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

power: respecting social contexts does not signify following conventions blindly and obeying authorities against conscience. Roetz’s reflection on the autonomy of moral choice in ancient China is a great contribution to the reevaluation of the self which he regards as a “self-responsible autonomous being with his own dignity”; other relevant issues are competence of decision, the autonomy of judgment, self-respect and self-strengthening, self-examination, motivation and conscience, the autonomy of action, and inner and internalized sanctions in Confucianism.³⁷

Will-Determination in Neo-Confucianism

After the aforementioned general references to the concepts of heaven and destiny and heart-mind, two other themes contribute to understanding the way of conceiving, living, and evaluating what we roughly intend with moral responsibility in late imperial China: the role of will, and the inner conflict inherent in the moral choice. This and the following section will deal with these themes.

We have seen that in both Confucian and Neo-Confucian writings, the existence of something similar to the Western concept of moral responsibility was generally accepted: people’s behavior was considered to be subject to the exercise of human control and will in the space of interaction between destiny and human nature. I mentioned that usually Neo-Confucians disproved external interventions by religious or mysterious powers, even if they did not exclude any form of veneration of supernatural forces.³⁸ In their reinterpretation of Mencian ideas, Heaven was the source of the cosmic order (li 理), both the natural and moral order (tianli 天理 and xing 性). Heaven’s Decree determines individual’s allotment of qi and infuses the moral nature (xing) in each person, as well as presiding at the transmission of the “succession of the Way” (daotong zhi chuan 道統之傳). The complex accidental combination of cosmic energy (qi 氣) of different quality received by any human being at birth or belonging to the environment is also outside one’s control. The qualities due to pure and impure qi correspond to personal dispositions, social