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

China, the search for personal autonomy, the claim of the worth of each individual, and the cultivation of a private space cannot be understated.

Some Chinese scholars argue that the Confucian idea of dignity is best represented by the socially defined regulations (“rites,” li 禮) for concrete roles, status, on the basis of age, gender, social relations. They are the product of a certain consensus and historical experiences, and they provide regulation for a decent and agreeable social order, safeguarding reciprocal respect and courtesy. Constructed on cosmological theory, they promote benevolent relations, express deep humanistic care for others, and advocate respect based on the Golden Rule.⁸ These scholars argue that Confucianism offers the best way of promoting human dignity. The Confucian orientation toward duty is based on the reciprocation principle and considers dignity, first of all, an achievement rather than an ascribed right.⁹ Moreover, the dignity advocated by Confucianism combines both its “inner nature” and “social-interpersonal recognition.”¹⁰ In this perspective, a peculiarity of Confucian dignity is the unequal worth of humans. Although this approach might appear familistic and limitative, the partiality shown to one’s relatives is an appraisal of natural ethical conduct, as the civil and the personal belong to different spheres. Ethics and law operate in different realms, the private and the public realms, ruled by different criteria. As evidenced by Munro, the Confucian worth is a function of the degree of love plus knowledge of the loving person’s relation to the target of the emotion, manifest in rituals. Thus, it follows that it is natural that “members of a person’s immediate family, neighbors, some friends, and close community have greater worth than other people in the world.”¹¹

Zhang Qianfan suggests that the potential virtues equally endowed in every human being reconcile Confucian duty-oriented ethics with rights-based modern liberalism. Confucian duty-oriented ethics integrate Western individual rights. On the contrary, Mark Elvin criticizes this position for downplaying cultural differences on the notion of individual and notes the risk of the historical anachronism of such arguments—as