Abstract

About a decade ago I noticed that when referring to quality health care, or financial pyramid schemes like the one in the Madoff affair, or weakness in the mortgage market, many American intellectuals and politicians talked about the "moral imperatives" or the "ethical bailout" that would be needed to correct the resultant problems. But no one identified what the moral imperatives were. So I decided to investigate what such imperatives might consist of if Chinese and American thinkers tried to work out an answer. This essay attempts to show what I found.What first attracted me to classical Chinese philosophy was that it seemed to anchor morality not in the words of an anthropomorphic God but in some natural...