Confucianism and acceptable inequalities

The sufficientarian justification of Confucian meritocracy: A critique

Confucian political theorists ⁵ who advocate political meritocracy as an alternative to liberal democracy tend to believe that just distribution in the Confucian tradition is based on merit barring very exceptional cases, which include ‘old men without wives, old women without husbands, old people without children, and young children without fathers’, ⁶ that is, cases where an individual does not have family members who can support him or her. ⁷ These scholars perhaps assume that emphasis on merit in political meritocracy naturally entails merit-based distributive justice which they see as an alternative to liberal egalitarianism. However, they rarely articulate the mode of distributive justice corresponding to their proposed political meritocracy. ⁸ In this regard, Joseph Chan is distinct because in a series of essays he has been attempting to offer a coherent account of Confucian distributive justice that is consistent with Confucianism’s overall political and economic outlook. ⁹

With reference to ancient Chinese classics such as the Mencius and the Xunzi, Chan derives three Confucian distributive principles: (1) sufficiency for all; (2) priority for the badly-off; (3) distribution of social and economic goods based on merit and contribution. These three ‘principles’ indeed have textual support. For instance, Chan derives the sufficiency principle from Mencius 1A7 where Mencius says:

‘Hence when determining what means of support the people should have, a clear-sighted ruler ensures that these are sufficient, on the one hand, for the care of parents, and, on the other hand, for the support of wife and children, so that people always have sufficient food in good years and escape starvation in bad; only then does he drive them towards goodness. ¹⁰

All of this ‘evidence’ that ancient Confucianism has for its seminal conception of socio-economic justice, however, does not establish any coherent theory or principle of Confucian justice. That is, the three ‘principles’ Chan presents are largely independent of one another, thus unintegrated, as a distributive principle. More accurately, they are merely practical measures publicly to express the ruler’s personal benevolence. At most, they show that early Confucianism, contrary to its most popular image propagated by Karl Wittfogel, had serious concern for the welfare of the people and possessed its own moral standards (if not an articulate distributive principle) of good government. ¹²

Of course, this does not mean that a contemporary Confucian political theorist cannot reconstruct these three ‘principles’ into a philosophical doctrine of distributive justice, and this is precisely what Chan does. His interpretive and normative position is most clear in the following statement.

For now, I simply want to point out that the Confucian perspective I have outlined bears striking resemblance to the position of a recent group of theorists who challenge the egalitarian theory of justice and have developed an alternative perspective sometimes called the doctrine of sufficiency. Like the doctrine of sufficiency, a Confucian perspective will need to defend itself against opponents from either end of the spectrum of theories of social justice. At one end is the libertarian, who argues that it is not a matter of justice or moral right for society to provide material assistance, let alone to the level of sufficiency, to those who are economically badly off. At the other end is the egalitarian, who argues that economic inequality at above the level of sufficiency still matters as far as justice is concerned. ¹³

It is completely unclear how we can draw sufficientarian implications from the passages Chan cites to give evidence to the principle of sufficiency for all. As noted, Chan draws attention to a few passages where Mencius and Xunzi say that people should have material/economic means ‘sufficient’ [zu 足] for living a flourishing moral life, ¹⁵ from which he attempts to draw the sufficientarian implications. This attempt, however, is heavily problematic because there is no compelling textual evidence that Mencius and Xunzi employed the Chinese term zu with the same sense in which the term ‘sufficiency’ is understood in contemporary sufficientarian ethics. And without such evidence, all Mencius and Xunzi essentially say is that a person should have a certain degree of material means to live an ethically flourishing life: ‘Only a gentleman can have a constant heart in spite of a lack of constant means of support. The people, on the other hand, will not have constant heart if they are without constant means.’ ¹⁶

Admittedly, one of the most important reasons for the sufficientarian critique of egalitarianism lies in the latter’s failure to appreciate the importance of what a person really cares about and what will actually satisfy him or her, which cannot be rationally calculated (as John Rawls does with reference to the maximin principle when deriving the difference principle) or uniformly determined by the state operating on egalitarian impulses. ¹⁷ In other words, from the sufficientarian standpoint, the most fundamental problem of egalitarianism is self-alienation. Therefore, the positive thesis of sufficientarianism, which stresses the importance of people living above a certain threshold free from deprivation, cannot be understood as solely concerned with distributive justice. In the most profound sense, it is a powerful political statement for liberal pluralism against liberal egalitarianism. Dismissing the background political message and moral claim, Chan’s attempt to interpret Confucian justice in sufficientarian terms, as it stands, turns out to be groundless or irrelevant.

But suppose it is possible to draw sufficientarian implications from the passages that happen to employ the term ‘sufficient’ (or ‘adequate’). Then, I believe it would be equally possible to draw prioritarian implications from Mencius 1B5, which Chan does not do. But why not? Political philosophers largely agree that sufficientarianism as a distributive principle is differentiated not only from egalitarianism (particularly ‘luck egalitarianism’) but also from prioritarian principles, which ‘favor the less advantaged because they assume that the moral value of a benefit, or disvalue of a burden, diminishes as its recipient becomes better off’. ¹⁸ Chan (and company) tends to equate egalitarianism with what Derek Parfit calls Telic egalitarianism, according to which it is in itself bad if some people are worse off than others through no fault or choice of theirs, ¹⁹ and therefore Chan never considers, let alone engages with, the possibility that giving a priority to the worst-off, or taking the Deontic egalitarian position, can be an equally compelling (if not perfect) principle of distributive justice independent of both luck egalitarianism and sufficientarianism. ²⁰ Since prioritarians (or Deontic egalitarians) such as Parfit do not think that natural inequalities are morally significant and hence do not call for redress or redistribution, ²¹ it is unclear why Chan believes sufficientarianism alone can defend Confucian justice against liberal egalitarianism.

I have no desire to get embroiled in the philosophical conundrum of deciding which distributive principle is most convincing philosophically: egalitarian, prioritarian, or sufficientarian. Nor am I interested in which distributive principle is most consistent with the Confucian sense of social justice, however one might conceive of it. What interests me is this: given the fact that egalitarianism, prioritarianism and sufficientarianism all tend to favor less advantaged individuals when their interests conflict with those of more advantaged individuals and despite some textual resources for an alternative (say, prioritarian) interpretation of Confucian justice, why are Chan and other Confucian political theorists such as Chenyang Li generally attracted to the doctrine of sufficiency, finding it as most endorsable by (classical) Confucianism? ²² This puzzling enthusiasm among Confucian political theorists for sufficientarianism therefore naturally shifts our attention from the doctrine of sufficiency as such to ‘merit and contribution’, which Chan and others believe to be central to Confucian justice. Consider the following statements by Chan and Li respectively.

[O]nce past the level of material sufficiency, Mencius and Xunzi do not object to economic inequalities that arise from personal factors such as merit and contribution, which are largely based on the possession of abilities (moral character and intelligence). Neither thinker is a ‘luck’ egalitarian, one who believes that those who become worse off than others through no fault of their own should be compensated. Instead, both believe that desert should be based on a person’s achievement and contribution. ²³

Apparently, as the statements quoted above imply, for Chan (and others who agree with him) the attraction of sufficientarianism lies in what is implied in the negative thesis of the doctrine of sufficiency – which is, economic inequalities are morally justifiable only if they result from individual merits after meeting the threshold. Put differently, Chan and company find the doctrine of sufficiency appealing not necessarily because it offers a distributive principle that can best serve the worst-off and mitigate socio-economic inequalities most effectively and legitimately, but because it seems to be the only distributive principle available in contemporary ethics that accepts inequalities with no ceiling ²⁶ and supports economic meritocracy (though qualified by the doctrine of sufficiency), two defining features they attribute to Confucianism.

At this point, whether the doctrine of sufficiency is the most reasonable distributive principle from a moral perspective or whether its positive thesis is most consistent with Confucianism vis-à-vis prioritarianism or egalitarianism is no longer a key issue. What looms large now is the conviction that Confucianism as an ethic of (political and economic) meritocracy is morally and culturally opposed to (liberal) egalitarianism. Evidently, Chan’s core normative claim is cultural and circular: since Confucianism endorses economic meritocracy qualified by the doctrine of sufficiency, it should be guiding distributive justice for Confucian East Asia; (liberal) egalitarianism, the argument goes, is unsuited for East Asian society because it is not consistent with Confucianism’s deep commitment to meritocracy. Chan says:

Although people’s achievements depend in part on the environment and customs in which they grow up, neither thinker [Mencius and Xunzi] asserts that those who become worse off through such uncontrollable kinds of factors should be compensated. I suspect that even if they were shown that people are born with different levels of talent, they would still not go so far as endorse luck egalitarianism [which] argues that economic inequality at above the level of sufficiency still matters as far as justice is concerned. ²⁷

It is difficult to dispute the merit of economic meritocracy and no reasonable person (including a committed liberal egalitarian) would deny its moral value as well as its relevance to distributive justice wholesale. ²⁸ As David Miller aptly points out:

… in proclaiming meritocracy, and insisting that those who are responsible for allocating positions of advantage should pay attention only to the ability and motivation of those who seek them, we are not simply pushing at an open door. Indeed we are asking people to set aside principles of action that come naturally to them – favouring your family, your friends, your co-religionists, those who have done you favours in the past, and so forth – and which have cemented societies together throughout human history. Meritocracy is in one sense a profoundly unnatural way of allocating social advantages. ²⁹

Then, are the Confucians merely cheering for the ‘common conviction’ about the moral relevance of desert? But what is the Confucian relevance or justification of this cheering? Can we derive the moral relevance of desert as a general criterion for Confucian distributive justice from the claim that public positions and emoluments should be appropriately given to those who are morally qualified? Does the strong emphasis on desert make society more fiduciary and relationships more ethical? Or does it make a person more virtuous and life more ethically flourishing? Since we will deal with these interpretive questions extensively in the following section, which I believe can be answered properly only by considering the overall moral vision and the constitutional framework of Confucian governance, let us focus on a question that still remains unresolved – Is the recognition of the relevance of desert indeed incompatible with liberal egalitarianism?

If we look at Rawls’ statement above closely, it is clear that Rawls’ real concern is not so much whether or not people deserve a greater return for putting in a greater effort but whether we can draw a clear and principled line between environmentally caused and freely developed individual talents. ³⁹ Though liberal egalitarians are convinced that people do not deserve their natural assets or their initial starting place in society, they do not think that the foundations of desert must be observed all the way down to their natural assets, as people have a right to them. Against Nozick’s (and possibly the contemporary Confucians’) criticism, therefore, Amy Gutmann defends liberal egalitarianism by saying: ‘Liberal egalitarianism can consistently argue that the notion of desert is meaningful but that, for both moral and practical reasons, it is applicable only to micro-situations rather than to distributive principles that are regulative of the basic structure of a society.’ ⁴⁰

The fact that the moral relevance of desert in distributive justice is widely accepted by liberal egalitarians and thus that liberal egalitarianism is compatible with or even embraces desert raises a fundamental question: granted that Confucian political theorists have a fair understanding of the core arguments of liberal egalitarianism and that they do not think meritocracy is exclusively a Confucian asset (which is nonsensical), why do they present economic meritocracy (though qualified by the threshold of sufficiency) as an alternative to liberal egalitarianism? If it could be proved that when Confucians stress the importance of desert, their real concern is not necessarily with the moral worth of desert (and by implications of personal dignity and moral autonomy) as such, we can conclude that the ultimate dividing line between Confucian meritocracy and liberal egalitarianism as distributive theory revolves around two questions: (1) whether or not the position embraces a robust constraint on inequalities above a certain economic threshold; ⁴¹ and (2) whether or not the position is fully committed to political equality.

Negative to both questions, given its subscription to the negative thesis of the doctrine of sufficiency and its rejection (or highly qualified acceptance) of political equality, Confucian meritocracy’s central concern turns out to be how to give moral justification to inequality. According to Chenyang Li:

Certain forms of inequality among citizens can be necessary for a healthy and well-functioning society. For instance, inequality in wealth gives people incentives to strive for the better in economic status, not only better than others, but also in the sense of overcoming oneself. Inequality in reward to people of varied desert is required by a common sense of justice. While equality can be a good thing to pursue, inequality of certain kinds is necessary, legitimate, and beneficial to society at large. ⁴²

Acceptable inequalities: A Confucian perspective

What is the place of desert in Confucian ethics? Does Confucianism take desert seriously unlike ‘luck’ egalitarianism as Confucian political theorists claim? Although Confucian political theorists occasionally cite Mencius and Xunzi to vindicate the importance of desert in Confucian ethics, the passages that they present as evidence are largely irrelevant. For instance, Joseph Chan relies on Mencius 3B4 to give evidence for the Confucian recognition of desert in which, as Chan summarizes, Mencius is seen to ‘encourage contribution or merit as the basis for emolument [by saying that] one should be paid in accordance with one’s work or contribution, not one’s intention’. From this Chan attempts to derive a desert-based distributive justice by adding that ‘[Mencius] stresses in particular that a gentleman who gives advice to the ruler deserves emolument, even though he does not engage in a productive activity like that of farmers and carpenters … [Mencius] believe[s] that desert should be based on a person’s achievement and contribution.’ ⁴³

Chan’s statement is difficult to make sense of with reference to philosophical discussions surrounding desert and distributive justice as we have seen in the previous section. To be sure, Mencius is saying that giving advice to the ruler ‘merits’ economic/monetary compensation, such as emolument if the Confucian scholar in question is formally serving the ruler in government. But here Mencius is mainly concerned with the importance of non-manual/productive work in which a Confucian gentleman is engaged, such as giving advice to the ruler, and its contribution to the public good, which is not easily recognized by ordinary people. Nowhere in the passage does Mencius show any interest in desert understood as natural talents or as problematized in contemporary moral and political philosophy. Of course, we can, as Chan seems to do, define desert differently, for instance, in terms of contribution, effort, or achievement. However, Chan would then have no basis to claim that Confucian meritocracy and ‘luck’ egalitarianism, which allegedly denies the importance of desert, are at odds with each other because no liberal egalitarians such as Rawls and Gutmann deny the importance of effort, contribution and achievement, although they question the moral relevance of natural talents as a regulative principle for (the basic structure of) society. What worries them is rather the structural co-relation between contribution or achievement and natural talents or (unequally produced) social/educational/economic environment in the non-ideal situation.

Chenyang Li’s attempt to defend desert-based economic justice in Confucian terms is even more problematic. Consider Xunzi 4:12, which Li quotes to justify his (Confucian-cum-Aristotelian) notion of ‘proportional equality’, which he finds in its core to be a desert-based notion of equality.

When a humane man occupies the highest position, farmers labor with all their energy to exhaust the potential of their fields, merchants scrutinize with keen eyes to get the utmost from their goods, the various artisans use their skills to the fullest in making utensils and wares, and the officials, from the knights and grand officers up to the feudal lords, all execute fully the functions of their offices with humanity, generosity, wisdom, and ability. ⁴⁴

Li differs from Chan in that he includes ability or capability [neng 能] as what constitutes desert along with natural talents and contribution. Whether ability can be directly identified with desert is arguable, however. For instance, George Sher distinguishes the possession of an ability to exert effort, which is close to desert as natural talent, from the exercise of that ability, namely, effort-making ability which he believes people are equally capable of. ⁴⁶ Even if we interpret the Chinese word neng in the quoted passage as an effort-making ability and thus admit that there is some room for desert in Xunzi’s political theory (even though all the passage says is that people who belong to different social ranks must fulfill the social – and economic – roles attached to their social status as faithfully and as ably as possible), a major problem still remains. In the present context and in Xunzi’s political philosophy in general, inequality is not what results from differing personal efforts or individual deserts. When Xunzi calls this state of affairs ‘the utmost equality’ [zhi ping 至平], he does not espouse a desert-based distributive justice, which is intrinsically individualistic according to contemporary ethics. ⁴⁷ The text only reveals Xunzi’s political endorsement of ritual [li 禮]-based aristocracy. Apparently, Li, who is one of the strongest advocates of political meritocracy, finds Confucian aristocracy normatively appealing in contemporary China ⁴⁸ but his normative preference is one thing and his attempt to advocate a desert-based economic meritocracy normatively on the basis of the text of the Xunzi is another. Given that Xunzi says nothing about desert in the economic sense, Li’s attempt seems far-fetched, perhaps even anachronistic. ⁴⁹

Of course, this refutation does not naturally establish the argument that Confucianism completely dismisses the importance of desert and I do not intend to embark upon the impossible task of constructing such an argument by examining all extant Confucian classics. My point is that even if we can find some sporadic passages in Confucian classics that seem to support a claim for desert-based distributive justice, it is difficult to draw strong meritocratic implications from them in the absence of equally strong evidence that such interpretation is consistent with Confucianism’s overall moral and political vision. Put differently, such interpretation must be consistent with the telos of Confucian virtue politics, namely, the moral and material well-being of the people, and with the overall scheme of Confucian benevolent government, a set of moral-political institutions and policies fully committed to fulfilling such moral and political purposes. The following statement by Mencius best illustrates what benevolent government consists of: ⁵⁰

If Your Majesty practices benevolent government toward the people, that is, if you reduce punishment and taxation, gets the people to plough deeply and weed promptly, and if the able-bodied men learn, in their spare time, to be good sons and good younger brothers, loyal to their prince and true to their word, so that they will, in the family, serve their fathers and elder brothers, and outside the family, serve their elders and superiors, then they can be made to inflict defeat on the strong armour and sharp weapons of Qin and Chu, armed with nothing but staves … Hence it is said, ‘The benevolent man has no match.’ ⁵¹

This is only a very rough recapitulation of Confucian virtue politics but I believe it offers a sufficient moral-political backdrop against which Confucians’ allusions to desert, (in)equality, economic policies (such as increasing or reducing taxes), or distribution, must be assessed and on which any normative attempt to reconstruct a Confucian sense of socio-economic justice in contemporary East Asia must be based. Now, having this backdrop in mind, let us consider Confucius’ own view of socio-economic justice.

What I have heard is that the head of a state or a noble family worries not about underpopulation but about uneven distribution [bu jun 不均], not about poverty but about instability. For where there is even distribution [jun 均] there is no such thing as poverty, where there is harmony there is no such thing as underpopulation and where there is stability there is no such thing as overturning. ⁵³

What is worth noting here is that Confucius does not discuss ‘even distribution’ as a purely philosophical question of distributive principle or as an instrumental measure to avoid poverty or underpopulation. According to Confucius’ reasoning, even distribution has profound political implications as it is indispensable to an ordered fiduciary society. For Confucius, therefore, exactly what mode of distribution is ‘even’ [jun] (by implication, just) is not determined endogenously as if the criterion of ‘being even’ (or being just) is internal to distributive principle (if any) or distributive action as such. Rather, the content of ‘being even’ or ‘being just’ is exogenously determined depending on the purpose of the political entity – in this case, the moral elevation of, and fiduciary relationships among, the people. It is, therefore, a grave mistake to conclude that Confucius is an egalitarian, advocating equality of result, solely focusing on his employment of the term jun.

If desert has any meaning in Confucian distributive justice (and there is no reason to think that Confucius would discard the relevance of desert wholesale in determining what is ‘even’ based on the above and his other statements), its moral relevance must be assessed in reference to these Confucian purposes, which determine the content of desert. Julian Lamont is certainly right when he says:

The concept of desert is not a purely internally defined concept: i.e. examination of the concept itself will not yield the appropriate desert-basis for the particular case being considered … [E]xternal goals and values – goals and values which cannot be found by an examination of the concept of desert itself – will normally enter into people’s determination of what they consider a legitimate desert-basis. ⁵⁵

This is particularly relevant to the Xunzian polity, which, according to Xunzi, is created by a group of the sage-kings as a kind of educational institution in the course of reforming people’s ‘bad’ [e 惡] nature. ⁵⁶

[S]ince human nature is bad (e), it must await the instructions of a teacher and the model before it can be put aright, and it must obtain ritual principles (li 禮) and a sense of moral right (yi 義) before it can become orderly. Now, since men lack both teacher and model (fa 法), they are prejudiced, wicked, and not upright. Since they lack ritual principles and precepts of moral duty, they are perverse, rebellious, and disorderly. In antiquity, the sage kings took man’s nature to be evil, to be inclined to prejudice and prone to error, to be perverse and rebellious, and not to be upright or orderly. For this reason they invented ritual principles and precepts of moral duty. They instituted the regulations that are contained in laws and standards. Through these actions they intended to ‘straighten out’ and develop man’s essential nature and to set his inborn nature aright. They sought to tame and transform his essential nature and to guide his inborn nature with the Way. They caused both his essential and inborn nature to develop with good order and be consistent with the true Way. ⁵⁷

First of all, people in the Xunzian regime are qualitatively different from those in the pre-li state who were purely self-interested according to their inborn nature. They are now civically transformed into citizens of a Confucian constitutional order, whose reformed nature must be consistent with the Way. In this regime, what is important is not so much one’s natural talents or abilities as such – there is nothing intrinsically meritorious about merely possessing them – but moral efforts one makes and the contribution such efforts bring (naturally in the ideal situation) to the moral order. ⁵⁹ For Xunzi, a Confucian gentleman [junzi] is one who makes moral efforts and by doing so contributes to the moral-political order regulated by ritual [li] and ethical norms [yi] and he alone can use his natural talents properly, that is, without moral transgressions, which would make others harbor ill will [yuan 怨] toward him. As Xunzi puts it, ‘In matters of conduct the gentleman [junzi] does not esteem indecorous, though difficult, feats; in his explanations he does not prize improper investigations; in matters of reputation he does not value unsuitable traditions. Rather, only what is fitting to the occasion does he esteem.’ ⁶⁰ And this is precisely what Confucius had in mind when he said, ‘[O]n seeing a chance to profit, [morally elevated persons] think of appropriate conduct [yi 義].’ ⁶¹ Then, desert is meaningful only if (1) it is a moral effort and (2) it ‘fits the occasion’, thus doing no harm to civility among the members of community. In this sense, Xunzi’s idea of desert or merit is self-regulative, which renders the Xunzian Confucian polity less meritocratic than Confucian political theorists claim it to be.

Second, even if a certain degree of inequalities is acceptable in the Xunzian regime given Xunzi’s recognition of differing personal efforts exerted by the people, acceptable inequalities are still circumscribed by a moral demand for social cooperation and justice and this demand is not trivial. Remember that for Xunzi, the Confucian constitutional order, which is at once moral and political, is morally required to overcome the state of nature. Interestingly, Xunzi describes the state of nature not only as immoral (i.e. not good), but more importantly (at least in our context), as unjust.

Now, let us try to imagine a situation where we do away with the authority of lords and superiors, do without the transforming influence of ritual [li] and morality [yi], discard the order provided by the laws and rectitude, do without the restraints of penal laws and punishments – were this to occur, let us consider how the people of the world would deal with each other. In such a situation the strong would inflict harm on the weak and rob them; the many would tyrannize the few and wrest their possessions from them; and the perversity and rebelliousness of the whole world would quickly ensure their mutual destruction. ⁶²

Rectifying such conditions, however, would not merely consist of ensuring that economic transactions are fair in the light of law, which is the claim characteristic of Legalism (and libertarianism). Considering Xunzi’s commitment to benevolent government and given the self-regulative nature of desert in the Xunzian regime, we can interpret the unjust condition far more extensively, involving a situation where the rich continue to accumulate their personal properties to the extent that it can either exacerbate the living condition of those who are poor, even if their basic needs are met, or make them feel frustrated and resentful. The limitless pursuit of personal property by the rich might be legal as long as there is no robbing or tyrannizing, but the absence of injustice in this sense does not seem to be what Xunzi is mainly concerned with, despite its importance as the baseline of justice. If a certain action, though legal, involves incivility or harm to fiduciary relationships among the members of the community, Xunzi would still consider such an action unjust. As the system of justice is a moral-political artifice to transform bad human nature, under the system of justice, humans are to be fundamentally transformed.

A love of profit and the desire to obtain it belong to man’s essential and inborn nature. Now, suppose that younger and elder brothers have valuable goods that are supposed to be apportioned among them, and further suppose that they follow the true feelings of their inborn nature – namely, a love of profit and the desire to obtain it – then younger and elder brothers will fall into fighting among themselves and robbing each other. Further, where they have been transformed by the proper forms and the natural order contained in ritual principles and precepts of moral duty, they will yield their claim to others of their own country. Thus, following one’s essential and inborn nature will lead to strife even among brothers, but when it has been transformed by ritual and morality, brothers will yield their claim to others of their own country. ⁶⁴

There is no qualitative difference between Xunzi and Mencius in this regard, despite their contrasting views of human nature and different suggestions for moral self-cultivation. ⁶⁵ Consider once again Mencius 1A7 where Mencius says: ‘Only a gentleman can have a constant heart in spite of a lack of constant means of support. The people, on the other hand, will not have constant heart if they are without constant means.’ Here Mencius’ aim is not only to point out the government’s responsibility to provide constant and sufficient material provisions for the people as Joseph Chan rightly claims, but also to highlight the Confucian scholar’s moral charisma, his extraordinary ability to continue to maintain the (passionate) heart for the Dao in spite of economic hardship. For Mencius material/economic goods are important as long as they can effectively support one’s moral life, a life to become a gentleman [junzi] and further a sage [shengren 聖人], and to the extent that the people ‘befriend one another both at home and abroad, help each other to keep watch, and succor each other in illness, [thereby living] in love and harmony’ ⁶⁶ – that is, to the extent that a society is built on fiduciary relationships.

Thus understood, for all three giants of Confucianism, desert as natural talent, though important, is not something that has an inherent moral value. Desert is valuable only if it is consistent with the telos of the Kingly Way, namely, moral self-cultivation and fiduciary social relationships. Though Confucians may not find inequalities that ensue after meeting the threshold of sufficiency morally objectionable, they would actively resist the level of inequalities that stands in the way of one’s devotion to the Way and hampers fiduciary social relationships. Inequalities are acceptable (as desert should be recognized) but they are significantly constrained by the Confucian norms of civility and justice, and, most importantly, by the very notion of the Confucian gentleman [junzi] and the merit that marks him as a moral exemplar.

Confucian democracy for the family model of distributive justice

Earlier, I argued that the concept of desert cannot be purely internally determined independent of external goals and values. In the same vein, Amartya Sen points out the very indeterminate and contingent notion of ‘meritocracy’:

[T]he concept of ‘merit’ is deeply contingent on our view of a good society. Indeed, the notion of merit is fundamentally derivative, and thus cannot but be qualified and contingent. There is some elementary tension between (1) the inclination to see merit in fixed and absolute terms, and (2) the ultimately instrumental character of merit – its dependence on the concept of ‘the good’ in the relevant society. ⁶⁷

As noted, almost all Confucian advocates of economic meritocracy are champions of political meritocracy. For them, an ideal Confucian society is where merit is given its ‘due’ place (or the paramount importance) across all life-spheres, even as they admit the need of a certain social safety net for the worst-off. Therefore, the ideal regime that these scholars support is close to natural aristocracy or a mixed regime where democracy is only instrumentally or minimally valued.

Little (almost no) attention, however, has been paid to what a good society looks like in an ideal Confucian polity and therefore what kind of meritocracy a Confucian meritocracy should be. In this regard, it is of tremendous importance that all three Confucian masters regarded an ideal Confucian state as a harmonious family where the king should deem his subjects as his own children and the people should treat each other as if they are related, as brothers and sisters. Therefore, at the core of traditional Confucian virtue politics, which was nested in the monarchical system, was whether or not the ruler was able to extend his love for his own family to the people that he ought to deem as his own children. ⁶⁸ Confucians were even convinced that ren, the Confucian moral virtue par excellence, is rooted in filial and fraternal love and responsibility [xiaoti 孝悌]. ⁶⁹

The fact that the ideal Confucian state is a ‘family state’ and the ideal social fiduciary relationships are modeled after harmonious family relationships has immense implications for our search for a normatively attractive model of Confucian distributive justice in contemporary East Asia where monarchy has been completely demolished. Our moral intuition would tell us that there is something deeply wrong about economic meritocracy and sufficientarianism within the family. Most parents distribute various goods to their children not on the basis of their merit (though they sometimes do so on special occasions) but on the basis of their need, and the children’s obligation to aid their aged or ill parents does not depend on their past performance, but on their present need. Likewise, most siblings in healthy relationships do not distribute their late parents’ properties on the basis of merit among themselves, but mostly according to need. As Robert Goodin puts it, ‘What most fundamentally underlies the reciprocal duties of family life – of spouses to one another, of parents to their children, of children to their aged parents – is the vulnerability of those parties to one another’. ⁷⁰ In the context of family, therefore, the claim that whatever inequalities are morally acceptable if only they ensued after meeting the threshold of sufficiency is absurd because the nature of the relationship (and special responsibilities that it gives rise to among family members) puts a significant constraint on inequalities that can threaten to destroy the very meaning of that relationship.

From a moral perspective, the attraction of the family model of distributive justice is that it shifts our attention from causal responsibility (what or who actually caused one’s vulnerabilities) to remedial responsibility (who should take responsibility for such situations). In modern capitalistic societies in which socio-economic vulnerabilities are largely caused structurally, it is difficult, even futile, to identify what the proximate cause of the problem is. The family model stipulates that when the cause of socio-economic vulnerabilities is either difficult to identify or structurally embedded, the responsibility to remedy the situation falls on those who are capable of, even if they are not causally responsible for, the situations they are now being asked to remedy. ⁷¹

Some Confucian political theorists (Ruiping Fan for one) would oppose this model which operates on Confucian familialism in which Confucian family ethics of care and responsibility is extended to fellow citizens because of its relative negligence of the importance of desert. But is desert really relevant in the case of helping the vulnerable? Should they deserve collective help? Consider Mencius 2A6, where Mencius gives a famous story about an innocent child who is about to fall into a well. Mencius says that anyone who sees a child in danger would be filled with alarm, distress, pity and compassion and he would react immediately not because the child deserves his help but simply because he possesses a heart of compassion. The question of whether man possesses a heart of compassion is not my concern here. I am rather interested in what Mencius omitted to tell – the fact that though the man did not cause the child to fall into a well, the responsibility to save the child was his simply because he happened to be there. Likewise, in most cases, the responsibility to help the vulnerable people falls on us collectively simply because they happen to be our fellow citizens and there is no other (effective) way that they can be helped.

Our discussion so far boils down to one important question – can East Asians form and maintain familial-civic friendship with their fellow citizens who are de facto strangers? One of the critical reasons that the Confucian intuition of the family model of justice failed to be fully realized in traditional East Asia was that the model was completely dependent on one man’s personal benevolence under the monarchical system and in the absence of effective institutional mechanisms to keep deserts as self-regulative according to the Confucian ethical ideal, the aristocratic caste could easily exploit them for their political ambitions and economic gains in the name of meritocracy. That is, what was fundamentally lacking in traditional East Asia was a social and political institution that can fully realize the Confucian intuition of distributive justice.

Democracy can offer a political institution that can best house Confucian familialism and various modes of social practice that can reinforce familial-civic bonds among East Asian citizens. ⁷² Democracy offers a civil society open to all, including the vulnerable and those who suffer injustice. It is in the democratic civil society that the vulnerable and victims of injustice can organize their voices and make them heard by political leaders and public officials without fear by appealing to familial-citizenship, thus without the impossible (given the current socio-economic structure in East Asia, particularly in China) burden to prove their merit. Only when the family model of distributive (and political) justice is connected to democratic institutions through Confucian familialism, thus making the polity Confucian democratic, will economic inequalities (reflecting different personal merits) not be excessive, certainly not more than those found in current East Asian societies. Still, in Confucian democracy political and economic meritocracy is valued but its valuation will be dependent upon the very mode of democracy as the content of merit will be given anew there.