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

not necessarily find an exact correspondence with a specific cultural setting. On the other hand, this statement is rather generic, as it does not define what degree of “independence, ability, and knowledge” is sufficient to reach a responsible choice.³ Moreover, although an agent may be free to act according to a motive, he is not necessarily free to modify that motive. Notwithstanding its limitations, such a statement can be used as a starting point for enquiry.

The themes of responsibility and free will have been challenged by recent findings in neuroscience that explained myriads of unconscious and biological processes behind human consciousness and subjective identity. Examined as neurobiological processes, emotions and moral decisions can only be viewed as involuntary and mechanical phenomena, consequences of the physico-chemical activities of the nervous system; ⁴ still, no final demonstration of the passive-deterministic or active role by the agent is possible, as it involves disputes about metaphysics and ethics. Thus, even if we accept a deterministic cause-effect or a casual chain, the question remains about the relation between readiness potential and moral decision, the compatibility of subjective evaluation of conscious experiences with the objective laboratory measurement of neural events, and whether the agent can be responsible for individual choices hypothesized inside this process.

Nevertheless, from personal experience and psychological experiments, the agent has a role in the constitution of emotions, at least by influencing the development of emotional life or modifying the cognitive evaluation of emotive reactions. Apparently, the fact that many world religions and moral systems, Confucianism included, have long debated the importance of “moral responsibility” suggests that its basic meanings are widely accepted. People in China as well as in other societies make choices in the face of different alternatives, negotiate their ladder of values with real situations and circumstances, share the experience of obstacles when attempting to fulfil their choices, and justify them.⁵ For example, one may more or less train their emotional responses by exercising more