Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

Thus, the concepts of moral responsibility in China and the West are different in their representations, evaluations, and self-deceptions. Moreover, these have incurred substantial changes in each civilization. In China, too, the concept of self (moral self and/or natural self) underwent evolutionary changes, but it took quite a different direction from the West.¹⁸ The concern over an interior life benefited from the conflict and interaction between Confucianism and Buddhism, as well as from Neo-Confucianism, which laid a new emphasis on the expansion of the mind and self.¹⁹ On this respect, Irene Bloom observes that enlarging the mind through humaneness is

the capacity of the mind [of a human] to unite with the mind of heaven—that is, to overcome any sense of opposition between self and other and to enter into a productive moral relation with all things. […] Underlying Chu’s [Zhu Xi] confidence in the human capacity for moral development and effective moral action in his belief that the mind of heaven and earth to produce things and to effect the myriad transformations of the natural process, is the same mind which is shared by human beings and the other living things.²⁰

Given the complexity of the issue, this chapter neither intends to deal with the objectivity of the feeling of responsibility nor to build a new theory of responsibility or sense of transgression in traditional China. Instead, this chapter will concentrate on the subjective acceptance or refusal of this feeling with regard to a few aspects²¹ and offer some reflections focusing on late imperial China, in an attempt to provide an analysis of implicit and explicit justifications and motivations concerning moral responsibility in light of the studies of the last decades.²²

An exhaustive survey of the evolution of related concepts in China and Europe here is not possible, so I have selected some specific themes and selected some significant passages to bring some of these interconnected concepts to the reader’s attention. Moral responsibility in Western tradition involves categories such as self, free will and inner conflict, moral-aesthetic judgement, causation, motivation, reward and punishment,