김성문. 2017. “Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy.”
Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy
Sungmoon Kim
Philosophy East and West, Volume 67, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 3-14
(Article)
Published by University of Hawai’i Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2017.0001
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643854
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Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy
Sungmoon Kim
Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong
sungmkim@cityu.edu.hk
In the past two decades, normative Confucian political theory has emerged as one of
the most vibrant subfields of political theory, spawning a variety of philosophical
thoughts, normative ideas, and institutional suggestions that are relevant to the
modern societal context of Confucian East Asia. Ideas such as “Confucian democ
racy” and “Confucian constitutionalism” are no longer considered oxymoronic or
conceptually impossible, and scholars in this field continue to develop their theories
from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. What is still missing, though, is a
philosophical construction that intertwines Confucianism not only with democracy
(or constitutionalism) but also with other important philosophical values that are
integral to any viable idea of the good life, such as legitimate political authority, per
sonal autonomy, distributive principle, and human rights. Joseph Chan’s Confucian
Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times fills this important lacuna in
contemporary Confucian political theory by providing one of the most sophisticated
philosophical accounts of modern Confucianism in which classical Confucian phi
losophy is reconstructed from a perfectionist standpoint in a way compatible with
democracy and other normative concepts and values. In the present essay, I focus on
Chan’s perfectionist justification of democracy with special attention to his service
conception of authority, from which he derives the service conception of political
rights and the largely instrumental conception of democracy. I critically discuss
whether Chan’s service conception of authority and political rights can consistently
support his political theory of democracy and human rights.1
Extending the Service Conception to Political Rights
Chan’s Confucian perfectionism is premised on the foundational idea of political
authority, the central purpose of which lies in serving for the benefit of the governed.
Drawing on classical Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi (as
well a pre-Confucian text like the Book of History), Chan is strongly convinced that
the sole justification of political authority in Confucianism consists in protecting and
promoting the people’s well-being. According to Chan, the service conception of
political authority stipulates that “the office’s value is entirely instrumental to, or
derived from, the worth of the people, and the features of the office — the power, re
spect, and emolument that come with it — are justified ultimately with reference to its
instrumental function” (p. 30).2 It should be noted that although Chan borrows the
term “service” from the much celebrated idea of the service conception of political
authority of Joseph Raz, and that the service conceptions of both Raz and Chan share
Philosophy East & West Volume 67, Number 1 January 2017 3–14
© 2017 by University of Hawai‘i Press
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similar instrumental justification, Chan’s conception of service differs importantly
from that of Raz, focused on practical reason for better compliance rather than good
consequences or outputs of governance.3
Chan’s interpretation of the Confucian conception of political authority in terms
of imperium (i.e., the legitimate right to govern within a jurisdiction) as opposed to
dominium (i.e., ownership right) is thought-provoking, not only in light of the longheld view of Confucian authority in terms of Oriental despotism but also given the
traditional Confucian endorsement of one-man monarchism and royal transmission
by hereditary right.4 Putting aside the exegetical issue, what is even more thought-
provoking about the service conception of Confucian authority is the normative
implications that Chan draws from it for political rights in general (as well as for
democracy, as will be discussed shortly). Since the sole justification of political au
thority is to serve the ruled, argues Chan, “political rights attached to this authority
are justified instrumentally by the contribution they make to the betterment of peo
ple’s lives” (p. 32). That is, there is no natural right to political power as such, by
either the ruler or the people. Here Chan is not merely saying that this is what ancient
Confucians believed — a claim that is less controversial, if not hardly surprising.
Rather, he draws a general normative principle, which he then directly applies to his
modern Confucian political theory. He says:
Political rights are not fundamental moral rights that belong to individuals but are more
on a par with the rights of officials such as the police, who have rights because their
proper exercise of them can protect and promote the well-being of the people. Theoreti
cally one could extend this view to a general view about all political rights, a view that is
not articulated in Confucianism but which can be regarded as a natural extension of, or
at least fully compatible with, its core political ideas. The general view is that the distribu
tion of political rights or powers, and the institutional form that these rights or powers
take, should be evaluated by the service conception. (p. 32)
I agree that the service conception of authority, granting its interpretative validity, can
justify the claim that there is no natural right for the ruler to rule and that his govern
ment must be a sort of limited government. I also agree that the Confucian discourse
of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命) can lend support to the idea of political
authority as imperium.5 What is unclear is how the general view that concerns all
political rights, which are directly relevant to contemporary East Asians, can be
derived from the service conception of authority itself. The textual evidence that
Chan appeals to uniformly points to the ruler’s legitimate (and arguably limited)
authority, but it says nothing about the rights possessed (or not possessed) by the
people. Apparently, what Chan has in mind here is not just to reinforce the truism
that Confucianism is a total stranger to the discourse of rights. Underlying Chan’s
statement is a new normative conception of political right, the exercise of which is
justified only if it serves the well-being of the people. Its political implications are
rather dramatic if we apply this conception of political right to ordinary citizens. For
instance, in this conception of political right, not all human beings have the right to
belong to a particular political community unless one has proven his or her service
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in the interests of others. But if one’s right to citizenship itself is justified only instru
mentally, how can one (say, an immigrant or a refugee) acquire citizenship in the first
place?
Another troubling case is the right to political participation, the right to have
rights according to some political theorists.6 Suppose that someone who is extremely
poor has been unable to make substantive contributions to the well-being of others
due to his or her dire condition. Does this mean that this person has no right to reg
ister his or her political opinions with the government? Would Chan argue that this
person has no right to political participation? It is one thing for the Confucian con
ception of political authority (which concerns only the ruler) to be best interpreted in
terms of imperium or service, but it is quite another for all political rights (which
concern everyone), therefore, to be justified by the service conception. It seems im
plausible to derive the latter claim from the former. There is a logical jump between
two claims, and, as Chan admits, there is no direct Confucian evidence to support
the latter claim.
Alternatively, we can make sense of Chan’s statement as meaning that one’s po
litical right is not absolute and should always be put in balance with others’ rights
and the common good.7 I think this is a more sensible view because it gives serious
attention to the importance of care and responsibility in the exercise of one’s rights,
the values Confucian virtue ethics strongly endorses, without radically reconceptual
izing the idea of political right itself. However, Chan’s service conception of political
right does not seem to go in this direction as it denies one’s prima facie right, qua
human being, to have any political right in the first place unless the right in question
has (reasonable) instrumental justification. A series of questions arises. Who decides
whether or not one has political rights, and how is this authority to be selected where
people have no right to vote? Who decides what kinds of political rights one has a
legitimate claim to have? If one’s political rights are proportional to his or her service
for the well-being of others, how can their weight and scope be determined without
violating the moral standards of impartiality and fairness? Even if the weight and
scope of political right can somehow be determined, if they vary depending on one’s
contribution to the well-being of others, in what sense can we call this a right rather
than merit?
Human Rights as a Fallback Apparatus?
In chapter 5, Chan fully engages with the question of human rights from a classical
Confucian perspective and advocates what he calls a moderate compatibility thesis,
which he summarizes as follows:
Confucians today, therefore, would approach the value and function of human rights in
the same way that early Confucian thinkers approached litigation. Human rights are not
necessary to the expression of human dignity, nor are they constitutive of virtues or virtu
ous relationships. In a nonideal situation, however, they can serve as an important fall
back apparatus to protect one’s basic interests and needs. (pp. 125–126)
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If approached independently of Chan’s earlier discussion of the service conception
of political rights and if it is agreed that human rights are distinct from political rights,
this statement should not be problematic among Confucian political theorists. Chan’s
discussion of an undignified relationship between a husband and a wife in John
Tomasi’s imaginary story is quite compelling — that “[t]he basis of self-respect . . .
need not lie in the fact that [the wife] has rights, but in the belief that she is worthy of
care and concern and that her well-being matters. . . . What she ought to do [then] is
to remind her husband of the ideal of mutual love and caring” (p. 123). But when the
marriage breaks down completely, Chan continues, the wife can fall back on formal
and legal rights in order to protect her interests.
The question is whether Chan’s endorsement of Confucian rights as a fallback
apparatus comports well with his service conception of political rights. There are
several problems. First, Chan’s service conception of political rights is based on the
ethics of consequentialism, but the idea of rights as a fallback mechanism, which
Chan took from Jeremy Waldron, is purely deontological (and Waldron famously
begins his essay by defending Kant against communitarians, old and new, including
Hegel).8
The second problem is more serious and requires a bit more of an explanation.
Following the claim above, Chan may then argue that political rights and human
rights are categorically different, and that while human rights can be justified deon
tologically as a fallback apparatus when affection dries out and virtuous relationships
break down, political rights must be justified instrumentally by the service concep
tion. I am not sure that political rights can be completely severed from human rights,
and as far as I know no (contemporary) legal and political philosopher maintains
such a rigid severance between the two. Waldron’s own discussion of rights as a
fallback mechanism would be helpful here, precisely because Chan borrowed this
concept from Waldron and made no qualification when doing so (unlike when he
borrowed the concept of “service” from Raz as noted earlier). First of all, when ad
vancing his idea of rights as a fallback, Waldron discusses “rights” in general, not
specifically “human rights,” understood as categorically distinct from political rights.
His overall goal in his essay was to shed new light on the liberal-communitarian
controversy. Consider Waldron’s concluding statement:
The debate is not between those who see social life as constitutively communal and those
who do not. Nor is it between community and the values of bare individualism. It is
between those who, on the one hand, yearn for communal bonds so rigid that the ques
tion of what happens when they come apart will not arise or need to be faced, and, on
the other hand, those who are, first, realistic enough to notice the tragedy of the broken
bond and ask “What happens next?”; and, second, optimistic enough to embrace the
possibility of the construction of new bonds and new connections, and ask “How is that
possible?”9
So, when advancing the idea of rights as a fallback, Waldron is not concerned with
the (problematic) distinction between human and political rights. His concern is
thoroughly political in the sense that he advocates rights to be something for those
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who find themselves outside the existing communal bonds — such as refugees, immi
grants, gays, and other minorities and marginalized individuals — to be able to fall
back on to challenge the existing types of relationships and further launch new and
legitimate social relationships without fear. (Here Waldron draws renewed attention
to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.) Waldron asserts that the job of legal rules and
legal rights is “to constitute a nonaffective framework for actions which are novel
from a communal point of view [without which] the creative human desire for new
initiatives faces a terrifying vacuum.”10
Chan’s appropriation of Waldron’s fallback idea goes in a different direction. Not
only does he (seem to) distinguish between human rights and political rights, but,
more importantly, he relocates the rights-as-fallback idea in the ideal-nonideal frame
work and endorses (human) rights only in the nonideal situation. Furthermore, by
“nonideal situation” Chan largely means a complete breakdown of otherwise happy
familial or communal bonds, which gives rise to the circumstances of legal justice,
but not the kinds of situations in which minorities and marginalized individuals
often find themselves. The result is a rather quotidian, philosophically less interesting
statement about rights-as-fallback — namely, that rights are unnecessary in the ideal
situation, but necessary in the nonideal situation. But here the real question that is
philosophically far more interesting and politically more important remains un
touched: Can rights play a part in generating new relationships, such as civil relation
ships among strangers, which enable them to enter into meaningful and legitimate
social, economic, and political interactions? The rights in question are fundamental
human rights as they are supremely concerned with people’s survival and flourish
ing as social beings, while at the same time they are quintessentially political rights
as they are conceived of as “rights” against the backdrop of inequality, discrimi
nation, oppression, or even annihilation. Given Chan’s service conception of polit
ical rights, I do not know how these sorts of rights can ever be justified in his political
theory.
Of course, Chan can only borrow the concept of “fallback” from Waldron and
advance his own theory of rights in a different way. Perhaps he could reconceptualize
the very concept of rights from the Confucian perspective, with closer attention to
virtue, relationship, or ritual.11 Or he could argue that the service conception of po
litical authority gives lexical priority to socioeconomic rights over civil and political
rights,12 or that the Confucian service conception of political authority enables us to
regard socioeconomic rights as core political rights and embrace these rights as con
stitutional essentials, which even liberals who are deeply concerned with economic
inequalities (including John Rawls, the champion of the “difference principle”) are
most reluctant to do.13 At any rate, Chan’s understanding of rights-as-fallback is quali
tatively different from that of Waldron, who is an anti-perfectionist,14 and he explores
neither a uniquely Confucian conception of rights nor a distinctively Confucian way
of thinking about the lexical ordering among various kinds of rights. Most impor
tantly, Chan’s idea of a rights-as-fallback apparatus is disjointed, even incompatible,
with his general view of (political) rights, justified by the service conception. It is
difficult to understand how Chan’s idea of rights-as-fallback, the justification of
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which is strongly deontological, can be simultaneously justified instrumentally, that
is, in a way consistent with his overall perfectionist standpoint.
Democracy without Popular Sovereignty or Political Equality
While Chan does not establish a vivid philosophical connection between his service
conception of political rights and his idea of rights-as-fallback, he draws direct impli
cations from the service conception of political authority and political rights for his
normative idea of democracy. Following David Beetham,15 Chan defines democracy
as “a mode of decision making about collectively binding rules and policies over
which the people exercise control” (p. 83). This is a rather conventional definition
of democracy. What is striking, however, is Chan’s substantive understanding of
democracy when he says,
No doubt democracy as a political system gives power to the people and distributes votes
equally. But such a system need not be justified by, or be seen to express, popular sover
eignty or political equality as a moral principle or ideal. . . . I suggest that the institution
of democracy can be disconnected from such moral principles. (p. 85)
Before discussing this “striking” aspect of Chan’s idea of democracy, let us first exam
ine how he justifies his particular conception of democracy with reference to the
service conception of political authority and political rights.
As noted, in Chan’s view, the service conception “affirms the primacy of the
people, not in terms of their political rights, but in terms of their worth” (p. 33).
The implication, again as noted earlier, is that neither the ruler nor the ruled (i.e., the
people) possess a natural right to political power. Convinced that the service concep
tion of political authority applies to both the ruler and the ruled, and perhaps iden
tifying the people, as conceived by ancient Confucians, directly with modern citizens,
Chan then says something remarkable about “citizenship”:
Because citizenship is a form of political office, it too needs to be justified according to
the service conception. It is necessary to ask whether such an institutional arrangement
serves the well-being of the people. There is no natural citizenship just as there is no nat
ural rulership. . . . [T]his view is not a rejection of democracy as a set of political institu
tions but a rejection of a certain way of justifying democracy, one that appeals to a
fundamental moral right of political participation or sovereign rule of the people. Reject
ing such a rights-based justification of democracy is entirely compatible with justifying
democracy instrumentally as a means of achieving certain goods, such as the protection
and promotion of the people’s well-being. (pp. 32–33)
There is no denying that citizenship is a form of political office, but this does not
necessarily lead to Chan’s subsequent claim that citizenship, therefore, “needs” to be
justified according to the service conception. Where does this “need” come from?
But even before raising this question, there are even more fundamental questions.
Chan takes for granted that citizenship is a form of political office, but he offers no
explanation as to why this is so, nor why we (should) even have citizenship in a
modern Confucian society.
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Traditional Confucianism is, admittedly, a total stranger to the institution of citi
zenship. Until the late nineteenth century the term “citizenship,” let alone its polit
ical office, was nonexistent in the pre-republican Confucian societies of both China
and Korea. What this implies is that citizenship is not analogous, conceptually as
well as politically, to “the people” or “the ruled.” Citizenship is a political relation
ship among free and equal citizens — however we define “free” and “equal” here —
and in modern society its institution or political office is established by the con
stitution. In East Asia, citizenship was not created by the internal evolution of
Confucianism, but was rather externally introduced with the collapse of one-man
monarchies and the subsequent establishment of republics. In a sense, modern East
Asian history can be recapitulated in terms of a radical and painstaking transforma
tion of the people (min 民) as royal subjects into self-governing citizens. Citizenship
is an important political office precisely because it presupposes collective self-
government, and Beetham’s definition of democracy above points precisely to this
self-governing (and self-binding) aspect of democracy. Seen in this way, Chan’s claim
that “there is no natural citizenship just as there is no natural rulership” is hard to
make sense of because the first part (“there is no natural citizenship”) is logically
independent of whether or not there is natural rulership. Citizenship is inconceivable
in the absence of free and equal citizens, and citizens are created politically (and
legally). In other words, “natural citizenship” is an oxymoron from a philosophical
standpoint.
The trouble is that Chan employs the term “citizenship” as a political concept
and institution without embracing the underlying substantive moral values, most im
portantly political equality. Instead, he argues that given its political importance,
citizenship must be morally justified by the service conception, implying that citizen
ship (and I suppose the rights and duties associated with it) ought to be distributed
unequally in proportion to one’s contribution to the well-being of others. Though this
line of reasoning brings us back to our earlier questions of who should be the distrib
utor of citizenship in the virtual absence of the Son of Heaven (more accurately the
sage-king) and how this authority can be selected without any moral controversy,
I do not necessarily find the normative position itself implausible, if the regime in
question is not a democracy. And if this is to advocate a nondemocratic form of re
gime, we can enter a different kind of philosophical debate, for instance, on the dis/
value of democracy or the de/merit of its nondemocratic alternative. (One should be
reminded that Aristotle defined aristocracy in terms of merit and democracy in terms
of equal power.) However, this is not what Chan intends here because he explicitly
frames his political theory in terms of democratic theory. This leads us to one of the
most striking parts of his normative theory.
Once again, let us begin by revisiting Chan’s service conception of political au
thority. Chan argues based on ancient classics that the single justification of rulership
in Confucianism lies in serving the well-being of the people, then draws the same
service implication for political rights of the people. We can make sense of, and even
concede to, Chan’s reasoning in the ancient Chinese context because, after all, as
Chan rightly notes, ancient Confucians, particularly Xunzi, justified class distinctions
Sungmoon Kim
9
and social differentiations (or, in today’s terms, social and political rights) on the
basis of differing merits achieved by individuals.16 Here we see neither an idea nor
an institution of citizenship, and the overall character of this ideal Confucian regime
is aristocratic, which is institutionally buttressed by the monarchical political struc
ture. Of course, the regime’s nondemocratic character is not a problem for Xunzi
or other ancient Confucians as they held no commitment to democracy or equal
citizenship.17
Chan, however, attempts to apply this ancient Confucian insight without much
modification to the modern world and to make it compatible with the ideas of citi
zenship and representative democracy — hence his service conception of citizen
ship and instrumental justification of democracy. More specifically, Chan embraces
only democracy’s political institutions (mainly election) while rejecting democracy’s
constitutive moral principles such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the
right to political participation — values incompatible with ancient Confucianism. But
how can one have both — ancient Confucian aristocracy and modern representative
democracy — without developing an internal contradiction? In the ancient Confucian
(say, Xunzian) monarchical-cum-aristocratic world, the agency problem that we have
been grappling with so far (i.e., who distributes citizenship and other political rights
and how this distributor is selected) does not even arise because the agent (i.e., the
Son of Heaven) is always there, predetermined by his hereditary right to the throne,
and he (and his officials) can legitimately distribute political power and rights among
the people equitably but not equally, based on their merits or contributions.18
In marked contrast, the agency problem is at the heart of democracy. If people do
not have the right to govern themselves as citizens (note that here we are talking
about political or constitutional rights, not natural rights), on what moral ground can
we employ election to select their political representatives? If people are not politi
cally equal as citizens and their political rights are proportional to their services,
contributions, or merits, on what moral ground should they each equally have one
vote? In chapter 3, however, when Chan upholds the selection model of political
representation (following Jane Mansbridge), he does not seem to deny the demo
cratic principle of one person, one vote. However, if all political rights must be justi
fied by the service conception, on what moral ground can Chan consistently support
this principle? If, to be consistent with his general idea of the service conception of
political rights, Chan indeed believes that a right to vote should be distributed pro
portionally according to one’s service, contribution, or merit, then who performs
the initial distribution in a democratic society? Also, if some people deserve more
votes (or more political rights in general) because of their merit, what is the point of
having an election? Why not just let them govern us, if we can identify them with any
objectivity?
Election as such is not a democratic institution, if it is decoupled from demo
cratic principles of popular election, political equality, and the right to political par
ticipation. The early J. S. Mill believed in the plural voting system, which allowed the
educated elites multiple votes, and no one regards him a democratic thinker. Like
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wise, many African countries have institutionalized competitive and regular elections
after democratization in the 1960s, but few of them are considered truly democratic
precisely because elections there are not tethered with underlying democratic prin
ciples of popular sovereignty and political equality. In many newly “democratized”
African countries, competitive election is casually juxtaposed with a variety of forms
of authoritarianism — hence a new neologism like “competitive authoritarianism.”19
We cannot call this sort of polity a democracy.
Certainly, Chan does not advocate any semblance of competitive authoritarian
ism. But when political perfectionism is connected to the service conception of po
litical rights (including the right to vote) and democracy is severed from its constitutive
principles, I am not sure how the regime in question can be called democratic. All in
all, there is a striking tension between Chan’s substantive understanding of de
mocracy and his definition of democracy, which he borrowed from David Beetham,
who, quite ironically, believes in political equality and free and equal rights, includ
ing the right to vote.20
Democracy’s Expressive Value: A Rescue?
Chan may challenge this undemocratic interpretation of his political theory by draw
ing attention to what he calls the expressive value of democracy. In fact, Chan does
not understand the value of democracy purely in terms of its instrumental value or its
service in “bring[ing] about certain effects that are desirable in the view of Confucian
thought” (p. 85). He also notes a positive expressive relationship between democracy
and Confucianism:
Recall that the Confucian ideal political relationship is marked by mutual commitment
and trust — the rulers are committed to governing the people in a trustworthy and caring
manner, and the ruled, in return, express their willing endorsement and support of their
rulers. Democracy can also be understood as a political system that expresses such an
ideal political relationship. (p. 85)
Chan may challenge the notion that as long as democracy is additionally (in addition
to the service conception) justified by its expressive value of mutual commitment and
trust between the ruler and the ruled, there is virtually no possibility for his Confu
cian democracy to deteriorate into a state of competitive authoritarianism. The chal
lenge is fair enough but does this say anything about democracy itself? Note that just
as he previously derived the general service conception of political rights for modern
East Asians directly from the ancient Confucian service conception of political au
thority, so Chan here derives the expressive value of democratic authority, germane
to modern East Asians, directly from the ancient Confucian accounts of the constitu
tive relationship between the ruler and the ruled.
As Chan rightly notes, the constitutive or ethical relationship between the ruler
and the ruled is in itself good from the perspective of Confucianism, and thus is
justified noninstrumentally in Confucianism. From the standpoint of democracy,
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however, the ethical relationship between the ruler and the ruled is one of the posi
tive byproducts of democratic procedures such as election, not an intrinsic value of
democracy. That is, we do not pursue democracy primarily for the sake of the ethical
relationship between the ruler and the ruled (which was the telos of traditional
Confucian virtue politics) but rather as a political arrangement that can best realize
collective self-government by free and equal citizens — which could and often does
result in an ethical relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Democracy’s non
instrumental or intrinsic values consist of moral principles and values that underlie
what democracy as a political ideal and practice stands for — again, popular sover
eignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. If (Confucian) de
mocracy’s noninstrumental values lie solely in the ethical relationship between the
ruler and the ruled, but not in democracy’s core intrinsic values, why should we
prefer democracy as a political system to other alternative forms of political regime
that may better achieve an ethical relationship between the ruler and the ruled — say,
rule by nondemocratically selected judges, rule by Confucian scholar-officials, or
rule by the enlightened benevolent monarch? What is the moral ground for choosing
democracy in the presence of such viable competitors?
For ancient Confucians, this was not a problem because who should be the ruler
and the ruled was a settled question. Their sole task was to make the existing rela
tionship between the ruler and the ruled ethical. In a democracy, however, the
ruled (the co-subjects) themselves are simultaneously the co-rulers. Put differently,
while the traditional Confucian idea of “people” captures only the co-subject dimen
sion, the idea of democratic citizenship speaks for both the co-ruler and co-subject
dimensions of the sovereign people. After all, ancient Confucians were fully con
vinced that an ethical relationship between the ruler and the ruled is perfectly achiev
able under one-man absolutism. Then, the question boils down to this: how does
Chan’s perfectionist Confucian democracy account for the co-ruler dimension of
democracy? If he rejects this dimension of democracy along with popular sover
eignty and political equality, how can the regime he espouses reasonably be called
a democracy, and how can the citizenship he seems to acknowledge be qualitatively
different from ancient Confucian peoplehood?
Conclusion
I must acknowledge that critiquing is a much easier job than constructing a theory,
and to that extent this essay does not do full justice to Chan’s complex political
theory of Confucian perfectionism, to which many important contemporary philo
sophical concepts and political practices are integral. My primary task in this essay
has been to raise questions regarding some further-reaching philosophical implica
tions of Chan’s service conception of political authority for political rights and de
mocracy and to examine how they cohere with his overall philosophical framework.
It is my hope that clarifying the issues discussed in this essay will engage Confucian
political theorists in more exciting philosophical explorations.
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Notes
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant f unded
by the Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2043763). I am grateful to Jiwei Ci,
Chenyang Li, P. J. Ivanhoe, David Wong, Roger Ames, Elton Chan, Yvonne Chiu, and
Steve Angle for their verbal or written comments on the earlier version of the paper
presented at the workshop called “A Wary Embrace of Democracy: Joseph Chan’s
Confucian Perfectionism,” held at the University of Hong Kong in May 2015. Special
thanks are due to Joseph Chan for his patient and constructive engagement with my
criticisms.
1 – For my engagement with Chan’s idea of Confucian political perfectionism, see
Sungmoon Kim, Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and
Constitutionalism in East Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
2 – All paginations in parentheses in this essay are taken from Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 2014).
3 – For Raz’ service conception of political authority, see his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 53–57. Chan acknowledges this cru
cial difference on p. 30 n. 4.
4 – See Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the
Warring States Era (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 71–76;
Henry Rosemont, Jr., “State and Society in the Xunzi: A Philosophical Commen
tary,” in Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi, ed. T. C. Kline III and
Philip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 1–38.
5 – But we should not forget that tianming can simultaneously justify the ruler’s
absolute authority as it actually did during the Han dynasty. It should also
be noted that throughout Chinese history, tianming has occasionally been ap
pealed to for the ex post facto justification of usurpation of power or dynastic
change. On this double-edged aspect of tianming, see Alan T. Wood, Limits
to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confucianism to a Doctrine of Political Rights
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), pp. 8–16.
6 – See Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), chap. 11.
7 – This line of argument has been pursued by David B. Wong, “Rights and Com
munity in Confucianism,” in Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self,
Autonomy, and Community, ed. Kwong-loi Shun and David B. Wong (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 31– 48.
8 – Jeremy Waldron, “When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need of Rights,” in
Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 370–391.
Sungmoon Kim
13
9 – Ibid., p. 391.
10 – Ibid., p. 377.
uman,”
11 – For such attempts, see D.W.Y. Kwok, “On the Rites and Rights of Being H
and Chung-ying Cheng, “Transforming Confucian Virtues into Human Rights,”
both in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu
Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 83–93 and 142–
153, respectively.
12 – Daniel A. Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian
Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 237–243.
13 – Sungmoon Kim, “Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights: A Mencian
Perspective,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74, no. 1 (2015):
149–185, at pp. 177–178.
14 – See Jeremy Waldron, “Autonomy and Perfectionism in Raz’s Morality of Freedom,” Southern California Law Review 62 (1988): 1097–1152.
15 – David Beetham, “Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Democratization,” in
Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East, West, ed. David Held (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 55.
16 – Also see Chenyang Li, “Equality and Inequality in Confucianism,” Dao 11
(2012), pp. 295–313.
17 – Eric L. Hutton, “Un-Democratic Values in Plato and Xunzi,” in Polishing the
Chinese Mirror, ed. Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn (New York: Global
Scholarly Publications, 2008), pp. 313–330.
18 – I also take issue with Chan’s separation between democratic institutions and
democratic social conditions, in Sungmoon Kim, Confucian Democracy in East
Asia: Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
pp. 82–86.
19 – Steven Levitsky and Lucian A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid
Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
20 – See David Beetham, “Democratic Quality: Freedom and Rights,” an unpub
lished essay available online at http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20433/Freedom_
and_Rights.pdf.
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Philosophy East & West