he is broadminded and cultivated, told respectively in Zhuangzi and Xunzi.

13. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places; Miller, “Goffman, Social Acting and Moral Behavior.”

14. There is no agreement among scholars on the meaning of “dispositions” because they may be considered all constant propensities of human beings, including sexual impulses. McDougall (The Energies of Men) enlists a series of “propensities” that comprise sentiments and emotions (such as fear, anger, the sense of the ridiculous, the wish for help), emotional and physiological reactions (disgust, exhaustion, sleepiness, sexual drive, maternal love), and dispositions (curiosity, socialization or gregarious instinct). For a cross-cultural taxonomy of universal inclinations, see also Munro, “Ethical Guidelines for Public and Private Choices.” Part one offers a theoretical elaboration of the new findings in evolutionary biology and psychology and their relevance to ethics, while part two seeks to apply these findings to actual social problems, especially as they affect China. In Ethics in Action, Munro further posits that all people share the same “five ultimate desires”; that is, five deep cross-cultural motivations which account for both biological and social human conditions and which are the basis of moral sense and behavior, individual satisfaction or dissatisfaction, stability or instability of social life.

15. Tina Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds, 40–62.

16. Ibid., 19–25.

17. Ibid., 24.

18. In Chinese thought, worthy of mention are the relativeness of any “label” pertaining to the socialization process, as theorized in Daoism, and the skandhas which Buddhists interpret as components of a phantom fluctuating among causes and effects. Zito draws attention to the elusiveness of the self in the accumulation of experiences and social relations (Zito, Of Body and Brush, 209; Zito and Barlow, Body, Subject, and Power in China, 9–10). Sing-chen Lydia Chiang (Collecting the Self), instead, stresses how Chinese zhiguai tales expressed the writers’ awareness of the impossibility of a single, coherent, and knowable self. In touching upon the matter, Plaks (“Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” 342–343) notes that “it’s a man’s death that imparts a certain degree of conceptual fixity to the life. This would help to explain the fact that a figure’s mode of dying is often more important than his way of living on both historical and fictional narrative.” Another acute contribution to the question of identity can be found in Tina Lu’s volume