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

and conduct in relation to the world.³⁹ Not all scholars, however, share these views. Benjamin Schwartz, for example, distinguishes between the different meanings ascribed to the term “choice” and objects to the notion that free choice between what is thought to be good or bad seems to be common to both the Judeo-Christian and ancient Confucian traditions.⁴⁰ There are various kinds of moral conflicts: a conflict between the ideal self and the concrete self, negotiating or fighting in specific circumstances; a conflict among various moral rules and systems; a conflict between divergent rules of the same system; a conflict between one’s perception of morality and the dominant or conventional system; a conflict on the interpretation of moral imperative; a contradiction between moral prescriptions or on their application to a new concrete case. Responses to such issues can also vary because they can opt for one value instead of another, can elude or try to elude the solution, can ignore the dilemma, or the quandary may concern the choice between two goods, two evils, the lack of knowledge, the limited freedom. Finally, we should consider the role of self-deception in the decisional process; that is, being conscious or not of the inner self-centric motivation of any choice.

Past scholarship in the fields of sinology and social psychology has shown a particular concern for themes like autonomy or heteronomy in China, internal or external determinations of morality,⁴¹ shame- or guilt-proneness relationships with moral conduct, and relevant definitions of these two feelings.⁴² From a linguistic point of view, whereas Anglophone culture treats shame and embarrassment as separate emotions, playing down the importance of the former,⁴³ the Chinese language has 113 terms for shame, or better yet, for what feelings we express with “shame”;⁴⁴ in Chinese, “shame,” including “guilt” and “embarrassment,” emerges as a separate group of feelings.⁴⁵ It has been demonstrated how since antiquity, the sense of shame has been interwoven with guilt,⁴⁶ but along with recent developments in anthropology and the psychology of shame, sinological interest in these themes seems to have gradually diminished. Nonetheless, a distinctive mark has been left by the work of Michael Nylan, who raises doubts about the moral superiority of the sense of