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

Part II

The Sense of Responsibility in Ming and Qing Confucianism

The man of the street may believe that he possesses “freedom of the will” and that he is, therefore “responsible” for his actions, at the same time denying this “freedom” and this “responsibility” to infants and lunatics. The philosopher, by whatever methods, will inquire into the ontological and epistemological status of these conceptions. Is man free? What is responsibility? Where are the limits of responsibility? How can one know these things? And so on. Needless to say, the sociologist is in no position to supply answers to these questions. What he can and must do, however, is to ask how it is that the notion of “freedom” has come to be taken for granted in one society and not in another, how its “reality” is maintained in the one society and how, even more interestingly, this “reality” may once again be lost to an individual or to an entire collectivity.

—Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann,
The Social Construction of Reality, 16¹