentially
other regarding, to be a virtuous person in this Confucian sense, one cannot
not be concerned with others’ welfare. So when Confucius says, and when Zhu
Xi airms, that true learners are not for the sake of others, they mean that such
learners aim at cultivating their own virtues and not showing others how much
scholarly knowledge they have about such virtues. hus Zhu Xi compares a
learner with someone who eats food: “when you eat, do you prefer to eat slowly
until you are full or to put food outside, telling people how much food you
have?”12 He also compares it with mourning: “Suppose you go to a funeral. If
you think of all the good things the deceased did for you in the past and really
feel sad about the person’s death, so much so that you cannot help crying, this
is natural [for the sake of oneself ]. However, if you want to show to the survivors of the deceased that you feel sad for the deceased and then start to cry, this
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings of Master Zhu 朱子語類 (Changsha 長沙: Yuelu Shuyuan 岳麓
8
書院, 1997), 232.
9
Ibid., 121.
Ibid., 232.
11
Ibid., 121.
12
Ibid., 126.
10
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
655
is not natural and is for the sake of others.”13 In other words, a good learner,
the ancient one, is to learn how to develop one’s own virtues and to become
a virtuous person, paying no attention to whether other people know that he
or she is a virtuous person or not. On the contrary, a bad learner, the learner
of today, is not interested in making oneself virtuous but in showing of the
scholarly knowledge one has about virtues. For this reason, Zhu Xi complains
that “learners of today” do not work on rightness and principle within but are
taking delight in talking about inessential things.
Second, while a virtuous person thus cannot but be concerned with the
welfare of others, such a person can still be regarded as being for the sake of
oneself, in the sense that a virtuous person regards the concern with others as
part of one’s concern with oneself. hus, he approvingly agrees with what one
of his students says in the following,
Great people measure their own things with the standard of the world.
Even if there is one person under heaven who is not touched by their
goodness, they feel somewhat uneasy in their heart/mind; and they realize that they still have something within themselves that has not been
fully realized, and so they cannot brighten the [originally] bright [but
currently darkened] virtue of all people under heaven. For this reason,
although what they do seems to be for the sake of others, as a matter of
fact, they are for themselves.14
In other words, a person who is truly for the sake of oneself is not someone who
does not care about others. As a matter of fact, such a person cares about others
more than anyone else does. However, when the person cares about the welfare
of others, the person regards the welfare of others as one’s own welfare. On the
contrary, if one takes care of others’ welfare but regards it as something additional
to one’s own welfare, then one’s care of others is for the sake of others.15
hird, closely related to the above point, a person can regard one’s care for
others as one’s care of oneself only if one can take delight in it, and a person
who regards one’s care of others as something additional is one who cannot take
delight in it. hus, Zhu Xi claims that to be for the sake of oneself is to take
delight in doing virtuous things, while to be for the sake of others is to force
oneself to do virtuous things just to show that one has the virtue. In Zhu Xi’s
view, it is important to see whether a person can take delight in doing virtuous
things or not. One of his students reports what he learns from Zhu Xi: “if one
is happy in being virtuous, one will never feel any slight degree of tiredness,
13
Ibid., 344.
Ibid., 280.
15
See ibid., 344.
14
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and therefore one can make daily progresses. If one’s happiness does not lie in
being moral, then one can be moral only intermittently and, therefore, cannot
not have some artiiciality in being moral.”16 Zhu Xi agrees, saying that a person
who does virtuous things for the sake of oneself can love doing good things as
one loves a beautiful color and hate doing immoral things as one hates a bad
odor, as stated in the Great Learning.17 When one does virtuous things and
avoids vicious things, just as one loves a beautiful color and hates a bad odor, one
does it naturally: there is no need for any external motivation.18 Here the two
elements, realizing a color is beautiful (recognizing an odor as bad) and loving
the color (hating the odor), become uniied: one cannot love a color (hate an
odor) without recognizing the color as beautiful (the odor as bad) at the same
time, just as one cannot recognize a color as beautiful (an odor as bad) without
loving the color (hating the odor) simultaneously. A virtuous person who loves
virtuous things and avoids vicious things, just as one who loves the beautiful
color and hates the bad odor, is entirely for the sake of oneself, as no one loves
a beautiful color in order to show others that one loves it or hates a bad odor in
order to show others that one hates it.
From the above, it is clear that the Confucian idea of learning for the sake
of self, despite its appearance, is not self-centered in the common sense. he
ancient learner’s “for the sake of oneself ” is precisely for the sake of others in a
genuine sense, while the present learner’s “for the sake of others” in this Confucian
sense is precisely for the sake of oneself in the common sense. To cultivate one’s
virtue (to be for the sake of oneself ) means to develop one’s inborn tendencies
to be concerned with others’ interests. herefore, the more one is for the sake of
oneself, the more one is for the sake of others. But to be for the sake of others
(to show of one’s scholarship in front of others) is to be concerned with one’s
own interest (in fame). So the more one is for the sake of others in this sense,
the more one is for the sake of oneself. Cheng Yi makes an interesting claim:
“‘he ancient learner is for the sake of oneself,’ and the result is the fulillment
of others; ‘the present learner is for the sake of others,’ and the result is the loss
of one’s self.”19 When a student asks about this, Zhu Xi explains that here two
16
Ibid., 515.
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 344.
19
Cheng Hao 程顥 and Cheng Yi 程頤, Completed Works of the Two Chengs 二程集, 2nd
ed. (Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 2004), 325; see also 1197. When discussing the
Confucian idea of “for the sake of the self,” Tu Wei-ming points out that “the Confucian insistence on learning for the sake of the self is predicated on the conviction that self-cultivation is
an end in itself rather than a means to an end. hose who are committed to the cultivation of
their personal life for its own sake can create inner resources for self-realization unimaginable to
those who view self-cultivation merely as a tool for external goals such as social advancement and
political success” (Tu Wei-ming, “Happiness in the Confucian Way,” in In Pursuit of Happiness,
17
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
657
diferent senses of “for the sake of others” are used. he present learner’s for the
sake of others is to show of one’s learning to others, while the ancient learner’s
fulillment of others is to help others establish themselves. On the one hand, because the present learner aims at showing of one’s scholarly learning and neglects
the cultivation of his or her own virtues, which is his or her true self, the learner
ends up losing his or her self. On the other hand, because the ancient learner is
for the sake of his or her self and therefore pays attention to the cultivation of
his or her virtues, this learner will end up being for the sake of others, as his or
her virtues naturally incline him or her to do good to other people.
From this we can see that, since for Zhu Xi virtuous agents are for the sake
of themselves, we may characterize them as self-centered. However, there are two
things distinctive about such self-centeredness, which make the self-centeredness
objection to virtue ethics, at least its Confucian version, implausible.
First, while this Confucian version also says that it is to one’s self-interest
to be moral, this self-interest is not something extraneous to one’s moral action
as the term “self-interest” is commonly understood. LaRue Tone Hosmer, for
example, discussing business ethics, asks, “what shall we say to a modern Gyges
active in management?”20 referring to the mystic ring in Plato’s Republic, which
can make one invisible when doing immoral things. Hosmer’s answer is that “acting in ways that can be considered to be ‘right’ and ‘just’ and ‘fair’ is absolutely
essential to the long-term competitive success of the irm.”21 Here disregarding
some criticisms of such an approach as inefective,22 we can see that the reason
that it pays to be moral is that such a moral action will, sooner or later, bring
material beneits to the business person. In such situations, the business person
does not ind it a joy to be moral. As a matter of fact, the person is perhaps
pained by being moral. He or she chooses to be moral nevertheless only to seek
ed. Leroy S. Rouner [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 105). In Tu’s view,
if Confucians “don’t subscribe to the thesis that learning is primarily for self-improvement, the
demand for social service will undermine the integrity of self-cultivation as a noble end in itself ”
(ibid., 106). While I think Tu is correct in explaining this Confucian idea of “for the sake of
the self,” he does not pay enough attention to the close relationship and even identity between
“for the sake of oneself ” (moral cultivation of self ) and “for the sake of others” (virtuous actions
afecting others).
20
LaRue Tone Hosmer, “Why Be Moral: A Diferent Rational for Managers,” Business Ethics
Quarterly 4 (1994): 191–204, at 191.
21
Ibid., 192.
22
For example, Bill Shaw and John Corvino argue that Hosmer here does not take into
serious consideration Gyges’s ring in Plato: “we cannot tell whether true morality will fare better
than the mere appearance of morality in generating corporate success. Furthermore, we see no
way at all to test whether true morality will fare better. . . . [H]ow can we expect them [managers]
to behave morally when they believe that they can hedge their bets and achieve as much or more
success by vice than by virtue?” (Bill Shaw and John Corvino, “Hosmer and the ‘Why Be Moral?’
Question,” Business Ethics 6 [1996]: 373–83, at 378).
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more beneits that will come with his or her “moral” actions. In other words,
one performs moral actions not for the sake of moral actions but for the sake
of beneits accompanying such actions. One performs moral actions only for
some prudential reasons.
Similarly, in contemporary virtue ethics, Rosalind Hursthouse, at least as
part of her argument, claims that virtue beneits its possessor in a similar sense.
Hursthouse acknowledges that virtue does not always beneit the agent and does
not enable her to lourish:
Here is an occasion where, say, if I speak out as I should, I am going to
be shut in an asylum and subjected to enforced drugging; here is another
where doing what is courageous maims me for life; here is another where
if I do what is charitable I shall probably die. he answer to the particular
question, on these occasions, just cannot be “if you want to be happy, lead
a successful, lourishing life, you should do what is honest or courageous
or charitable here—you will ind that it pays of.”23
So she agrees that virtue is neither necessary nor suicient for the lourishing of
the agent: “it is not necessary, since it is generally acknowledged that the wicked
may lourish like the green bay tree. And it is not suicient because of those
nasty cases that came up in consideration of the particular question.”24 Even
so, Hursthouse still claims that by and large virtue beneits its possessor. She
makes an analogy. Following medical advice is neither a suicient nor a necessary
condition for being healthy. Still, following it is one’s best bet for being healthy.
Similarly, although being virtuous is neither necessary nor suicient for one’s
lourishing, it is one’s best bet for lourishing.25
If Zhu Xi means the same thing in his interpretation of the Confucian
idea of “for the sake of oneself ” as Hosmer’s belief that “it pays to be moral”
or Hursthouse’s claim that “virtue beneits its possessor,” then Zhu Xi’s neoConfucian virtue ethics can indeed be justly regarded as self-centered. However,
as we have seen, for Zhu Xi, the self-interest one seeks by performing moral
actions is inherent in these actions: one feels joy in being moral not because
Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 171.
Ibid., 172.
25
Ibid., 173. David Copp and David Sobel disagree: “Perhaps it is true, despite our objections,
that, ‘for the most part, by and large,’ being honest and generous and kind and caring beneits a
person. But for all we have seen, it might also be true that, ‘for the most part, by and large,’ being
selish, detached, and cautious beneits a person” (David Copp and David Sobel, “Morality and
Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics,” Ethics 114 [2004]: 514–54, at
531). hey do recognize, however, that “one of the advantages of Hursthouse’s proposal . . . is
that it does not depend on a moralized conception of lourishing. She admits, for example, that
sacriices required by virtue can count as losses in eudaimonia” (ibid., 531).
23
24
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
659
being moral can serve one’s interest in gaining fame or health or wealth, etc.,
that may or may not be brought to him or her by his or her being moral; rather
it is because one realizes one’s self-nature—as a moral being—by performing
moral actions. Moreover, in order to be for the sake of oneself in this sense, one
often needs to make some sacriice of one’s self in the common sense: one’s fame,
health, wealth, and even life. hus, Zhu Xi claims that a learner should “regard
rightness as more important than one’s life and death.”26
Second, while the familiar version of self-interest by itself is in conlict with
morality (although in some situations one’s self-interest may motivate one to be
moral and one’s being moral may be conducive to one’s self-interest), in Confucianism, there is no such conlict. Although Zhu Xi claims that one should be
moral because it is a joyful thing to do, he does not mean that one should do
whatever things bring one joy. In other words, while one should be moral because
it is in one’s own interest, one should not do whatever is in one’s self-interest.
Here one must irst be clear about what is one’s genuine interest: to ind the
uniquely human joy which is precisely to do virtuous things. hus the conlict
between self-interest and morality disappears, since one’s proper self-interest is
precisely to be concerned with others’ interests. In this sense, the better one serves
one’s self-interest, the more moral the person is. As Richard Kraut states, virtue
ethics “irst proposes a concrete conception of the good, and then urges each
of us to maximize our own good, so conceived. . . . It does not claim that one
should seek one’s own good, come what may for others; rather, by arguing that
acting virtuously and acting well coincide, it seeks to undermine the common
assumption that at bottom the self must come into conlict with others.”27
he essence of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian response to the self-centeredness
objection to virtue ethics is summarized by Solomon, who takes
account of an important distinction between two features of an EV. here
is, irst, the feature that the objector notices: the central place that one’s
own character plays in the practical thinking associated with an EV. But
there is also within an EV the set of virtues that each agent aims to embody
in his character. While the irst feature of an EV may appear to render it
excessively self-centered, the second feature is surely able to counteract
that danger. he particular virtues characteristic of an EV may be as
other-regarding as one might wish. While each agent may be expected to
devote primary practical attention to the development of his or her own
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 215.
Richard Kraut, “Egoism and Altruism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York
and London: Routledge, 1998), §4.
26
27
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character, the attention may be required to turn the agent into a person
fundamentally concerned with the wellbeing of others.28
In other words, while the virtue ethical reason that Zhu Xi provides to the
question of why be moral is self-regarding (to cultivate your own virtues), the
very virtues you need to cultivate are other-regarding (to be concerned with
others’ welfare). One indeed cannot cultivate one’s virtue without taking care
of others’ interests. he virtuous person, as stated by Bernard Williams, “desires,
quite often, to do various virtuous things,” and one may claim that “anything
motivated by desires is directed toward pleasure, and the pursuit of the pleasure
is egoistic.”29 However, as Williams also points out, it is important to see that
“some of my desires aim at states of afairs that do not involve me at all. . . .
here are self-transcending desires.”30 In other words, we cannot claim that a
virtuous person is self-centered simply because the person always tries to satisfy
his or her own desires. We need to see what desire this person wants to satisfy.
As a virtuous person, the desires the person typically wants to satisfy are desires
of helping others. In this sense, the virtuous person is not self-centered at all.31
In this respect, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian response is quite compatible
with the Aristotelian view. We have seen that Hursthouse makes a controversial
argument that virtue beneits its possessor, which may well be subject to the
self-centeredness objection. However, she emphasizes that this argument is
only part of her broader argument and so has to be understood in combination
with the other part of her argument: virtue makes its possessor a good human
being. In this argument, virtuous persons perform virtuous actions not because
they believe that this is the best bet for their getting more material and external
beneits. In contrast, when they perform virtuous actions for others, they do so
for the sake of others. For this reason, they often sacriice their own material
interests and even their own life. A virtuous person’s self-interest is served by
serving the interest of others, as they take delight in their actions of making others happy. his is made most clear by Aristotle’s own idea of the true self-lover.
In Aristotle’s view, true lovers of self are not those “who assign to themselves
28
Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 171–2.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 49.
30
Ibid., 50.
31
In this connection, Hursthouse also makes an interesting observation: “the fully virtuous
character is the one who, typically, knowing what she should do, does it, desiring to do it. Her
desires are in ‘complete harmony’ with her reason; hence, when she does what she should, she
does what she desires to do, and reaps the reward of satisied desire. Hence, ‘virtuous conduct gives
pleasures to the lover of virtue’ (1099a12); the fully virtuous do what they (characteristically) do,
gladly” (Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 92).
29
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
661
the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures,”32 but those who are
always anxious that they “should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with
any other of the virtues,” and in general always “try to secure for themselves the
honourable course.”33 he reason is that a person of the latter type “assigns to
himself the things that are noblest and best, and gratiies the most authoritative element in himself . . . and therefore the man who loves this and gratiies
it is most of all a lover of self.”34 hen he reaches exactly the same conclusion
as Zhu Xi: “therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both
himself proit by doing noble acts, and will beneit his fellows), but the wicked
man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as
he does evil passions.”35
III.
he Self-Centeredness Objection on the Second Level: Problem with the
Aristotelian Response. In the above, we have seen that a virtuous person, while
concerned with his or her self, is also concerned with having a virtuous character;
and, having a virtuous character, particularly since other-regarding virtues are
prominent in Confucian virtue ethics, makes the virtuous person concerned
with the interests of others. In this sense, virtue ethics is not self-centered in
the morally-condemnable sense. However, this response to the self-centeredness
objection to virtue ethics, as David Solomon points out, may be the grounds
for restatement of the objection at a deeper level:
[T]he objection points to an asymmetry that arises between an agent’s
regard for his own character and his regard for the character of others. he
question raised here has this form: Since an EV [ethics of virtue] requires
me to pay primary attention to the state of my own character, doesn’t
this suggest that I must regard my own character as the ethically most
important feature of myself? But, if so, and if I am suitably concerned
about others, shouldn’t my concern for them extend beyond a mere
32
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. W. D. Ross, in he Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963), 1168b15–16.
33
Ibid., 1168b26–28.
34
Ibid., 1168b29–33.
35
Ibid., 1169a12–15. However, on the issue of why a true self-lover should be virtuous,
while there are serious doubts about whether Aristotle’s conception of human nature as rational
and social can lead to the conception of virtue (see, for example, Bernard Williams, Morality:
An Introduction to Ethics [New York: Harper, 1971], 73–4; and John McDowell, Mind, Value, &
Reality [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 12–3, 35–6, and 171–3), Zhu Xi
avoids this problem by arguing that human nature is virtuous (for a detailed examination of this
issue, see Yong Huang, “Two Dilemmas of Virtue Ethics and How Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism
Avoids hem,” Journal of Philosophical Research 36 [2011]).
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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
concern that their wants, needs and desires be satisied, and encompass
a concern for their character? Shouldn’t I indeed have the same concern
for the character of my neighbour as I have for my own?36
Solomon uses the example of a Christian’s view of love or charity as a person’s
primary virtue. his person will then make it his or her task to become a person who exhibits this virtue toward others, but this virtue does not require the
person to bring it about that others around him or her also exhibit this virtue:
“Christian love requires me to attend to the wants, needs and desires of others. But doesn’t this suggest that I regard others as less morally important than
myself? Satisfying their needs is good enough for them, but I require of myself
that I become a loving person.”37
As this objection may sound somewhat strange, one may wonder who
would raise such an objection. Solomon himself does not state it clearly except,
again, to say that it is also traceable to some versions of Kantianism. For example,
A. C. Ewing, a Kantian, when deining egoism as the view that “the ultimate
aim is one’s own pleasure,” emphasizes that “the ‘pleasure’ is intended to cover
all satisfactions, not only the mundane pleasures of dinners and amusements,
but the joy of the most selless and spiritualized love, the unselish satisfaction
of the righteous in furthering the general good, and the delight of the religious
mystic in communion with God.”38 hose who take the latter types of pleasure
as the true pleasure Ewing calls a higher form of egoists, and he particularly
has Plato and Aristotle in mind, for whom, “I ought always to pursue my own
greatest good, for my greatest good is to act virtuously . . . . [and] part of virtue
just consists in seeking the good of others disinterestedly.”39 Such a higher form
of egoism, for Ewing, is equally objectionable: “Is it not priggish, and indeed
selish in a bad sense, to make other man a mere means to our own good, even
if that good be conceived in its highest and widest sense as the development
of our character? Would not a man be prig rather than a saint if he decided all
actions by reference only to their efects on his own character?”40
However, Bernard Williams, hardly a Kantian, directs this objection more
clearly to Aristotelian virtue ethics. As we have seen, Williams argues against the
view of virtue ethics as egoistic in the sense that virtuous persons desire pleasure
36
Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 172.
Ibid.
38
A. C. Ewing, Ethics (New York: he Free Press, 1953), 22.
39
Ibid., 31.
40
Ibid., 32. D. J. Allan makes a similar criticism: “every point conirms the impression that
Aristotle does not think it psychologically possible for a man to choose otherwise than in his own
interest, and is seeking, in one way or another, to say what really happens when men appear to
subordinate their interest to that of another” (D. J. Allan, he Philosophy of Aristotle [London:
Oxford University Press, 1952], 138).
37
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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in performing virtuous actions, as the actions they perform are other-regarding.
However, he argues that even after we get rid of this misconception, “there may
still seem to be something left to the charge of egoism,” which “involves the
agent’s thinking about these dispositions themselves and relating them to a life of
well-being. Even if the dispositions are not themselves directed toward the self, it
is still his own well-being that the agent in Socratic relection will be considering.
Egoism seems to be back again.”41 he type of egoism that Williams has in mind
is clearly related to the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on the deep
level: the virtuous person is concerned with the external well-being of others but is
primarily concerned with the internal well-being of his or her self, when the person
clearly realizes that internal well-being is more important and more constitutive
of human well-being than the external well-being. his becomes most clear when
Williams tries to expose the problem of Socrates’ view that “the good man cannot
be harmed” (one can harm his body but not his soul, which is his true self ): “in
describing moral motivations, it takes a very spiritual view of one’s own interests,
but the subject matter of ethics requires it to give a less spiritual view of other
people’s interests. If bodily hurt is no real harm, why does virtue require us so
strongly not to hurt other people’s bodies?”;42 and we may add: if bodily pleasure
is not a real pleasure, why does virtue require us so strongly to bring such pleasures
to others? Aristotle does not think that bodily harm and pleasure are not real harm
and pleasure, but he regards them as less important than the harm and pleasure of
the soul. Yet, precisely with regard to the harm and pleasure of the soul, Aristotle’s
virtuous person is only concerned with himself. Moreover, he acquires the pleasure
and avoids the harm of his own soul precisely by providing others with bodily
pleasure and eliminating or decreasing their bodily harm. hus, Williams points
out that, “when Aristotle seems most removed from modern ethical perceptions,
it is often because the admired agent is disquietingly concerned with himself.”43
What Williams has in mind is Aristotle’s view of a virtuous person as a
true self-lover. Aristotle makes a contrast between such true self-lovers and selflovers in the common sense. he latter are “people who assign to themselves the
greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures.”44 Such self-lovers are
to be reproached. However, a true self-lover is the one who is “always anxious
that he himself, above all things, should act justly, temperately, or in accordance
with any other of the virtues”; such a person is a true self-lover because “at all
events he assigns to himself the most authoritative element in himself and in
all things obeys this.”45 Such a true self-lover is obviously not self-centered in
Williams, Ethics and Limits of Philosophy, 50.
Ibid., 34.
43
Ibid., 35.
44
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1168b15–17.
45
Ibid., 1168b25–30.
41
42
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the common sense: when he performs virtuous acts and therefore beneits his
fellows, he does so “for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary
dies for them.”46 However, the Aristotelian self-lover is clearly self-centered in
Solomon’s deep sense. Although the person’s virtuous acts will beneit the agent
(internally) and the patient (externally) at the same time, there is an asymmetry
between these two kinds of beneit: the beneit patients get from the agent’s
virtuous actions is wealth, honor, and/or bodily pleasures, while the beneit the
agent gets from his own virtuous actions is nobility. And Aristotle makes it clear
that nobility is much more important than wealth, honor, and bodily pleasure:
the true self-lover “will throw away both wealth and honors and in general the
goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility.”47 Here the
self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics is precisely this: while the Aristotelian
virtuous agent does care for others for their own sake, he only cares about their
external goods and not their more important internal goods (virtue or nobility);
while he does sacriice his own external goods, he does so, at least partially, in
order to acquire his own internal goods.
Solomon, himself an advocate of virtue ethics, acknowledges that the selfcenteredness objection at this deep level is ineliminable within virtue ethics. In
his view, the only reasonable response to such an objection is to ind partners
in crime (if it is indeed a crime, he adds), i.e., to indicate that the major rivals
to virtue ethics that raise this objection, deontology and utilitarianism, commit
the same crime themselves. his is what he does. For example, Kantian ethics
requires an agent to act from the sense of duty but does not require the agent
to try to bring it about that others also act from the sense of duty. Kant thinks
that we have an imperfect duty to promote our own moral perfection and to
advance others’ happiness, but we do not have the corresponding imperfect
duty to promote our own happiness and others’ moral perfection: the former,
because we do not have any duty to do what we always automatically wish to
do; and the latter, because “the perfection of another man, as a person, consists
precisely in his own power to adopt his end in accordance with his own concept
of duty; and it is self-contradictory to demand that I do (make it my duty to
do) what only the other person himself can do.”48 So, in Solomon’s view, “he
Kantian slogan here might be, ‘rightness for me, happiness for you.’”49 he case
46
Ibid., 1169a19–20.
Ibid., 1169b20–21.
48
Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue, ed. M. Gregor (New York: Harper, 1964), 44.
49
Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 172. Michael Slote, whose version of
virtue ethics gets its inspiration more from the British sentimentalism than Aristotelianism, emphasizing the symmetry between agent and patient, sets it as his task to avoid this Kantian asymmetry:
“in common-sense terms we admire both what a person is able to do to advance his own or other
people’s happiness and what a person is able to do to advance the admirability either of himself
47
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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of utilitarianism is slightly more complicated, as Solomon acknowledges that
classical utilitarianism requires that an agent ought not only to make himself or
herself benevolent but also to attempt to make others benevolent. However, the
asymmetry is still there: while the agent’s concern for others’ benevolence is only
of instrumental concern (to maximize human happiness), the agent’s concern for
his or her own benevolence is not merely of instrumental concern. he benevolence of the agent “is, as it were, the perspective from which the benevolence of
others attains a kind of (instrumental) moral signiicance, but his [the agent’s]
own benevolence cannot, itself, attain moral signiicance from this perspective,
because it is the perspective. It is in this way that even for a utilitarian one’s own
character has a special status that is denied to others.”50
I shall argue that Solomon is wrong in claiming that the self-centeredness
objection to virtue ethics is ineliminable and that the only appropriate response
to it is a partners in “crime” argument, particularly in the context of Zhu Xi’s
neo-Confucianism. However, in the remainder of this section, I shall examine
the Aristotelian response to this objection and explain why it is not convincing,
at least to those who raise the self-centeredness objection. Many Aristotle scholars
try to show that Aristotle’s eudaimonism can avoid the self-centeredness objection on this deep level.51 he strongest evidence for them is a passage in which
Aristotle discusses what they regard as moral competitions: “those, then, who
busy themselves in an exceptional degree with noble actions all men approve and
praise; and if all were to strive towards what is noble and strain every nerve to
do the noblest deeds, everything would be as it should be for the common weal,
and everyone would secure for himself the goods that are greatest, since virtue is
the greatest of goods.”52 Richard Kraut, for example, argues that Aristotle here
is talking about a moral competition among virtuous agents. Such competition
“difers from other forms of competition in precisely this respect: normally, when
or others. We commonly admire people for their possession of self-regarding and other-regarding
virtues . . . and we also admire people who help others to develop admirable or virtuous traits
of character. . . . And so I think it is part of common-sense virtue ethics to assume that people
should be concerned with the happiness and virtue . . . both of others and of themselves” (Michael
Slote, From Morality to Virtue [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 111).
50
Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 173.
51
McKerlie distinguishes between egoist eudaimonism and altruistic eudaimonism: “One
answer says that Aristotle gives to each agent the single fundamental goal of making his or her
own life realize eudaimonia. I will call this view the ‘egoistic eudaimonist’ interpretation. he
alternative interpretation takes Aristotle to be an altruistic eudaimonist. He thinks that as well
as aiming at eudaimonia in our own lives we should also have as a fundamental aim that at least
some other people realize eudaimonia” (Dennis McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern
for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy 11 [1991]: 85–101, at 85). As we shall see,
McKerlie himself supports the second interpretation.
52
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169a6–12.
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people try to outdo one another, one person’s gain is another’s loss; but when
virtuous individuals ‘compete for the ine’ then everyone beneits in some way or
other.”53 To illustrate this, Kraut uses the analogy of a competition among solo
musicians: “he better each plays, the more likely he is to win, but at the same
time, everyone else beneits by the fact that each is striving to do his best.”54
he idea is that my playing to my best will cause others to play to their
best, as we all want to win the competition. So in this moral competition
among virtuous persons, the more I try to develop my own virtuous character,
the more I do to develop the virtuous characters of others. Julia Annas makes a
similar point. In her view, since Aristotle has redeined self-love as love of one’s
virtuous character,
it is not surprising that the competition between true self-lovers is also
redeined, and turns out to be wholly diferent from the common understanding of competition. Normally competition is for a limited good, and
hence is at others’ expense; if I get more you will get less. But when people
“compete to be virtuous” what they do is not at the others’ expense, for
Aristotle insists that each person gets the greatest good, since “virtue is
that kind of thing.” Virtue is an inexhaustible good; if I have more this
does not leave less for you.55
So although neither Kraut nor Annas clearly states it, the signiicant diference
between moral competition and other forms of competition is that, while in the
latter there is normally only one winner, in the former everyone can be a winner,
for the referee of the competition has a diferent criterion from the one used in
other forms of competition. In a normal race, for example, the winner is the
fastest runner. However, in the Aristotelian moral competition, the winner is
the one who does his or her best. hus, while it is possible that the winner runs
slower than others (as those who run faster than the winner may have not done
their best), it is also possible that everyone is a winner (if everyone does his or
her best). It is perhaps in this sense that Kraut claims that “when Aristotelian
agents compete with one another to be the best, each places far more emphasis
on doing as well as he can than on doing better than others.”56
his is indeed an interesting interpretation. However, as a response to the
self-centeredness objection, it is not entirely convincing. First, to what degree
can we make sense of moral competition among virtuous persons? To illustrate,
let us look at two examples used by Aristotelian scholars to explain the followRichard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989), 117.
54
Ibid.
55
Julia Annas, he Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 297.
56
Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 119.
53
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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ing passage of Aristotle in the context of moral competition: the true self lover,
among other things, “may even give up actions to his friend; it may be nobler
to become the cause of his friend’s acting than to act himself. In all the actions,
therefore, that men are praised for, the good man is seen to assign the greater
share in what is noble.”57 Christopher Toner explains this self-lover’s self-sacriice
of virtuous action by such a hypothetical scenario: two of us are friends and fellow
members of a platoon engaged in a dangerous reconnaissance. One volunteer
is needed to be the irst to cross an open area. I am moved to volunteer, but I
recall that you have unfairly acquired a reputation for cowardice and wanted to
clear this reputation. So I remain silent so that you can be the irst.58 Richard
Kraut provides a similar illustration: Suppose I think my friend is capable of
supervising major civic projects, but he has had too few opportunities to show
his worth. So I persuade public oicials who oversee such projects to secure the
opportunity for him.59
In both examples, the virtuous person sacriices his or her virtuous actions so
that his or her friend can perform them. In this case, the virtuous person awards
himself or herself what is ine, while his or her friend has the chance to perform
the virtuous actions. However, there is something wrong here. In both cases, the
virtuous person’s friend must be already virtuous, at least to some extent. In Toner’s
example, the courageous person’s friend merely has a bad reputation of being a
coward, and the virtuous person’s sacriice of the courageous action helps his or
her friend to restore his honor. However, this does not make his friend more virtuous (courageous), as for Aristotle, honor belongs to the same category as money
and wealth, things that the self-lovers in the vulgar sense love. A truly virtuous
person is more concerned with being virtuous, not with being known for being
virtuous.60 In Kraut’s example, the virtuous person sacriices his or her virtuous
action for his or her friend so that the friend can have an opportunity to show his
worth. his assumes that a person who has more opportunities to perform virtuous
actions is more virtuous than a person who has fewer opportunities to do so. his
assumption, however, is wrong. It focuses too much on action. A virtuous person
just performs virtuous actions whenever such circumstances occur. Moreover, as
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169a33–36.
Christopher Toner, “he Self-Centredness Objection to Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy 81
(2006): 595–617, at 611.
59
Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 126.
60
Along these lines, hrasymachus in Plato’s Republic says of the perfectly virtuous (just)
person, “though doing no wrong, he must have the repute of the greatest injustice, so that he may
be put to the test as regards justice through not softening because of ill repute and the consequences
thereof. But let him hold on his course unchangeable even unto death, seeming all his life to be
unjust though being just” (Plato, he Republic, in Plato: he Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 361c).
57
58
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Hurka has pointed out, “though a person can certainly act virtuously, she can
also have virtuous desires and feelings that never issue in action—for example,
compassion for someone whose pain she is unable to relieve.”61 After all, Aristotle
himself also claims that virtue is related to both action and feeling.
Second, as shown in both Toner’s and Kraut’s examples, those who are in
the moral competition are already somehow virtuous persons or true self-lovers.
Only virtuous persons are willing to join the moral competition, and virtuous
persons compete with only virtuous persons. his causes an immediate problem
for the self-centeredness objectors. he self-centeredness objection to virtue
ethics is precisely about the virtuous agent’s lack of interest in making others
virtuous. While there is no need for a virtuous person to be concerned about
the character of another virtuous person, we need to know whether a virtuous
person in the Aristotelian sense is also concerned or able to make a non-virtuous
person virtuous. It does not seem to be the case. On the one hand, in his discussion of friendship, Aristotle makes it clear that true friendship is based on the
likeness of virtues, in contrast to friendship based on utility or pleasantness. In
other words, it is a friendship among virtuous people.62 Moreover, as noticed by
Kraut himself, for Aristotle, if a virtuous friend turns out to be bad, the virtuous person who breaks of such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing
strange.63 After all, for Aristotle, a virtuous person makes friends with others
not in order to make his friends virtuous; otherwise he would choose to make
friends with non-virtuous persons instead of people who are already virtuous
and remain virtuous. For the self-centeredness objectors, this shows that the
Aristotelian virtuous person, at least in the context of Aristotle’s discussion of
friendship, is not concerned with making non-virtuous persons virtuous. On
the other hand, the Aristotelian virtuous person’s refraining from performing
virtuous actions for the sake of others as discussed by Toner and Kraut, by itself,
cannot make a non-virtuous person virtuous. Suppose that the person to whom
the virtuous person in Toner’s example sacriices his action is indeed a coward.
Will the virtuous person’s sacriicing his action in this particular situation make
his friend courageous? Obviously not. A coward is a coward not because he or
she has never encountered any dangerous situations or opportunities to perform
courageous actions, but because every time the coward encounters a dangerous
situation, he or she backs of. So, if anything, the virtuous person’s refraining
from performing the courageous action, even with the intention to give an ophomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8.
As Julia Annas points out, “the best or perfect kind of friendship is one in which each
person is friends with the other because of that person’s goodness, speciically his good character—
indeed this kind of friendship is often called friendship of character” (Annas, he Morality of
Happiness, 249–50).
63
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1165b20–23; see Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 111.
61
62
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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portunity for the coward to be courageous, would only make the coward feel less
uneasy for being a coward, as he would see no one doing anything diferently
from what he does: those who are cowards just like him, as cowards, will not
move forward, and those who, unlike him, have the virtue of courage would
decide to sacriice their courageous actions to those cowards.
hird, while it is not clear whether Aristotle indeed has moral competition in
mind, let us assume that Kraut is right about this; and to make it more plausible,
given the context in which Aristotle is supposed to express this idea, the context
of his discussion of genuine friendship, let us assume that this is a competition
among somehow already but not fully virtuous persons. In such a competition,
one’s efort to develop one’s own virtues as fully as possible may indeed cause
his or her competitors to make a similar efort to develop their own virtues as
fully as possible. However, at least to the self-centeredness objectors, this makes
it look like Adam Smith’s invisible hand justiication of individual greediness in
competition in a well-ordered market economy: the more one strives to one’s own
interest, the more the person contributes to others’ welfare. In such competitions,
it is true that everyone’s self-centered actions beneit others in the competition
as a consequence, but one joins the competition for one’s self-interest, not for
the beneit of others. Kraut of course disagrees. In his view, in such a competition, a virtuous person not only makes others virtuous as a consequence of
their being virtuous but also intends to do so. For example, Kraut argues that
virtuous “friends help each other develop in character and correct each other.”64
However, the two passages he cites from Aristotle do not explicitly support his
claim: “a certain training in virtue arises also from the company of the good”;65
“the friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship;
and they are thought to become better too by their activities and by improving
each other; for from each other they take the mould of the characteristics they
approve.”66 In neither of these two passages does Aristotle say explicitly that a
virtuous person joins “moral competition” in order to make others virtuous, even
though it is clear that such a competition may indeed improve the virtuous qualities of all competitors. So at least there is an ambiguity here regarding whether
the improvement of others’ virtues is the virtuous person’s intention or merely a
consequence of his action. Given Aristotle’s claim that a virtuous person, a true
self-lover, at all events assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best,
the weight of the evidence may even lean toward the self-centeredness objectors.
Defenders of Aristotle’s virtue ethics against the charge of self-centeredness often
cite a number of passages that seem to be on their side. For example, Aristotle
Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 121.
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1170a11–12.
66
Ibid., 1172a12.
64
65
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says that “(1) we deine a friend as one who wishes and does what is good, or
seems so, for the sake of his friend, or (2) as one who wishes his friend to exist
and live, for his sake; which mothers do to their children, and friends do who
have come into conlict. And (3) others deine him as one who lives with and
(4) has the same tastes as another, or (5) one who grieves and rejoices with his
friend”;67 “to a friend we say we ought to wish what is good for his sake”;68 and
“a man seems to us a friend, who wishes the good or what he thinks to be such
to some one, not on his own account but for the sake of that other; or, in another way, if he wishes for another man existence—even if he is not bestowing
goods, still less existence—on that other’s account and not on his own, he would
seem most of all to be a friend to him.”69 In all these passages, Aristotle makes
it clear that a virtuous person or a true self-lover wishes the good to his friend
for his friend’s sake. From these and other similar passages, defenders claim that
Aristotle’s virtuous person does care about others’ virtue. Dennis McKerlie, for
example, claims that Aristotle’s eudaimonism is altruistic rather than egoistic,
in the sense that a virtuous person is not merely concerned about one’s own
well-being but also that of others:
[I]n this kind of friendship we should feel a concern for another person
that does not difer importantly in its nature from the concern we feel for
ourselves. . . . [W]e should care about the friend’s realizing eudaimonia
in much the same way that we care about realizing it ourselves. So the
friend’s eudaimonia should be almost as fundamental a goal as our own
eudaimonia.70
Moreover, in a few passages, Aristotle claims a virtuous person is related to his
friend as to himself.71 From this McKerlie infers that
the good man values the friend’s existence to almost the same extent
that he values his own existence, or that he values the friend’s existence
in almost the same way or manner in which he values his own existence.
. . . the key to the argument is the thought that the friend is another self.
. . . I should care about the friend’s eudaimonia in the way that I care
about my own eudaimonia.”72
67
Ibid., 1166a1–8.
Ibid., 1155b31.
69
Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia, trans. J. Solomon, in he Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963), 1240a23–26.
70
McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 88.
71
See Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1166a30–32, 1170b7–8.
72
McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 96–97.
John Cooper also argues that Aristotle’s virtuous person is altruistic, but he qualiies his view immediately, saying that this does not mean that the virtuous agent does not also have a self-interested
68
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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A natural response to such a defense from the self-centeredness objectors
will perhaps run like this. First, all such passages are found in the section in
which Aristotle talks about friendship of virtue, whose goal is not whether or
how a virtuous person can make non-virtuous persons virtuous, since friends
that a virtuous person makes are already virtuous. So a virtuous person naturally
wishes his friends well, as when they become bad, they cannot be his friends.
his seems to be what Aristotle has in mind when he says that “if we were right
in saying that friend wishes good to friend for his sake, his friend must remain
the sort of being he is, whatever that may be; therefore it is for him only so long
as he remains a man that he will wish the greatest goods.”73 Second, this can also
explain why Aristotle says that a virtuous person is related to his friend as to
himself, because a person can become a friend of the virtuous person precisely
because he is like the virtuous person in being a virtuous person himself. A virtuous person loves his friend because he loves himself and because his friend is
like him. hus, when the friend ceases to be like him, the virtuous person will
not be related to his friend as to himself. As a matter of fact, he will abandon
the person as a friend. hird, it is true that Aristotle makes distinction between
mere well-wishing and friendship, as friendship shows itself also in doing what
one wishes.74 However, while Aristotle does tell us how a virtuous person can
award others external goods, he is silent about how a virtuous person awards
others internal goods, i.e., virtues. As a matter of fact, in the second passage
quoted in the last paragraph, when Aristotle says a virtuous person wishes his
friends well, he adds the clause “even if he is not bestowing goods.” hus, while
an already good person does not need a virtuous person to bestow good, it is also
a question whether, for Aristotle, a virtuous person can bestow good to those
who lack it, those who are not virtuous yet and therefore cannot be friends of
the virtuous person, even if the virtuous person wants to bestow such goods to
them, a question I shall return later. In any case, it is hard to convince the selfcenteredness objectors, given, on the one hand, the ambiguity of the passages
that defenders use to show that Aristotle’s virtuous person is also interested in
making non-virtuous persons virtuous and, on the other hand, the crystal clarity of contrasting passages, in which Aristotle states that a virtuous person is
concerned with one’s own virtue but only with others’ external well-being. In
this relation, in addition to the passage we quoted earlier, in which Aristotle
contrasts the self-lover in the true sense and the self-lover in the vulgar sense,
reason for acting, nor that “the agent’s concern, in the given action, for the other person’s good
is stronger than his concern for his own” (John Cooper 1977, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” Review of Metaphysics 30 [1977]: 621 n. 7).
73
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1159a8–13.
74
Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. St. George Stock, in he Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1963), 1241a10–13.
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the main target of the self-centeredness objection, Aristotle also says, when he
answers whether the good man loves himself most of all or not:
since we say that the good man will resign goods in the way of utility to
his friend, he will be loving his friend more than himself. Yes, but his
resignation of such goods implies that he is compassing the noble for
himself in resigning these to his friend. In a way, therefore, he is loving
his friend more than himself, and in a way he is loving himself most. In
respect of the useful he is loving his friend, but in respect of the noble
and the good he is loving himself most.”75
We can understand this issue better if we look at Aristotle’s discussion about
whether a supremely happy and self-suicient person still needs friends. It seems
that, if Aristotle’s virtuous man joins moral competitions with his virtuous friends
primarily to make oneself more virtuous, as the self-centeredness objection claims,
then such a supremely happy and self-suicient person would no longer need
friends, as he, as a completely virtuous person, no longer need beneit from others. Yet, Aristotle states clearly that such a person still needs friends, which seems
to show that the self-centeredness objection is after all inapplicable to Aristotle.
his would be the case only if Aristotle thinks that such a completely virtuous
person still needs friends in order to make these friends more virtuous. However,
although Aristotle discusses this issue in all the three books on ethics, in none of
them does he make this point. Magna Moralia presents the famous analogy of
friends as mirrors. Aristotle argues that a self-suicing man does not need any
good, as he has already had all the goods,76 except self-knowledge, acquisition
of which is pleasant. However, since “we are not able to see what we are from
ourselves . . . as then when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into
the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that
knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is . . . a second self.”77 So the
self-suicient person needs friends in order to have self-knowledge. Clearly, for
such a purpose, it is best for the self-suicing man to have friends who are equally
self-suicing, for friends who lack the goods the self-suicing man has will not
help the self-suicing man to know himself in such respects.78 In Nichomachean
75
Ibid., 1212b12–17.
Ibid., 1212b29.
77
Ibid., 1213a15–23.
78
Admittedly, in this chapter, Aristotle asks, twice, if the self-suicing man does not need
friends, “to whom will he do good? Or with whom will he live?” (ibid., 1212b30 and 1213a28).
Unfortunately, while he does go on to elaborate on the second question, which is not so puzzling,
he does not tell us anything about what he means by doing good to friends. We might want to
assume that this also includes internal good, but we cannot convince the self-centeredness objectors on this, as on the one hand at least Aristotle does not clearly say it, and on the other hand,
76
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Ethics, in addition to this, Aristotle mentions a few other reasons that such a
happy person still needs friends. First, friends are the best external goods, and
so “it seems strange, when one assigns all good things to the happy man, not to
assign friends, who are thought of as the greatest of external goods.”79 Second, a
happy person needs friends to confer beneits.80 hird, a happy person would be
solitary without friends, “for no one would choose the whole world on condition
of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live
with others. herefore even happy man lives with others.”81
To say that Aristotle’s virtuous person is not concerned with making others
virtuous may seem surprising. Jennifer Whiting’s Kantian interpretation of the
passage, in which Kraut claims Aristotle develops the idea of moral competition, attempts to provide an explanation for this. According to Whiting, when
Aristotle claims that the true self-lover awards himself the greater good, he is
making a comparison not with the good the true self-lover awards others but
with good he would award himself had he chosen the external good. By this,
Whiting does not mean to claim, as some defenders we have examined above
do, that the true self-lover also awards others the greater good. To claim this,
one must assume that an agent can make a choice between awarding the greater
good to oneself and awarding it to others or between awarding others the greater
good and awarding them the lesser good, but Whiting claims that such an assumption is not available. his is because “the kalon [what is ine]—insofar as it
consists in virtue and virtuous action—is not generally the sort of thing one can
secure for one’s friends . . . but virtuous action is—and this is a logical point—
something one can secure only for oneself.”82 Immediately after this she adds a
footnote stating that this is a similar position to Kant’s, as cited earlier in this
essay, when Kant excludes others’ perfection from an agent’s imperfect duty for
the same reason. So Whiting concludes that Aristotle’s “proper self-love may yet
prove more Kantian than it appears at irst glance.”83 In other words, instead of
if the self-suicing man still need do good, internally, to his friends, then his friends, instead of
also being self-suicing, must still lack some internal good and so are not ideal mirror for the
self-suicing man to see himself in. And this complaint seems to have some support from Ethica
Eudemia: “for friends who are self-dependent neither teaching nor learning is possible, for if one
learns, he is not as he should be [and so not self-independent]; and if he teaches, his friend is not,
and likeness is friendship” (Aristotle, Ethics Eudemia: 1245a16–18).
79
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169b8–10.
80
Ibid., 1169b10–12.
81
1169b17–19.
82
Jennifer Whiting, “Self-Love and Authoritative Virtue: Prolegomenon to a Kantian Reading
of Eudemian Ethics viii 3,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed.
Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175.
83
Ibid., 173.
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the virtuous person being unwilling to make others virtuous, a virtuous person
cannot make others virtuous.84
While it is not clear whether Aristotle indeed agrees with Kant that one
cannot make others virtuous and people have to become virtuous by themselves,
Aristotle does seem to think that it is at least not a virtuous person’s job to make
others virtuous, as can be seen from his discussion of the transition from ethics
to politics toward the very end of Nichomachean Ethics, Book 10, Chapter 9.
here, with his account of virtue fully presented, Aristotle points out that, “with
regard to virtue, then, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use
it, or try any other way there may be of becoming good.”85 he question then
is whose job it is to make people virtuous. Aristotle makes it clear that it is not
a parent or friend, however virtuous the person himself is, and however many
particular details he knows about his child or friend whom he wants to make
virtuous. It is rather the legislator, even though he does not have such intimate
knowledge of citizens and is not necessarily more virtuous than a parent or
friend. here are two reasons Aristotle holds this view.
First, a virtuous parent or friend does not have the necessary expertise.
Aristotle uses an analogy. A person without medical training, however healthy
he is himself, and to whatever degree he can be his own doctor (by learning from
his past experiences in diferent cases), cannot be a doctor, or at least as good
a doctor, of another—including his child and friend, whose particular details
he knows—as a professional doctor. Even though this professional doctor does
not know as much about his patient as a parent knows of his child or a friend
knows of his friend (indeed, as a matter of fact, the doctor himself may be not
as healthy as his patient’s parent or friend), however he can provide better care
of the patient than the patient’s untrained parent or friend, because he “has the
general knowledge of what is good for everyone or for people of a certain kind
(for the sciences both are said to be, and are concerned with what is universal).”86
For the same reason, a parent or friend, even a virtuous one, cannot be a good
teacher of virtues, or at least as good a teacher of virtues for his child or friend
as a public legislator for his citizens. he legislator may not know as much
particular detail of his citizens as a parent knows of his child or a friend of his
friend (indeed, the legislator himself may be not as virtuous as a parent or friend
84
Nancy Sherman seems to agree with Whiting when she claims that there is “a certain
limitation on what a character friend can give another. How one can help is limited, among other
things, by an acknowledgment of the rational agency of each. In so far as a friend is another self,
in helping a friend, an individual cannot pre-empt that friend’s rational agency, or desire to make
choices for himself with regard to virtuous living” (Nancy Sherman, “Aristotle on Friendship and
the Shared Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 [1987]: 589–613, at 608).
85
Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1179b1–3.
86
Ibid., 1180b14–16.
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
675
in question), but he has the general knowledge of diferent types of people and
the expertise to make them virtuous.
Second, a private person (parent or friend), though virtuous, does not have
the needed authority. After dismissing nature, argument, and teaching as ineicient
means in making people virtuous, Aristotle states that a person must be cultivated
by means of habits. However, “it is diicult to get from youth up a right training
for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately
and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For
this reason their nurture and occupations should be ixed by law.”87 hus, to
make people virtuous is not the job of a private virtuous person, for “the paternal
command indeed has not the required force or compulsive power (nor in general
has the command of one man, unless he be a king or something similar).”88 It is
rather the job of legislators, for most people “do not by nature obey the sense of
shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness
but through fear of punishment.”89 Aristotle does say that, if there is a lack of the
public care for this matter, “it would seem right for each man to help his children
and friends towards virtue,” but he immediately adds that “it would seem that he
can do this better if he makes himself capable of legislating.”90 It is in this sense
that, for Aristotle, while to provide an account of virtue is the job of ethics, to
provide an account of how to make people virtuous is a task of politics.
Our examination above shows that self-centeredness objectors are perhaps
at least not entirely groundless in their claiming that Aristotle’s virtuous person
is not characterized as to make non-virtuous persons virtuous. And it seems that
the best response that Aristotle could give to such objectors is that it is not the job
of a virtuous person to make others virtuous. Clearly, such a response cannot be
satisfactory to the self-centeredness objectors, and it seems diicult to develop a
satisfactory response from the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics to adequately
respond to the self-centeredness objection on this deeper level. homas Aquinas
is normally considered as belonging to the Aristotelian tradition, and it is true
that he makes it clear that a virtuous person is concerned not only with others’
external well-being but also with their internal well-being, particularly in his
conception of fraternal correction. Fraternal correction, properly so called, is
“to apply a remedy to the sin considered as an evil of the sinner himself,” which
is “the same as to procure his good, and to procure a person’s good is an act of
charity, by which we do our friend well.”91 More importantly, Aquinas thinks
87
Ibid., 1179b31–35.
Ibid., 1180a19–20.
89
Ibid., 1179b11–13.
90
Ibid., 1180a30–33.
91
homas Aquinas, he Summa heologica, in Great Books of the Western World, vols. 19–20
(Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 1952), II-II, qu. 33, art. 1.
88
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that fraternal correction is a kind of spiritual almsdeed, which is more excellent
than the corporeal one.92 Clearly Aquinas’s virtue ethics can thus well avoid the
self-centeredness objection.93 However, at least two things deserve our attention.
First, Aquinas regards fraternal correction as an aspect of the virtue of charity,
which belongs to the third category of virtue, theological ones, an entirely new
one to Aristotle, who has a twofold classiication of virtues: intellectual and
moral. In Aquinas’s view, theological virtues consist in attaining God, while
“moral and intellectual virtues consist in attaining human reason.”94 For this
reason, “charity can be in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the
natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Spirit.”95 If this is the case, since
for Aristotle there is no theological virtue, we may doubt whether fraternal correction can be developed as an Aristotelian virtue. For this reason, Christopher
Cordner argues that the Christian moral tradition to which Aquinas belongs
is radically diferent from the Aristotelian one, where “we ind no mention of
kindness, compassion, forgiveness, apology, repentance, remorse, humility, or
of the ‘theological virtues’ of faith, hope and charity.”96 Second, even though
Aquinas does think a virtuous person, out of charity, “should be concerned about
others’ virtues,” he still thinks that “a man ought, out of charity, to love himself
more than he loves any other person,” and “a man ought not to give way to any
evil of sin which counteracts his share of happiness, not even that he may free
his neighbor from sin.”97
IV.
he Self-Centeredness Objection on the Second Level: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian
Response. If homas Aquinas can help the Aristotelian virtue ethics to respond
to the self-centeredness objection only by adding a theological virtue alien to it,
we may wonder whether there is any alternative response that is more congenial
to the Aristotelian virtue ethics. It is for this reason that I suggest that we turn
to Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian virtue ethics, which is as humanistic as Aristotle’s
but is clearly not self-centered in this deeper sense. In Zhu Xi’s view, a superior
or virtuous person (junzi 君子) is a virtuous person not simply because he or
she has the disposition to provide material and external comforts to people in
need as they do, but also because they want to make others virtuous. his is
92
Ibid., II-II, qu. 32, art. 4.
I would like to thank the editorial staf for alerting me to this.
94
Ibid., II-II, Ibid., qu. 23, art. 7.
95
Ibid., II-II, qu. 24, art. 2.
96
Christopher Cordner, “Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations,” Philosophy 69 (1994):
291–316, at 293.
97
Aquinas, he Summa heologica, II-II, qu. 26, art. 5.
93
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
677
most clear in his interpretation of the beginning sentences of the Great Learning, one of the Confucian canon of Four Books: “the way of great learning is
to ming ming de [明明德], xin min [新民], and zhi shan [至善].” According to
the common interpretation, ming ming de and xin min are two diferent items:
the former is related to oneself: to brighten one’s own originally bright but
currently obscured virtues, and the latter is related to others: to love (here xin
新 is interpreted as qin 親) people. hus understood, it may also be subject to
the deep level of the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics, particularly
if we understand loving people in the normal sense of providing people with
material and external goods. However, in Zhu Xi’s interpretation, really there
is only one item, which is to brighten one’s originally bright virtues. As we
have seen, Zhu Xi claims that all teachings by sages are crystallized in this
three character phrase, ming ming de, which includes everything involved in
Confucian moral cultivation. hus, for Zhu Xi, “if one fully understands it,
the single phrase ‘to brighten one’s [originally] bright virtue’ is enough, and
there is no need for the rest. Sages know that it is diicult for learners to fully
understand it, and so they listed many steps. Let us take for example ming
ming de and xin min, which mutually illustrate each other. hose who have
brightened their own nature are self-renewals; those who renew others are ones
who make others to brighten their own bright virtues.”98
For this reason, when a student asks “whether renewing others must be
originated from one’s self-renewal,” Zhu Xi replies airmatively.99 In Zhu
Xi’s view, although it is the case that “to brighten one’s bright virtues is to be
without any selish desires, while to renew people is to desire that other people
can always do the right thing,”100 they are really not two separate things. hus,
one should realize that “if other people are not renewed to the utmost, it is also
due to the fact one has not fully brightened one’s own bright virtue.”101 So one
cannot claim that one’s own virtue is brightened if one is not concerned with
other people’s originally bright but currently obscured virtues. Zhu Xi makes
this point repeatedly:
As soon as one’s virtue is brightened, one will naturally renew people. . . .
Everyone has this dao-principle. It is not something that only I myself
have. Since one has understood it, one ought to extend it to others, so that
they can also brighten their own virtues. How can one be contented with
one’s own being able to have it without letting others have it as well!102
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 275.
Ibid., 284.
100
Ibid., 339.
101
Ibid., 242.
102
Ibid., 339.
98
99
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Since I have already brightened my originally bright virtues, seeing that
others are obscured by the cloudy vital force and material desires, how
can one not immediately desire to renew them, having them clean and
brush [their originally bright virtues] as I did mine, so that they can be
awakened from the muddy vital force and material desires and restore
what they were naturally endowed with. his is what is meant by renewing people.103
One has to teach others to care for the elders, respect older siblings, and
be nice to the young. One cannot care for one’s parents and yet teach
others not to care for their parents, respect older siblings and yet teach
others not to respect their older siblings, and be nice to one’s children
and yet teach others not to be nice to their children.104
All these show that, for Zhu Xi, one’s brightening one’s own bright virtues
includes renewing others (helping others brighten their bright virtues). In other
words, a person cannot be regarded as virtuous if the person is contented with
one’s own being “virtuous” without being interested in others’ virtues, since a
“virtuous” person who shows no interest in others being virtuous, by this very
fact, shows that this person lacks virtues and so is not really virtuous. hus, when
a student asks whether “a person who has brightened one’s own bright virtue
and yet does not want to renew people with this brightened virtue is selish,”
Zhu Xi responds airmatively.105 In his view, “normally, when a selish person
gets some ideas, he or she is unwilling to share them with others, thinking that
he or she would then be unable to claim to be better than others. Superior
persons have a broader mind. If they get something, they can extend it to others. If they are able to do something, they will teach it to others. What a pity
it would be if others are unable to do things that one is able to do!”106 hus, a
person cannot be considered as a generous person, a person with the virtue of
generosity, without being interested in making others generous. We normally
think that one can be generous without making others generous, because we
have in mind only generosity of material and external goods: one is willing to
share such goods with others without making them then share these goods with
(their) others. However, Zhu Xi, with a much broader conception of the virtue
of generosity and its corresponding vice of miserliness, argues that such a person
generous in the common sense is not only not generous but actually has the
vice of miserliness (lin 吝), which is always associated with another vice, vanity
103
Ibid., 241–2.
Ibid., 332.
105
Ibid., 339.
106
Ibid., 404.
104
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
679
(jiao 驕): “All people who have vanity must be miserly, and all people who are
miserly must have vanity.”107
To show the relationship between these two vices, Zhu Xi irst uses the
example of miserliness with respect to one’s material possessions: “the reason
a person is a miser about such material possessions is that, if the person shares
it with others, others will be as rich as he or she is, and so the person will have
nothing to brag about.”108 However, Zhu Xi emphasizes that “a person can be a
miser not only in material possessions but also in skills of doing things and willingness to be good.”109 To illustrate miserliness about skills of doing things, Zhu
Xi recounts that he once saw two persons unwilling to tell each other about things
they could do respectively, even though these were insigniicant things, as they
were afraid that if they did, they would have nothing to brag about themselves.
Now, in Zhu Xi’s view, this is exactly the same case with virtues. A person who
has a “virtue” and yet is not interested in making others virtuous is also a miser,
as the person thinks that if others also have his or her virtue, he or she will have
nothing to brag about. Moreover, unlike a miser about material possessions and
skills of doing things, who can keep such possessions and skills without sharing
them with others, a miser of virtue cannot keep the virtue without sharing it
with others, for if the person does not share his or her virtue with others, the
person loses the virtue. In addition, unlike one’s material possessions, which will
be decreased when shared with others, one’s virtue, when shared with others,
will not be decreased but will become even brighter.
his last point of Zhu Xi’s about a miser in virtue becomes clearer in his
interpretation of the Confucian golden rule: “One who wants to establish oneself will establish others; and one who wants to prosper oneself will help others
prosper.”110 Commenting on this, Zhu Xi states that “the two things [establishing and prospering] include both internal and external.”111 What he means by
external is such things as happiness, long life, health, and peace that everyone
desires.112 his is our common understanding of the golden rule: since I want
to be happy, live long, be healthy, and have peace, I should also help others to
be happy, live long, be healthy, and have peace. What is unique about Zhu Xi’s
interpretation of the Confucian golden rule is, however, his emphasis on its
internal aspect, which is made clear by the sentence immediately after he talks
about the internal external aspects of the golden rule: “Take for the example
the cultivation of virtue. One wants to establish one’s own virtue,” and so, by
107
Ibid., 841.
Ibid.
109
Ibid.
110
Analects 6.30.
111
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 758.
112
Ibid., 928.
108
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implication, one should help others to establish their virtues.113 hus the deeper
meaning of the golden rule for Zhu Xi is that, if one wants to develop one’s own
virtue, one should develop the virtue of others; and if one wants to prosper in
one’s virtues, one should make others prosper in their virtues. his point is made
more explicit in another place, where Zhu Xi claims that “what my heart/mind
desires is also what the heart/mind of others desire. I want to respect my parents,
love my brothers, and be kind [to my children], and so I must also want others
to respect their parents, love their brothers, and be kind [to their children] as I
do to mine. . . . If only I myself can do these, while others cannot do this, I feel
uneasy.”114 he following statement, made by one of his students in a conversation with Zhu Xi, expresses this internal aspect of the Confucian golden rule
well: “If one wants to be a superior person, then one also wants all others to be
superior persons; if one does not want to be an inferior person, then one also
does not want others to be inferior persons.”115
In this relation, it is interesting to see how Zhu Xi interprets Analects 4.15,
as this is often also regarded as a version of the Confucian golden rule. In this
passage, Confucius said that there is one thread going through all his teachings.
After he left, students tried to igure out what this one thread is, and one of his
students, Zengzi, said that it is zhong [忠] and shu [恕]. his has been puzzling
for many commentators in history, as Confucius says that there is only one
thread going through his teachings, but Zengzi mentions two instead of one. So
what is crucial is to see what zhong and shu mean. Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s
interpretation of zhong as to fully realize oneself and shu as to include the realization of others in one’s full realization.116 In Zhu Xi’s view, therefore “Zhong and
113
Ibid., 758. In a similar spirit, Qing scholar Mao Qiling 毛奇齡, in his Corrections of
the Four Books 四書改錯, interprets this rule to mean that one cannot establish oneself without
establishing others and one cannot make oneself noble without letting others be noble. In other
words, to establish others is the intrinsic content of establishing oneself, and to let others be
noble is the intrinsic content of making oneself noble. For this reason, Mao Qiling relates this
passage not only to the idea of “realizing oneself [cheng ji 成己]” and “realizing others [cheng wu
成物]” in the Doctrine of the Mean, but also to “manifesting one’s clear character [ming mingde
明明德]” and “loving people [qin min 親民]” at the very beginning of the Great Learning, to
“making oneself alone perfect [du shan qi shen 獨善其身]” and “making the whole Empire perfect [jian shan tian xia 兼善天下]” in the Mencius (7a9), and to “cultivating oneself [xiu ji 修
己]” and “bringing security to people [an ren 安人]” in Analects 14.42 (see Cheng Shude 程樹
德, Collected Commentaries on the Analects 論語集釋 [Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局,
1990], 429). In this understanding, the two items in each of these pairs are inseparable: one cannot realize oneself without realizing others, manifest one’s clear character without loving people,
make oneself perfect without making the world perfect, and cultivate oneself without bringing
peace to people, and vice versa.
114
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 322.
115
Ibid., 958.
116
Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, Collected Works of the Two Chengs, 306.
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
681
shu are one thing and cannot be seen as two,”117 because zhong, to fully realize
one’s self, implies shu, to help others fully realize their selves. On the one hand,
since a person who fully realizes one’s self is not tolerant with one’s own moral
faults, he or she should also not be negligent about the moral faults of others.
hus, when a student asks whether a person of shu does not care about other
people’s moral faults, as one of the literal meanings of shu is to forgive, Zhu Xi
says that “this is a strange idea. None of the Six Classics ever says that shu is to
be tolerant of others’ moral faults. . . . It is not right to take care of oneself only
and let other people become bad.”118 On the other hand, since a person who
fully realizes one’s self is one who always does good things, the person should
also help others do good things. hus, Zhu Xi advises: “when someone comes
to ask for your advice about things to do, you should be very careful. Tell them
to do what is good and do not tell them to do what is not good. Only thus can
you be seen as fully realizing your own self.”119 It is clear here that Zhu Xi regards
shu, to help others to be good, as part of zhong, to fully realize one’s own self,
because “only one who completes himself or herself can complete others, and
to complete oneself includes completing others.”120
So in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian virtue ethics, a truly virtuous person is a
person who not only cares about others’ external and material welfare but also
cares about their virtues. However, to care about others’ virtues is a much more
diicult thing to do than to care about their external and material welfare. For
the latter, one can simply give them what one has and they need; for the former,
however, one cannot, and indeed does not need to, give one’s virtue to others,
as others have all their virtues within; only these virtues are obscured by their
selish desires. So to be virtuous, they only need to realize their virtues within,
which, however, is something essentially only they can do for themselves. hus,
Zhu Xi states: “virtue [de 德] is to get [de 得], which is to get by oneself. It is
not something that one can just learn about. If one just learns about it and does
not get it by oneself, it is as if one heard it said by others, which has nothing to
do with oneself.”121 It is in this sense that Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s unique
interpretation of a controversial passage in the Analects: “people can be made
to follow it [dao] but cannot be made to know it.”122 A common interpretation
of this passage is that Confucius must either think that people are too stupid
to understand dao or that it is better to keep people ignorant about dao. However, Cheng Yi argues that people cannot be made to know dao because dao,
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 602.
Ibid., 629.
119
Ibid., 435.
120
Ibid., 120.
121
Ibid., 779.
122
Analects 8.9.
117
118
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by its very nature, has to be known by oneself.123 Zhu Xi agrees on Cheng Yi’s
interpretation: “[P]eople can be made to do things. As regards knowledge, one
has to get it by oneself, and it is not something others can force on people. To
make them to do things without making them know them does not afect their
following the principle. By the time they realize the principle by themselves,
they will naturally do things.”124
However, Zhu Xi does not therefore follow Kant or Whiting’s Aristotle to
claim that virtues therefore cannot be taught, and people should be left alone
to igure out how to become virtuous by themselves. Although he often follows
Mencius, comparing a person who is not virtuous yet to a person who is asleep,
he does not want to push the analogy too far, since a person who is asleep can
sooner or later become awake by himself, while a person not virtuous yet has
to be awakened by others:
a person who is [morally] stupid does not know that he or she has a heartmind, just as a person asleep is unaware of his or her body. Although
asleep, when awakened [by others], the person becomes aware of his or
her body. he case with one’s heart-mind is similar. Although morally
stupid, when alerted [by others], the person can know the presence of
the heart-mind.125
Here Zhu Xi emphasizes the importance of waking up the person who is asleep.
When a student asks whether a person who becomes licentious can wake up
himself or herself by resuming self-control, Zhu Xi makes it clear that it is
impossible: “a person becomes licentious because the person is stupid. If the
person can wake up himself-herself, the person is not stupid, and if the person
is not stupid, he or she will not be licentious.”126
he question is then how a virtuous person can teach others to be virtuous,
when one can be virtuous ultimately only by oneself. In Zhu Xi’s view, the most
efective way to teach others to be virtuous is to set a personal example. Zhu
Xi believes that everyone has the virtues within, which are merely obscured by
selish desires in those who are not virtuous yet. So “if one cultivates one’s own
virtues, others will naturally be moved [ganhua 感化].”127 For this reason, “one
123
For a detailed discussion of Cheng’s interpretation, see Yong Huang, “Neo-Confucian
Hermeneutics at Work: Cheng Yi’s Philosophical Interpretation of Analects 8.9 and 17.3,” Harvard
heological Review 101 (2008): 169–201.
124
Zhu Xi , Collected Writings of ZHU Xi 朱熹集 (Chengdu 成都: Sichuan Jiaoyu Chubanshe
四川教育出版社, 1996), 1806.
125
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 179.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid., 480. In appearance, there is some tension between this view of teaching others by
personal examples and the view that we discussed earlier: a learner for the sake of oneself cares
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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can teach others to love their parents only if one loves his or her parents irst;
one can teach others to love their siblings only if one loves his or her siblings
irst. Other things are all the same”;128 “only when one has virtues and is without vice can one ask others to have virtues and blame others for having vice”;129
and “people must irst have this goodness and then they can extend it to others;
without this goodness oneself, how can one extend it to others?”130 It is in this
sense that Zhu Xi comments on Cheng Yi’s unique interpretation of one of the
opening sentences of the Analects: “How happy one is to receive friends coming
from afar.”131 In Cheng Yi’s view, the reason one is happy is that one’s goodness
is extended to others so that there are many followers. Zhu Xi approves this
interpretation.132 He claims that here one is not happy because having a large
number of followers shows that one is virtuous,
for since one already gets it, why should one be happy only after other
people follow oneself? One should know that what one has got for oneself
one also wants others to have. However, when there are only one or two
followers, one does not feel very happy. When there are a lot of people
following one (in becoming virtuous), how can one not be happy?
Of course, the way of setting up personal example (shenjiao 身教) does
not always work, and so some supplementary methods must also be used. For
example, Zhu Xi states, “if you do not know [what is inherent in you], I will
tell you so that you will know it; if you do not know how to practice, I do it
here in front of you and with you.”133 Here Zhu Xi mentions two additional
methods. he irst is teaching by words (yanchuan 言傳). In his view, while all
Confucian sages teach by personal examples, all classics by sages perform this
function of teaching by words. he second is to make people do good things
and not do bad things by rules of propriety and even punitive laws. It is true
that, when made to do good things and not to do bad things in this way, people
are not thereby virtuous. However, for Zhu Xi, at least people will not do bad
things. More importantly, if this method is always followed by the other two
about whether one gets virtue himself and not whether others know that one is virtuous, as to
teach others by personal example is predicated on the assumption that others know that one is
virtuous. Zhu Xi is aware of that: “When one’s moral action moves others so that there are many
followers, one should be happy; but if others do not know about one’s moral actions, one should
not be unhappy” (ibid., 406). What is crucial here is whether one wants to show that one is virtuous or desires others to be virtuous.
128
Ibid., 493.
129
Ibid., 319.
130
Ibid., 404.
131
Analects 1.1.
132
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 405.
133
Ibid., 204–5.
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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
methods, teaching by example and teaching by words, people will gradually
become clear about their virtues and become virtuous. In the passage we quoted
above on Analects 8.9, we have already seen that, for Zhu Xi, “to make them
do things without making them know them does not afect their following the
principle. By the time they realize the principle by themselves, they will naturally
do things.” When discussing this same Analects passage with his student, Zhu
Xi again claims that
“People can be made to follow dao but cannot be made to know it.” his
means that as long as they are practicing morality as a habit, they will
naturally experience and understand it. It is important “to encourage them
in their toil, put them on the right path, aid them and help them, let
them understand dao by themselves, and then help them establish their
virtues.”134 When you teach people, if you do not encourage them, put
them on the right path, help and assist them, and yet want them establish
their virtues, this is a short cut and not a way of teaching others.135
In short, for Zhu Xi, a truly virtuous person should be like the sage king
Shun, who “completes his own goodness, is good to others, and makes the goodness of others illuminating.”136 hus, Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can avoid the
self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on the deep level.
V.
he Self-Centeredness Objection on the Foundational Level. We have now
examined Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian response to the self-centeredness objection
to virtue ethics on both the surface level and the deep level as discussed by David Solomon, an advocate of virtue ethics himself. A virtuous person desires to
do virtuous things and takes delight in being virtuous. his, however, does not
mean that this person is self-centered. First, the things that a virtuous person
desires to do are virtuous things, things that require the person to be concerned
about the interest and welfare of others. Second, the interest and welfare of others that a virtuous person is concerned about is not limited to their external and
material beneits but also includes their characters. As we have seen, while both
Confucianism and Aristotelianism have resources for the former, clear evidence
for the latter can only be found in Confucianism.
Here Zhu Xi is quoting Mencius 3a4. My translation follows Zhu Xi’s understanding,
which may not be what Mencius or the sage King Yao means, as Mencius in that passage is quoting Yao.
135
Zhu Xi, Classiied Sayings, 1078; see also 242.
136
Ibid., 1161.
134
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However, the self-centeredness objection goes even deeper than anticipated
by Solomon. homas Hurka raises his objection to virtue ethics as foundationally egoistic. his objection agrees that a virtuous person is concerned with the
interest of others; it would also agree with Confucians that the interest of others a virtuous person is concerned with includes their characters; and it would
even agree that the virtuous person is concerned with the good, both external
and internal, of others for their sake and not merely for the sake of the agent
himself or herself. However, it claims that virtue ethics is still self-centered or
egoistic, for the virtuous person is concerned with the interest of others, including their characters, for their sake, ultimately because the person is concerned
with his or her own interest in fully realizing his or her virtue. In Hurka’s view,
virtue ethics
presupposes an egoistic theory of normative reasons whereby all a person’s
reasons for action derive from his lourishing. he resulting virtue-ethical
theory need not be egoistic in its substantive claims about action; it can
tell people to promote others’ pleasure and knowledge [and, we may add,
virtue] even at the expense of their own. Nor need it be egoistic about
motivation: it can say that to act virtuously, they must care about others’
pleasure and knowledge [and virtue] for its own sake. But it is what I
will call foundationally egoistic, insisting that their reasons to act and be
motivated in these ways derive ultimately from their own lourishing.137
Hurka’s objection here is partially a response to Julia Annas’s defense of virtue
ethics as being neither self-centered nor egoistic. In her defense, Annas makes a
distinction between self-centeredness in content and self-centeredness in form.
She claims that a virtuous person is not self-centered in content but can be
regarded as self-centered in form:
What I have to develop, in order to successfully achieve my inal good, are
the virtues. . . . [B]ut all virtues are dispositions to do the right thing, where
this is established in ways that are independent of my own interest. hus
the fact I aim at my own inal end makes ancient ethics formally agentcentered or self-centered, but does not make it self-centered in content.
. . . [A]chieving my inal good, happiness, whatever that turns out to be,
will involve respecting and perhaps furthering the good of others.138
Annas insists that a virtuous person, by being virtuous, is committed to
respecting and furthering the good of others for their sake and not merely as
instrumental to his or her own good or end. Nevertheless, Annas agrees that
Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 232; emphasis added.
Annas, he Morality of Happiness, 223.
137
138
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virtue ethics is self-centered in form, as a virtuous person respects and furthers the
good of others in his or her efort to achieve his or her own inal good. his, in
Hurka’s view, means “that they [virtue theories] connect all of a person’s reasons
for action to his own lourishing. Assuming his lourishing is a state of him, this
makes the theories egoistic in my foundational sense.”139 While Hurka can agree
that a virtuous person respects and furthers the good of others for their sake, he
or she does it in such a way that it is ultimately for his or her own sake. In other
words, a virtuous person is concerned with his own good, and yet due to the
nature of his own good (virtue), he has to be concerned with the good of others
and to be so for the sake of others. To use Richard Kraut’s terms, it is for one’s
own sake that a virtuous person should beneit others for their sake. While Kraut
himself inds it unintelligible to speak of “beneit[ing] others for their sake for
your own sake,”140 we can see the point that Hurka tries to make. On one level,
the virtuous person, in contrast to a prudential person, does beneit others for
their sake. If the person beneits others for the sake of himself or herself, whether
externally or internally, the person is not a virtuous person. However, on a foundational level, the virtuous person does so indeed for his or her own sake: to be
a virtuous person. Now, according to Hurka, it is “not virtuous—it is morally
self-indulgent—to act primarily from concern for one’s own virtue. Someone
motivated by the theory’s claims about reasons will therefore be motivated not
virtuously but in an unattractively self-indulgent way.”141
One way to respond to this self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on
the foundational level is that the virtuous person is fundamentally or ultimately
other-regarding. It is true that the virtuous person seeks his or her goal, but the
goal he or she sets for himself or herself is to respect and further the good of
others. In this sense, a virtuous person acts for her own sake only in the sense
that she seeks to realize her own goal, which is to respect and further the good
Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 232–3 n. 28.
Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 136.
141
Ibid., 246. It is important to point out that, in discussing the self-centeredness objection
to virtue ethics, we have been primarily focused on the eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics and
not its aretaic version, some advocates of which (such as Michael Slote) claim that it is immune
to such an objection (see footnote 49 in this article), as it focuses on what is admirable. However,
Hurka argues that this charge of foundational egoism is also applicable to aretaic virtue ethics, for
“even an aretaic theory says a person has reason to act rightly only because doing so will express
virtue on her part” (ibid., 246). In another place, Hurkas adds, “An aretaic theory likewise gives
a self-regarding explanation, that the action will be something admirable on the agent’s part, and
this is, again, not the right explanation. Because they focus so centrally on the agent’s virtue,
virtual-ethical theories ind the ultimate source of his reasons in himself, in what virtuous actions
will mean for his lourishing or admirability” (ibid., 248).
139
140
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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of others.142 In other words, a virtuous person is concerned with the good of
others. Only in the sense that the goal of respecting and furthering the good of
others is his or her own goal and not anyone else’s goal can the virtuous person
be regarded as being virtuous for his own sake. To imitate what Richard Kraut
says, it is to beneit others for my (agent’s) sake for their (patients’) sake. Kraut
himself would certainly regard it as equally unintelligible, but the implied idea
here is that, while (as Julia Annas says) the virtuous person aims at her own
lourishing “just in the sense that she is living her life and not mine,”143 the life
she lives is to respect and further the good of others. In this sense, the virtuous
person is essentially other-regarding. hus, if the self-centeredness objection
claims that virtue ethics reduces the good of others to the good of the agent,
this reply to the objection seems to claim that the good of the virtuous agent is
reduced to that of others. However, in this sense, Hurka claims that, instead of
self-indulgence, virtue ethics now turns to be self-efacing: virtue ethicists
can say that to lourish or express virtue, a person must act from genuinely virtuous motives, such as a desire for another’s pleasure for its own
sake. If she instead aims at her own lourishing or virtue, she does not
act from the required motives and so does not achieve the lourishing or
virtue that is her goal. his requires the theories to be what Parit calls
self-efacing, telling agents not to be motivated by or even to think of their
claims about the source of their reasons.144
his seems to Hurka ironic, because “some partisans of virtue ethics have
been vocal critics of the self-efacingness of consequential theories . . . but their
own theories have the same feature, if anything in a more disturbing way.”145
To avoid this dilemma between self-indulgence and self-efacingness, a correct
understanding of the nature of virtues, particularly Confucian virtues, is not to
see it as either foundationally self-indulgent (for the sake of oneself by acting
for the sake of others) or as foundationally self-efacing (for the sake of others
through acting for one’s own sake); it is rather to see it as both “to beneit others and to beneit oneself.” Moreover, it is not to see them as two independent
142
Christine Swanton, for example, argues that, “in defense of eudaimonism, one may claim
that reasons for ‘type or range X’ pertain to the point of X as a virtue, and that in turn is constituted
by the aim or target of X. So, for example, if X is the virtue of friendship, X-type reasons have to
do with expressing friendship in acts of afection, promoting the good of the friend, and so on.
No surreptitious or covert egoism seems lurking here. In short, reasons for type X derive from
the target of X and are not themselves reasons for a claim that X is a virtue” (Christine Swanton,
Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 79).
143
Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” in Oxford Handbook of Ethical heory, ed. David Coop
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 522.
144
Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 246.
145
Ibid.
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reasons, as Kraut says,146 as if a virtuous person can have one without having the
other or can have one before the other; it is rather to see them as two sides of
one and the same reason. As we have seen, a virtuous person in the Confucian
tradition cannot be an altruist (serving the interests of others) without taking
good care of one’s own great body, to use Mencius’ terms, which is his or her
heart/mind. In this sense, an altruist has to be an “egoist”; however, one cannot
be an “egoist” (taking care of one’s own great body) without serving the interests
of others. In this sense, an “egoist” has to be an altruist.
his point is made more vivid by Zhu Xi. As we have seen, Zhu Xi has a
very broad conception of selishness and a correspondingly broad conception
of sellessness. For Zhu Xi, a selish person is a person who is unwilling to share
with others not only his material possessions but also his skills and virtues,
and particularly relevant here is the last item. A person who is only concerned
about one’s own virtues but not about the virtues of other people is also a selish
person and for that reason is not a virtuous person. So a truly virtuous person
is a selless or altruistic person in the broadest sense, a person who is not only
concerned with others’ material and intellectual well-being but also their characters. In this sense, if asked why she acts altruistically, the virtuous person will
naturally reply, “Because I want to be an altruistic person.” However, it is at least
odd if Hurka wants to claim that such a person is still foundationally egoistic:
the person acts altruistically/sellessly only because the person wants to be an
altruistic person and not because he or she really wants to act altruistically. It is
odd because, obviously, we cannot claim that a person acts really altruistically
only when he or she does not want to be an altruistic person. In other words,
it is odd because we cannot claim that an altruistic person is an egoist even in
Hurka’s foundational sense. At the same time, however, we cannot say such a
person is self-efacing because it is the kind of person he or she wants to be, he
or she is happy in being such a person, and he or she inds his or her true self
in being such a person.147
hus, the two apparently antithetical ideas, egoism and altruism, the selfregarding and the other-regarding, or the self-indulgent and self-efacing, are
combined. Moreover, they are combined not in such a way that a virtuous person
is partially egoistic and partially altruistic or sometimes completely egoistic and
sometimes completely altruistic, but in a way that the person is completely “egoistic” and completely “altruistic” simultaneously: a virtuous person acts entirely
See Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 137.
I think this Confucian way of dealing with this issue is better than the way presented by
Barbara Herman, which seems to me more clever than convincing. According to Herman, instead
of being concerned with others’ well-being in order to be a virtuous person, a virtuous person is
concerned with others’ well-being because of his or her virtues (Barbara Herman, “Rules, Motives
and Helping Actions,” Philosophical Studies 45 [1984]: 369–77, at 370–1).
146
147
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
689
for the sake of one’s true self and so is completely egoistic; however, this is only
because the virtuous person deines his or her true self as one concerned with
the good of others and so is entirely altruistic. It is not correct to say that the
virtuous person is primarily or foundationally an “egoist” as if he or she takes
care of the interests of others only as a means to serve the interests of his or her
own true self, just as it is not correct to say that the virtuous person is primarily or foundationally an altruist as if he or she takes care of his or her own true
self only as a way to serve others. Rather, altruism and egoism here completely
overlap. As illustrated by the igure used by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical
Investigations, which looks like a duck in one way and a rabbit in another way,148
a virtuous person looks like an egoist in one way (he or she serves his or her
own goal: being an altruist) and an altruist in another way (he or she sets his or
her very goal to serve the interest of others). However, in Wittgenstein’s igure,
take away the rabbit, and you will not have the duck, and vice versa. Similarly,
in a virtuous person, take away egoism, and you will not have altruism left, and
vice versa.149
In this sense, it is wrong to ask, as a Kantian may well be tempted to ask,
whether a virtuous person does a virtuous thing because he or she thinks it is to
his or her interest or because the person thinks it is really a right thing to do. In
the Kantian view, if the former, the person does the virtuous thing for a wrong
reason; and only if the latter can the person’s action have any genuine moral
worth. In the Confucian virtue ethics, however, to be self-interested and to be
concerned with others are not only not contradictory, they are not even two things
that happen to coincide perfectly: they are actually one and same thing. When
one seeks one’s true self-interest, one must be performing moral actions; and
when one performs moral actions, one must be seeking one’s true self-interest.
hus, we can say that a person seeks the interest of others (is other-regarding)
precisely in order to seek one’s own interest (to be self-regarding); and we can
also say that a person seeks one’s own interest (is self-regarding) precisely in order
to seek the interest of others (to be other-regarding). To be self-interested in this
sense is identical to being interested in others. he very action that promotes the
interest of others, precisely when and because it promotes the interest of others, promotes one’s self-interest, as one’s self-interest is precisely to promote the
148
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edition
(New York: Macmillan, 1958), 194.
149
Although Brad Hooker thinks that it is not realistic, he does admit that, “for a deeply
virtuous person, the conlict between virtue and self-interest can fade to the point of invisibility.
If you have built your life around the project of being virtuous, then you may view any future for
you in which you spoil that project as inferior to any future for you in which [you] achieve it”
(Brad Hooker, “he Collapse of Virtue Ethics,” Utilitas 14 [2002]: 22–40, at 25).
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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
interest of others. hus, the more virtuous (more concerned with the interest of
others) a person is, the better his or her self-interest is served, and vice versa.
In this connection, I think Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of love is quite illuminating. According to Frankfurt, there are two aspects of love. On the one hand,
the inherent importance of loving is due precisely to the fact that loving
consists essentially in being devoted to the well-being of what we love. he
value of loving to the lover derives from his dedication to his beloved. As
for the importance of the beloved, the lover cares about what he loves for
its own sake; . . . however, what he loves necessarily possesses an instrumental value for him, in virtue of the fact that it is a necessary condition
of his enjoying the inherently important activity of loving it.150
hese two aspects are so closely interwoven that, for Frankfurt, it is foolish to
ask whether I love someone for the sake of the beloved or for the sake of my
own enjoyment in loving the person. He uses the following example to illustrate
his point:
Consider a man who tells a woman that his love for her is what gives
meaning and value to his life . . . the woman is unlikely to feel . . . that
what the man is telling her implies that he does not really love her at all,
and that he cares about her only because it makes him feel good. From
his declaration that his love for her fulills a deep need of his life, she will
surely not conclude that he is making use of her.151
So what is most distinctive of virtue ethics in general and Confucian virtue
ethics in particular is that, when a virtuous person takes care of the interest of
others, he or she does not have to overcome his or her inclination. Instead, one
takes delight in being concerned with others because by being concerned with
others one satisies one’s desire, achieves one’s goal, realizes one’s true self, and
therefore feels happy.
However, it might be asked why it is not enough simply to be moral or why
one must also take delight in being so. his is perhaps also what is behind the
self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics. When asked why a virtuous person
should beneit others, virtue ethics explains, in the end, that “this will make his
life better or admirable, but that is, intuitively, not the right explanation. he
Harry G. Frankfurt, he Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
150
59.
151
Ibid., 60. In addition to the parental love for children, Philippa Foot also uses the example
of friendship to make the same point: “What friendship requires a friend to do for a friend may
indeed be onerous, involving even life itself. But what is done in friendship is done gladly, con
amore” (Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 102).
The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi
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right explanation is that it will make the other’s life better.”152 To respond, irst
of all, we have to agree that the moral life recommended by virtue ethics is a
better life for the agent than the lives recommended by alternative theories of
ethics. For example, Michael Stocker asks, “what sort of life would people live
who did their duties but never or rarely wanted to?”153 Obviously, whether such
a life is good for moral patients or not, this cannot be a good life for the moral
agent, as the agent has to make a great efort to overcome his or her natural
inclinations in order to perform moral actions and therefore cannot take delight
in performing such actions. his is made most clear by Kant’s separation of
morality from happiness. Of course, critics of virtue ethics think that whether a
moral life is good to the agent is irrelevant or at least not important; what matters is whether it is good for moral patients. However, contrary to what we may
normally think, such moral actions as recommended by Kant are hardly good
for moral patients either. To see this, let us look at Michael Stocker’s following
hypothetical scenario:
Suppose you are in a hospital, recovering from a long illness. You are very
bored and restless and at loose ends when Smith comes in once again.
You are now convinced more than ever that he is a ine fellow and a real
friend—taking so much time to cheer you up, traveling all the way across
town, and so on. You are so efusive with your praise and thanks that
he protests that he always tries to do what he thinks is his duty, what
he thinks will be best. . . . [T]he more you two speak, the more clear it
becomes that . . . it is not essentially because of you that he came to see
you, not because you are friends, but because he thought it his duty . . .
or simply because he knows of no one more in need of cheering up and
no one easier to cheer up.154
his example shows clearly that only when and because a virtuous person’s action
beneiting others makes the agent’s life better can it make his or her patient’s life
better. In other words, virtue does make a diference with one’s action.155
Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 249.
Michael Stocker, “he Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical heories,” in Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, ed. Daniel Statman (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press 1997), 67.
154
Ibid., 74.
155
A critic like Brad Hooker also agrees that, on the view that virtue is intrinsically morally
valuable, “a world containing virtue would be a morally better world even if it contained no different behavior, no more happiness, and no more of everything else valuable. Is this view right? Is
there less moral value in my doing the same thing you’re doing, if you’re doing it out of a genuinely
good character and I’m doing it out of compulsion or fear of punishment? he answer seemed to
be, ‘Yes’” (Hooker, “he Collapse of Virtue Ethics,” 25–6). he only disagreement I have is that
when one acts virtuously, there will always be more happiness, with regard to both the agent and
the patient, than when one acts with compulsion or fear. So I think he is wrong to claim that “not
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VI.
Conclusion. In this article, I assume, without argument, that Confucianism
in general and Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism in particular is a virtue ethics, a type
of ethical theory that has emerged or, rather, has been revived in the Western
philosophical world in the last few decades. My interest is to explore the possible
contribution that Confucianism, even if it is not a virtue ethics, can make to
contemporary virtue ethics. With this in mind, I focus on the self-centeredness
objection to virtue ethics in this essay. he objection states that, since virtue ethics
recommends that we be concerned with our own virtues or virtuous characters,
it is self-centered. In response, I argue that, for Zhu Xi, the self that a virtuous
person is concerned with is constituted by precisely such virtues as to incline
him or her to be concerned with the good of others. While such an answer is
also available to Aristotelian eudaimonistic virtue ethics, I argue that Zhu Xi’s
neo-Confucianism can better respond to the objection on a deeper lever. On
this level, it claims that, while a virtuous person, as in the eudaimonistic virtue
ethics, is concerned with the external and material goods of others, he or she is
concerned with his or her own character. Since virtue ethics thinks that one’s
character is more important than material beneits, virtue ethics is self-centered in
this deeper sense. I argue that a virtuous person in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism,
unlike one in Aristotelianism, is virtuous because the person takes care of not
only the material well-being but also the character traits of others. Moreover,
Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can respond to the self-centeredness objection on
a foundational level (that a virtuous person promotes the good, both internal
and external, of others, ultimately for the sake of his or her own good). I argue
that, in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism, one’s concern with oneself and one’s concern with others are inseparable, and therefore one cannot say which is more
foundational or ultimate.156
Kutztown University
Kutztown, Pennsylvania
every more virtuous life contains more personal good than every less virtuous life. Virtue is not
necessarily a personal good of lexically greater value than others” (ibid., 25).
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I would like to thank Michael Slote, the irst reader of the initial draft of the paper,
and homas Hurka, the commentator on an earlier version of this paper when it was read at
a panel at APA Paciic in Vancouver in 2009. I beneitted greatly from their comments. I also
want to express thanks for the comments made by Steve Angle, Kenneth Dortor, P. J. Ivanhoe,
Justin Tiwald, Tong Shijun, Richard Stichler, Zhang Rulun, Yang Guorong, Yu Jiyuan, and
many others when an earlier version of this paper was read on several other occasions. Finally,
my gratitude goes to an anonymous reviewer of this journal as well as its editorial staf for their
helpful suggestions for revision.