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

in Europe, Stoic ius naturale above all consists of obligations or responsibilities, and Thomas Aquinas’s Natural Law is the imprint of Divine Light ordering men to avoid evil and to do good.²² Any attempt to single out universal worthiness of the human being in itself is destined to fail anachronistically. This would be difficult not only for the concept of human dignity but for any other cultural and ethical phenomenon, from the sense of justice to equality. Emphasis on duties or obligations, as well as order and harmony, are not exclusive to Confucianism and Chinese culture. Historians are challenged every time they resort to categories of their time—categories and themes they necessarily use. Beyond the peculiar evolution of different cultures and their conceptual systems, we may assume the presence of a common element in any society and culture: the care in defence of one’s personality, the assertion of one’s right to respect.²³ Necessarily this minimum sense of dignity is constructed according to the cultural development of the specific environment with different values attributed to life, autonomy, social hierarchy and mobility, and higher or lower value on individual liberty and equality. Mencian theory of innate human morality and autonomy is no less compatible with a general notion of human dignity than European natural law tradition. We can find examples of enforcement of individual human rights in front of power and collectivity also in non-Western intellectual traditions. In Chinese intellectual history too, we can indeed find a constant tension of resistance against submitting under the dominance of the collective.²⁴ Irene Bloom states that, although no Chinese term of dignity existed in ancient China, an analogous notion can be found in Mencius’s “heavenly nobility” (tianjue 天爵), the original mind innate in every human, the dignity to rejecting charity offered in a humiliating way, the potential of refusing life and avoiding dangers in the name of self-respect.²⁵

Owing to the exclusive Western origin of the modern notion of human dignity, it is difficult to apply it to traditional China. Even if one considers the historical and cultural differences in the perception of the value of human being, in terms of life and autonomy, it is useful to identify a