This article surveys recent scholarship on Confucian role ethics, examines some of its fundamental commitments, and suggests future directions for scholarship. Role ethics interprets early Confucianism as promoting a relational conception of persons and employs this conception to emphasize how a person's roles and relationships are the source of her ethical obligations and ethical growth. While there is much consensus among role ethic scholars, they disagree over the role of theory in further explicating the view and about the metaphysical basis (...) of relational persons. Strong and moderate versions of role ethics emerge, and the article explores the strengths and weaknesses of both. (shrink)

This essay examines whether Confucian role ethics offers resources to identify and redress gender inequality and oppression. On its face, Confucian role ethics seems ill suited for this task for two reasons. First, a central tenet of role ethics is that a person is constituted by her roles. Because roles are constituted by norms that govern them, many social roles are, and have been, historically oppressive. Second, discussions of Confucian role ethics tend to avoid talk of autonomy, yet autonomy is (...) helpful in identifying and rectifying gender inequalities insofar as autonomy tracks the ways oppression disables individuals’ abilities to achieve personhood. My goal in this essay is to work... (shrink)

The role dilemma raises a problem for role ethic interpretations of Confucianism. The dilemma arises from the conflict between the demands and obligations of Humaneness and the demands and obligations of roles one occupies. Favoring the demands of Humaneness undermines a role ethic because roles and role-obligations no longer ground the ethic. However, favoring social role-obligations permits immoral and unjust role-obligations and allows for uncharitable readings of Confucianism.This paper examines how Mengzi resolves the dilemma. I argue that Mengzi’s account of (...) human nature privileges the demands of Humaneness; social roles are central but defeasible in light of Humaneness. I briefly discuss a prominent articulation of Confucian role ethics as well as the role dilemma. Then, after considering the technical resources within the Mengzi, I argue that Mengzi espouses an externalism about roles. Finally, I explore the relationship between Mengzi’s externalism and role e.. (shrink)

Recently, Sean Cordell has raised a problem for Aristotelians who seriously consider social roles: When the demands of the role conflict with the demands of morality, which norms ought one follow? However, this problem, which I call the role dilemma, is not specific to Aristotelians. Classical Confucians face a similar problem. How do Confucians resolve conflicts between the demands of humaneness (ren 仁) and the demands of social roles and the social norms (li 礼) that govern these roles? Confucians who (...) favor humaneness, maintaining that other demands are defeasible, offer an externalism about roles. This response is similar to the Aristotelian argument that the demands of human excellence trump other demands. Consequently, Confucian externalism collapses into a virtue ethic. Confucians who favor the demands of li offer an internalism about roles. However, internalism is undesirable because it implies relativism and condones oppressive social institutions. The Confucian role ethicist must offer a tenable solution that steers clear of the pitfalls of both externalism and internalism. Although I do not advance a solution here, I believe a tenable alternative exists. The goals of this paper, instead, are to demonstrate that classical Confucians face the role dilemma and to initiate a discussion about the theoretical apparatus required of Confucian role ethics in order to distinguish it from other ethical theories. I conclude with some programmatic remarks about additional questions and problems that ought to be addressed. (shrink)

Mengzi (372–289 BCE), or Mencius, an early Confucian whose thinking is represented in the eponymous Mengzi, argues that human nature is good and that all human beings possess four senses—the feelings of compassion, shame, respect, and the ability to approve and disapprove—which he variously calls “hearts” or “sprouts.” Each sprout may be cultivated into its corresponding virtue of ren, li, yi, or zhi. -/- Here we explore why Mengzi thinks we possess these four hearts and their relation to the cultivated (...) virtues. (shrink)

Explore's al-Ghazāli's skeptical methodology in Deliverance from Error.

This note adduces three passages in Seneca the Elder to reinforce a demonstration in CQ 69, 793–8001 that the text of Plin. HN 7.117 has suffered corruption in one of its clauses and requires emendation to restore Pliny's intent. This additional evidence concerns a trope employed by declaimers which could have predisposed a scribe to alter Pliny's text to state that Cicero proscribed Mark Antony. Such a statement has no place in a list of achievements that otherwise all belong to (...) Cicero's consulship twenty years earlier in 63 b.c. (shrink)

This paper will examine the circumstances that inspired the famous utterance attributed to the haruspex Spurinna, ‘Beware the Ides of March!'1 Recently the argument has been made that this warning to Caesar was based upon an astrological calculation, rather than on the usual arts of an haruspex who read signs of the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificial animals or by interpreting bolts of lightning and portents . As intriguing as this astrological theory is, I am convinced that it (...) is fatally flawed, and I intend to show why it must ultimately be rejected. The question is not merely an academic one, having to do with the methods employed by a particular seer on a given occasion. Rather, if it can be established as even probable that Spurinna based his prophecy upon an astrological calculation, which helped convince the conspirators that Caesar was vulnerable to attack on the Ides as being an unlucky day for him according to the stars, then we are presented with a very significant and hitherto unsuspected instance of astrology influencing the course of public affairs at Rome several decades before astrology came into its own under the early emperors. According to such a reconstruction, astrology played a key role in determining the date of one of the most fateful murders in Roman history. It is the contention of this paper, on the contrary, that there is no reason whatsoever to attribute Spurinna's prophecy to an astrological calculation. (shrink)

This paper will examine the circumstances that inspired the famous utterance attributed to the haruspex Spurinna, ‘Beware the Ides of March!'1Recently the argument has been made that this warning to Caesar was based upon an astrological calculation, rather than on the usual arts of an haruspex who read signs of the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificial animals (exta) or by interpreting bolts of lightning (fulgura) and portents (ostenta). As intriguing as this astrological theory is, I am convinced that (...) it is fatally flawed, and I intend to show why it must ultimately be rejected. The question is not merely an academic one, having to do with the methods employed by a particular seer on a given occasion. Rather, if it can be established as even probable that Spurinna based his prophecy upon an astrological calculation, which helped convince the conspirators that Caesar was vulnerable to attack on the Ides as being an unlucky day for him according to the stars, then we are presented with a very significant and hitherto unsuspected instance of astrology influencing the course of public affairs at Rome several decades before astrology came into its own under the early emperors. According to such a reconstruction, astrology played a key role in determining the date of one of the most fateful murders in Roman history. It is the contention of this paper, on the contrary, that there is no reason whatsoever to attribute Spurinna's prophecy to an astrological calculation. (shrink)

Pliny's celebration of Cicero's consular achievements contains a striking anomaly, namely the assertion that Cicero proscribed Marcus Antonius(HN7.117). That statement turns Cicero, the victim of Antonius’ murderous vendetta, into the one who wielded the executioner's axe, and it abruptly shifts the focus of the passage from 63 to 43b.c.Two slight corrections to the Latin text can eliminate the intrusion of the proscriptions by substituting a reference to the control Cicero exercised in 63 over Gaius Antonius, his consular colleague and an (...) old ally of Catiline. In hisIn Pisonem(§5), Cicero takes credit for combatting the threat posed by his colleague, and it is highly probable thatHN7.117 mentioned Gaius (not Marcus) Antonius as well, since Pliny's summary of Cicero's consular deeds and honours is nearly identical to the one found inPis. 4–6. The beauty of the emended text is that it restores both historical fact and a logical progression to the overall structure of Pliny's encomium. (shrink)

We explore the central analogy behind Mengzi’s view of ethical cultivation. -/- Philosophers sometimes ask what makes a person’s life worthwhile or what conditions make for a good life. Mengzi’s answer involves cultivating our innate moral senses into fully ripened virtues of ren (humaneness), yi (rightness), li (propriety), and zhi (wisdom). This cultivation neither is individualistic nor can it happen in isolation: it requires a lifetime of meaningful interactions with other people. In short, one’s ethical cultivation is interdependent with other (...) people, one’s social environment, and whether (and how well) one reflects on the stirrings of their sprouts and extends their previous moral behavior to the current situation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a new and more satisfactory context for a fragment from one of Ennius’ tragedies preserved in Cicero and discussed by a late scholiast on the Ciceronian passage. It will be shown that the scholiast, or more likely the source upon which he drew, had in front of him a bit more of the Ennian passage than the partial line preserved in Cicero and that the scholiast drew a false conclusion concerning the identity (...) of one of the interlocutors from the way in which one speaker addressed the other. Previous scholars have sought to remove the inconsistency in the scholiast's sketch of the scene either by changing the locale of the dialogue or by correcting the scholiast's identification of the out-of-place speaker. It will be shown that a more productive line of investigation is to seek to discover the underlying cause of the scholiast's apparent error. The identification of the cause not only sheds light on the fate of Ennius’ text in Late Antiquity but permits us to restore, by means of conjecture, an additional word to the corpus of Ennius’ tragedies, a word that is a favourite of his in the Annales, but until now has not been attested in a Roman tragedy before the age of Seneca. (shrink)

This paper seeks to dispel the notion that Mark Antony and the Senate indulged in a cat-and-mouse game over the control of Caesar's archives in the weeks immediately following the Ides of March. At stake was whether unpublished documents drawn up by Caesar before his death should be ratified and put into force. The belief that the Senate and Antony contended over this issue and that Antony got the upper hand rests primarily on what I hope to show is a (...) misinterpretation of two key passages in the Philippics. Moreover, since the standard interpretation of these two passages appears to be supported by Dio's account of how Antony cajoled the Senate into permitting him a freer hand to review and publish documents found in Caesar's archives, it will be necessary to have a closer look at Dio's probable sources for this particular section of his history. (shrink)

This paper seeks to dispel the notion that Mark Antony and the Senate indulged in a cat-and-mouse game over the control of Caesar's archives in the weeks immediately following the Ides of March. At stake was whether unpublished documents drawn up by Caesar before his death should be ratified and put into force. The belief that the Senate and Antony contended over this issue and that Antony got the upper hand rests primarily on what I hope to show is a (...) misinterpretation of two key passages in the Philippics. Moreover, since the standard interpretation of these two passages appears to be supported by Dio's account of how Antony cajoled the Senate into permitting him a freer hand to review and publish documents found in Caesar's archives, it will be necessary to have a closer look at Dio's probable sources for this particular section of his history. (shrink)

I examine the role moral reasons play in the Mengzi and their relationship to Mengzi's conception of wisdom. Some commentators have argued that agency in early Chinese thought is best characterized as performance based rather than deliberation based. I propose that Mengzi's conception of agency is both performative and deliberative because he understands wisdom as a sort of expert decision making. Consequently, Mengzi relies on moral reasons of two sorts. First, duan-reasons are reasons to act so as to overcome internal (...) obstacles to action and, second, renyi-reasons are reasons to act so as to achieve a goal that constitutes moral success. (shrink)

Reviews Brian Bruya's edited collection The Philosophical Challenge from China.

Reviews _Appreciating the Chinese Difference_ edited by Jim Behuniak.

Reviews Gary Kemp's "What Is This Thing Called Philosophy?