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

conditions, but all have the same good nature; that is, the possibility to improve their moral condition, to rectify their psychophysical nature. All finally depends on will-determination and self-cultivation. Selfish desires and negative conditions may prevent moral perfection and becloud human conscience; these tendencies and conditions are out of human power and determine differences among people. Despite this innate inequality, the will is the only function that can be controlled and improved, and that may overcome social and intellectual obstacles.⁸ It is by looking at things from such perspective that we can find, notwithstanding the opposing views, a general agreement on the importance of morality for the individual and the acceptance of the concept of moral responsibility. The silent drama of “solitary” decision-making replaces the Western anguish of the soul engaged in a fight against itself. Differences in the perception of the manifestation of the moment of choice rested on diverse conceptions of the world, human nature, religion, and, above all, on conceptions of the soul. In both Western and Chinese cultures, nevertheless, the sense of responsibility was perceived as depending on oneself, and the self was fundamentally understood as an autonomous moral agent, more or less a part of multiple social groups and thereby involved in interpersonal relations. Conflict and spontaneity are apparent opposites that mark the importance of both the attitude-habit and the moment of choice in moral life. Any moral system is abstract and limited, while an agent negotiates concrete situations to create and re-create their ethical practice through determination and will. We can conclude stressing that the sense of responsibility was perceived as the main way of self-assertion.

This brief summarization of the representation of moral responsibility leads us to the following two sets of considerations. The first concerns the scale or scales of values. Given the fact that the subject is required to comply with two competing, mutually exclusive obligations, thereby having to choose between opposing values, to which of the two should they give priority? Scholars have emphasized that in traditional Chinese morality the absence of a tragic dilemma of choice between two equivalent alternatives always implies a hierarchy running from a “superior” duty