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

Confucian tradition as a synonym for “will” and “positive determination” and is a fundamental component of moral responsibility.⁶⁰

Before Zhu Xi, Cheng Yi 程颐 (1033–1107) accepted the proposition that a wicked person is endowed since birth with negative energy and therefore is responding to their own wickedness, but it is also true that one is able to conquer this energy and to restore human nature, which follows the moral principle. This shows that “principle”—like ming—is, in Cheng’s eyes, both descriptive and prescriptive. It expresses the possibility of a certain event or action or their effective preconditions, but at the same time refers also to the set of ethical values to which one has to conform. This ambiguity of “principle” has probably contributed to obscuring the theoretical question of moral liberty. It was nevertheless clear to the Neo-Confucians that a person can follow various “paths,” even wrong ones, but only one of them is the “Way.”

Given that the quality of psychophysical energy influences one’s moral behavior and wisdom,⁶¹ what is the qi to be understood as a deterministic element that justifies different levels of morality among human beings? The answer is that one is able to change one’s actual temperament bestowed at birth and absorbed from the environment. Zhang Zai, as much as other Neo-Confucian thinkers after him, is clear when he states that those with a bad temperament or defective personality can change if they practice self-cultivation (lit. learning) (氣質惡者，學即能移).⁶² Cheng Hao resorts to the metaphor of water to indicate the possibility of purifying one’s nature: “although pure or turbid, we cannot say that turbid water is not water. Similarly, a human being must increase their efforts in purification: if the effort is strong and intensive, purification will be quick; if on the contrary, it is slow and lazy, purification will be difficult. When water is clean, it is [as pure as] the original source of water.”⁶³

Against any doubt that the fact that someone practices self-cultivation and someone else does not, or even worse indulges in vices and debauchery, still depends on one’s destiny and individual dispositions,