Contingency and responsibility in Confucian political theory

Abstract

In this article I investigate the Confucian sense of responsibility from the framework of “moral economy,” understood as a causal relationship between one’s virtue and non-moral goods including political position/success, and “contingency,” the failure of moral economy, and argue that early Confucians’ astute understanding of the contingent nature of the political world enabled them to subscribe to the non-causal sense of responsibility. Contrary to the common argument that Heaven was invoked by the Confucians in order to shield themselves from responsibility for their political failures, I argue that they imposed a more expanded sense of responsibility both on them and on the rulers, largely preoccupied with realpolitik. In their effort to restore moral economy between the ruler’s virtue and his political position in particular, I show Confucians engaged in what I call reverse moral economy, at the heart of which was to constrain the ruler’s arbitrary use of political power.

Keywords

confucianism contingency moral economy responsibility heaven

One of the interesting features of early Confucianism is its ritual-centered worldview that does not allow much room for contingency, which commonly refers to things that are “neither chosen nor necessary.”¹ What characterizes the contingent situation is a related set of experiences of unpredictability, uncertainty, and purposelessness, which according to many modern Western thinkers (especially liberal thinkers) are defining characteristics of human conduct. Michael Oakeshott’s famous “sailors’ metaphor” powerfully describes the contingent nature of human conduct: “[M]en sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”² Although no Confucian believed that rituals (hereafter li 禮) can eliminate contingency from human life, li provided practical apparatuses by which to abate it to the extent that the most crucial ethical choice for individuals should be whether or not to conduct their lives according to the li.³ As Pocock rightly observes, early Confucians uniformly held that “if the li are carried out, society’s disagreements are resolved, its norms and relationships declared and established, and its necessary enterprises co-operatively executed.”⁴ Since the life of contingency, given its unpredictable, uncertain, and purposeless nature, is replete with all sorts of disagreement and conflict, and this contingent aspect of human life is most conspicuous in the political life where public decisions affecting numerous others are to be made, it may even be said that the Confucian vision of the li militate against “the political” in the sense that Western scholars inspired by Nietzsche and Weber—so-called “political realists”—understand the term.⁵

Understandably, therefore, most studies in political theory of early Confucianism revolve around the li, specifically how the li contribute to civility, political order, statecraft, and good government, or to put in another way, how the li bring disorder and unruliness, the pre-li state according to Xunzi, under human control in a morally edifying way.⁶ Like their early Confucian predecessors who viewed contingency as the antithesis of a li-based ordered social and political life, contemporary scholars rarely pay attention to it largely because of their fascination with the remarkable power of the li in cultivating formidable moral character, which helps shield the moral agent, the political actor (e.g., the ruler) in particular, from what philosophers call “situational variations.”⁷ That is, in Confucian moral and political theory, the focus has been predominantly on what is within human moral control and how that control is attained, but rarely on what is or remains outside human control and how the moral or political agent should respond to it. The result is a missed opportunity to have a more comprehensive understanding of Confucianism, beyond Confucian li-based virtue ethics and politics.

In this paper, I investigate the way the early Confucians—Confucius and Mencius in particular⁸—responded to the contingent situations that their li-based moral-political project left out, attributing it to Heaven (tian 天) or to its decree (ming 命; sometimes translated as “fate”), and its philosophical connection to the Confucian sense of responsibility.⁹ Contrary to the prevailing view that the Confucians invoked Heaven for instrumental reasons of shielding themselves from responsibility for their political failure so as to concentrate on what is within their control (i.e., moral self-cultivation through the practice of the li), I argue that they were clearly aware of the fundamentally contingent nature of the political world and derived from their moral struggle with it a unique sense of responsibility that defies the dominant causal conception implied in the clear-cut dichotomy between what is within and outside human control. Special attention is paid to how the Confucians conceived of contingency differently depending on what the agent is between the Confucian scholar, committed to cultivation of virtues, and the (non-Confucian) ruler who ascends the throne not by virtue but by hereditary right, and what this difference implies for Confucian political theory.

Moral economy and contingency

The understanding of contingency as the state of affairs of being neither chosen nor necessary is most intelligible against the background of a non-teleological worldview in which there is no presupposed moral end and thus the distinction between what is purely voluntary and what is completely determined is easy to identify. Against the backdrop of a teleological worldview, however, of which the Confucian worldview is a peculiar kind, contingency takes a different shape, without necessarily losing its generic meaning of “unchosen and undetermined.” Recently, Youngsun Back has offered the concept of “moral economy” as a conceptual framework to make sense of contingency in the Confucian teleological ethical context, and my argument in this paper proceeds by critically embracing this conceptual tool.

According to Back, the teleological structure of the Confucian ethical system can be understood in terms of a meaningful connection between moral worth and non-moral goods where moral worth refers to one’s moral virtue, Confucianism’s central concern, while non-moral goods refer to all goods other than moral virtues, including wealth, health, power, status, and honor. Back captures this teleological connection between moral worth and non-moral goods upheld by early Confucians in terms of moral economy. “Despite all its various forms and modes,” says Back, “the crux of moral economy lies in the necessity involved in the connection between moral worth and non-moral outcomes; that is, regardless of causes or agency and regardless of duration, one’s moral excellence will bring favorable outcomes in the end.”¹⁰ Simply put, moral economy is “none other than the belief in moral necessity that good people prosper and bad people suffer, eventually and ineluctably.”¹¹ In Confucianism, Heaven is believed to maintain moral economy as the ultimate source of ethical warrant. Yet, early Confucians also noted that there are cases in which moral economy can fail and thus the connection between moral worth and non-moral goods does not hold. Back calls the failure of moral economy contingency and describes it as a case in which “the world is felt to be beyond human comprehension and beyond human control.”¹² In its Confucian teleological understanding, what gets stressed is contingency’s “not necessary” dimension, as it does not posit an alternative world where free choice of any good according to one’s preference or moral taste is possible or desirable.

Back uses the analytical framework of moral economy and contingency in order to illuminate the different ways in which the early Confucians conceptualized moral economy corresponding with their differing understandings of Heaven, and to see what implications are to be drawn from this investigation for their virtue ethics. For example, according to Back, even though both Confucius and Mencius equally appealed to Heaven, regarding failures of moral economy, Confucius embraced contingency as integral to moral economy itself, which sometimes works mysteriously, whereas Mencius never acknowledged failures of moral economy, which he regarded as self-evident truth, by precluding external factors beyond one’s moral control (i.e., factors contributing to contingency) from Heaven’s natural moral operations.¹³ This difference, in Back’s view, leads to two distinct modes of ethics—the ethics of faith (Confucius) and the ethics of confidence (Mencius). At the core of the former is, as demonstrated by Confucius himself, one’s voluntary choice to live up to the norms of moral economy, while what is central to the latter are the confidence in rationalistic moral economy which never fails and optimism about human moral agency.¹⁴

I find Back’s interpretation of early Confucianism insightful and revealing. I agree that Confucius held a more nuanced view of Heaven (and by implication moral economy) than Mencius, and Mencius’s rationalism led him to have more confidence in virtue’s unambiguous contribution to non-moral goods.¹⁵ I am not certain, however, that these early Confucians indeed upheld moral economy between virtue and political position/success as Back assumes—or political moral economy as I will call it throughout this paper. Though Back does not make a systematic connection between her ethical conclusion and Confucian political theory, let us take a cue from her discussion about Confucian political moral economy in order to shed light on an important aspect of Confucian political theory.

Back shows that since non-moral goods are contingent upon Heaven’s will, hence beyond one’s moral and ritual control, Confucius’s ethics of faith inclines the moral agent to focus on what is within his control, namely moral self-cultivation, without too much concern for its contingent non-moral consequences.¹⁶ Interestingly, this view, which understands Confucian moral agency in terms of one’s ability to control, strongly resonates with Robert Eno’s more overt political interpretation of Confucius as an ethical purist. Eno, however, employs a different language for what Back calls moral economy and contingency respectively—for the former Heaven’s prescriptive role and for the latter Heaven’s descriptive role, implying that contingency refers to a Confucian moral agent’s ex post facto description of the event having taken place as willed by Heaven.¹⁷ Eno claims that throughout the Analects (and in other early Confucian texts, especially in the Mengzi 孟子) Heaven’s descriptive role is invoked in order to make moral sense of the Confucian agent’s political failure. And from this perspective he makes the following political interpretation of Analects 2.4, the passage in which Confucius is commonly understood as reflecting upon his life-long process of moral self-cultivation.¹⁸

The first half in itself takes us the full length of the prescriptive path of Ruist [read: Confucian] Sagehood, from the stages of study to the resolution of all uncertainty. In contrast, the second half opens by introducing the descriptive obstacles that confront the Sage [read: Confucius] as he steps into the world of political action. We can anticipate that the logic of the passage is to set the descriptive action of T’ien [tian] against the prescriptive path of Ruism in order to instruct us how to reconcile the two.¹⁹

Back’s notion of contingency gives a powerful explanation for what the descriptive role of Heaven, which is rendered virtually identical with ming-as-fate, leaves unarticulated or oversimplifies—it is not so much because of political failure as such but because of the voluntarist nature of Confucian ethics that Confucius devoted himself to personal moral self-cultivation, especially by participating in the li.²⁰ Put differently, Confucius’s devotion to li-based moral self-cultivation was not contingent on his accidental political failures, but rather internal to his comprehensive moral vision of the good life. Nevertheless, Back’s stark dichotomy between what is within and outside human moral control lends strong support to Eno’s claim that as ethical purists early Confucians (Confucius in particular) chose to withdraw from political involvement in a world where Confucius lamented there was no Way (wu dao 無道).²¹ Furthermore, Back’s framework can help explain why a social relationship between Confucius and his followers emerged and developed primarily (but not exclusively) as a school rather than as a political association, despite their strong sense of Heaven-prescribed moral mission to transform the world. Finally, Back’s analysis is also useful in making philosophical sense of the “anomaly” (in Eno’s view) of Mencius, namely his relentless pursuit of political involvement and active engagement with rulers who were generally geared toward the then dominant trend of realpolitik during the Warring States period. As Eno puts it, rationalistic confidence in the moral economy of Heaven is likely to have enabled him to “put to the test the assertion that generations of [Confucians] had avoided testing; that a truly virtuous [Confucian], given the opportunities of the times, could transform the world,”²² by marginalizing contingency as external conditions’ incidental impact on moral destiny of mankind.

Political involvement

A question immediately arises. If we understand moral economy and contingency in Confucianism largely from the standpoint of what is morally controllable and what is not, and if we conclude that Confucius (and early Confucians in general) turned to cultivation of (personal) virtues because of the uncontrollable, contingent nature of non-moral goods, political position/success in particular, how can we account for the early Confucians’ strong aspiration to participate in government in spite of repeated failures? As the perspicuous gatekeeper pointed out, Confucius was one who “ke[pt] working towards a [political] goal the realization of which he kn[ew] to be hopeless.”²³ This means that he neither subscribed to the simple or necessary correlation between moral virtue and political position/success, nor recoiled from political involvement because of the hopelessness of his employment in government or the slim possibility of becoming politically influential and retreated to the secluded life of personal self-cultivation. On the contrary, as long as the Analects is concerned, which provides the most reliable record on the life of Confucius,²⁴ the contingent nature of political life did not seem to prevent him (or his followers) from political involvement.

All the more striking, at one point Confucius was even willing to work for Bixi who, with his military forces based in the city of Zhongmou, rebelled against his superior in the state of Jin, an immoral action involving a critical violation of the ritual norms of the Zhou civilization which Confucius took pains to revivify. Upon chastisement by his own student Zilu, Confucius justified his seemingly problematic action by saying,

[H]as it not been said, “Hard indeed is that which can withstand grinding?” Has it not been said, “White indeed is that which can withstand black dye?” Moreover, how can I allow myself to be treated like a gourd which, instead of being eaten, hangs from the end of a string?²⁵

Here Confucius makes clear that his ambition is not merely to keep his moral integrity intact but to put his moral power into practice. Furthermore, Eno’s speculation about the early Confucians’ ethical purism and political withdrawal flies in the face of remarkable flexibility shown in Confucius’s attitude toward political involvement: “I, however, am different [from all other ancient sages]. I have no preconceptions about the permissible and the impermissible.”²⁶

In my view, even if it is agreed that Confucius believed in the general teleological connection between virtues and non-moral goods such as health, wealth, and honor, it is questionable that political elevation/success was one of such goods which he thought would result from one’s virtue, although he did want those participating in government to be meritorious.²⁷ As we have seen, Confucius seems to have been keenly aware of the highly contingent nature of political life, and indeed there is no textual evidence to support the speculation that he only came to realize the contingent relationship between virtue and political position/success at the last moments of his life after repeated political failures. To be sure, he believed in the world-transforming power of virtue held by the ruler (the sage-king, more precisely),²⁸ but nowhere in the Analects is he seen to have posited a(n) (eventual) correlation between one’s virtue and political success, when the person in question is a Confucian scholar like himself. As Confucius’s passion lay primarily in moral self-cultivation and moral enhancement of others, his political desire to transform the world, which encompasses his continued effort to seek a position in government, should be understood as an endeavor to create an ordered sociopolitical condition that can materialize his profound moral ambition.

Seen in this way, it is doubtful that Confucius pursued political success but out of frustration along the way turned to nonpolitical moral self-cultivation, something he considered to be within his control. What we glean from the Analects, rather, is that for Confucius the political project of social reform was an integral part of his more comprehensive moral project of self-transformation, and we should understand his (and his followers’) political involvement from this moral perspective. To put in another way, in Confucius’s moral vision, the purpose of political participation was not so much to seek employment in government per se but to extend one’s moral virtue to the service of the public good. And this is how he understood the most profound political implications of ren 仁 (commonly translated as benevolence or human-heartedness), the Confucian moral virtue par excellence.²⁹ In Confucius’s view, whether or not this extension of care through political position will be successful is up to Heaven or its decree, hence contingent, but the will to extend one’s virtuous character to service for the well-being of the people is undoubtedly within one’s moral agency, which is itself rooted in and animated by Heaven’s decree.³⁰ Here, political participation broadly construed (beyond formal involvement in the government) is an indispensable component of one’s expansive conception of moral self-cultivation.³¹ The reason for political failure, as intended by Heaven, is unfathomable to the human agent, but the proper state of mind that a cultivated Confucian scholar should embrace in the face of it should not be resignation to fatalism or self-defense, or resentment, but rather a sense of awe and regret.³²

Responsibility (I): The Confucian scholar

The stark demarcation between what is controllable and what is not, though largely useful in making sense of certain aspects of Confucian ethics, gives rise to a justified misgiving about political responsibility. If political failures are intended by the inscrutable Heaven and thus are outside of one’s control, how can he be held responsible for his failed actions? In Confucianism does Heaven (or ming highlighting Heaven’s descriptive side) serve merely as a conceptual device to rationalize one’s political failure ex post facto?

Of the approaches relying on the demarcation between what is within and outside of human control, Back’s framework of moral economy and contingency, otherwise useful, seems especially vulnerable to this misgiving because here the (eventual) teleological causality between one’s virtue and his political success is posited as one critical instantiation of Confucian moral economy. In this framework, political failure not only signals contingency, the failure of moral economy, but also reveals ex post facto that the agent was in actuality not virtuous enough and his less than formidable moral character made him susceptible to situational variations. However, given the public and collective nature of political life involving many other moral agents, to attribute one’s political failure mainly to his moral character seems too demanding.

One way to avoid this predicament would be to highlight the inscrutable and uncontrollable dimension of Heaven and ascribe no moral responsibility to the putatively virtuous agent. How can one be held responsible for the outcomes over which he has virtually no moral control? In fact, this is how Eno understands the relationship between Heaven’s decree and human agent, when he says that “the decree that determines the failure of the [Confucian] political mission almost frees the [Confucian], extricating him from toils of political responsibilities and allowing him to retire, at least partially, into the pure ritual practice of the [Confucian] community.”³³ Echoing Eno’s argument about the twofold roles of Heaven (prescriptive and descriptive), El Amine aptly sums up their political implications for the Confucian moral agent in the following way:

[O]n the one hand, in the same way that tian is used to support the pursuit of political virtue and the promotion of the worthy, it also encourages well-motivated political engagement. On the other hand, and crucially, by delimiting areas beyond human control, it justifies certain political failures, shielding the political agent from responsibility for unforeseen or uncontrollable events.…[J]ust as the mandate separates aspects of human life that are within our control from those beyond it, similarly, on the political level, it separates events that the gentleman worries about from those that he should not worry about.³⁴

However, this way of understanding responsibility in Confucianism rather conceals (and possibly distorts) than illuminates its distinctive Confucian moral character. In Western political and legal theory, the most dominant conception of responsibility is a causal responsibility, predicated on the logical connection between autonomous action and its uninhibited consequences. Underlying this simple conception are a series of philosophical assumptions;

The gist of moral agency is autonomy (i.e., autonomous thought, choice, and action).

An action that is morally autonomous is fully within one’s control.

An action results in consequences.

An action that is within one’s perfect control results in uninhibited consequences for which he/she alone is responsible.

The responsibility for the consequences of the autonomous action cannot be logically transferred to others or attributed to external forces that played no role in causing them; on the flip side, if one’s action was influenced by others or inhibited by external factors, his/her responsibility is either reduced or nullified depending on the nature and/or the degree of such influence or inhibition.

Apparently, both Eno and El Amine take this (or similar) causal concept of responsibility for granted and interpret Confucian moral agency in relation to the descriptive role of Heaven or ming from this perspective. This approach, however, is inadequate in the Confucian context because the causal conception of responsibility does not posit a teleological worldview as the moral backdrop against which one’s action or agency is to be evaluated. In the causal conception, most dominant in liberal political theory, the world is conceived of as naturally contingent and, as we have seen with Oakeshott’s “sailors’ metaphor” earlier, what characterizes contingency is uncertainty, indeterminacy, and unpredictability. In this non-teleological worldview, contingency has two opposing sides. On the one hand, the fact that human relation to the world is inherently contingent and no moral or metaphysical authority is there to guide one’s life renders it dangerously precarious, as best seen in Hobbes’s portrayal of the state of nature. On the other hand, however, contingency surrounding human existence in the world is the profound source of (ontological) freedom, which defines one’s personal and social life as adventurous rather than fixated in social roles authorized by a transcendental force, be it God or Heaven. Ironically, then, this dual aspect of contingency informs us that life is free and adventurous precisely because of its contingent, precarious nature. Here moral agency implies, in practice, one’s ability to navigate his/her non-teleological journey on a sea of contingency. Contingency buttresses the world in which one’s adventurous and autonomous action causes its specific outcomes to happen and thus makes it possible that the responsibility for those outcomes falls solely on the one who caused them. In the case of political failure, there is no Heaven to invoke; it is the agent’s poor choice, unwise decision (including failure to consider the external factors that are likely to stand in the way of his/her decision), or badly executed action that is to blame.

In marked contrast, in the Confucian worldview Heaven is the teleological pivot that at once enables and baffles human moral agency, especially in one’s involvement in the political world. In Confucianism, therefore, political action is not understood as free as it is deemed to be in the causal conception of responsibility. Nor is it thought to be within one’s (perfect) control, rendering responsibility to be a matter of one’s moral debt, which his or her autonomous action has logically incurred, to the contingent world which itself consists of a multitude of equally autonomous and adventurous human agents. In Confucian teleology, contingency does not mean the negation or the logical opposite of moral economy, but rather its integral part. In this sense, one can say, Heaven is Möbius-strip-like.

Contingency thus understood has profound implications for human moral agency and sense of responsibility in a way quite different from modern Western conceptions of free agency and the causal conception of responsibility. Simply put, in the teleological conception there is no perfect autonomy and nothing is believed to be within one’s unalloyed control. Thus, one’s political success is not seen solely as the result of his moral or political doing, nor is his political failure understood as the contingent outcome of his putatively autonomous action. Even though Heaven does not determine the specific course of one’s political action and its consequences, the overall direction of the action is guided by it, and its consequences, successful or futile, represent its will. Consider the following anecdote describing Confucius’s trouble in Kuang, being attacked by Huan Tui, the Minister of War of Song.

When under siege in Kuang, the Master [read: Confucius] said, “With King Wen dead, is not culture (wen 文) invested here in me? If Heaven intends culture to be destroyed, those who come after me will not be able to have any part of it. If Heaven does not intend this culture to be destroyed, then what can men of Kuang do to me?”³⁵

Interpreting this passage along with another passage in the Analects that appears to involve the same incident,³⁶ Eno submits that “[t]he T’ien pictured here is ethically prescriptive,”³⁷ as “T’ien generates a virtue embodied in individuals, and it legitimates the ancient behavioral patterns that were so central to [Confucian] interests.”³⁸ However, it is questionable whether Heaven here reveals only its prescriptive side, which grounds and motivates human moral and political agency. Implicit in the situation in which Confucius finds himself is his political failure; not only is he unemployed by any government among feudal states, but, even worse, his life is threatened by one of the political heavyweights of Song, from which he has sought employment. The same Heaven, which Confucius claims generated virtue (de 德) in him and which has no intention of destroying (Zhou’s) culture, is simultaneously the source of his current predicament. Heaven may have no intention of destroying culture but it has apparently intended Confucius to suffer repeated political failures and now a life-threatening danger. In other words, the contingent situation Confucius as a political actor is facing is itself intended by Heaven, otherwise the guarantor of moral economy.³⁹

In the passages under examination, what is remarkable is Confucius’s attitude toward Heaven who is putting him through an unexpected tribulation. Rather than saying that the hardship he is currently undergoing is not his fault or complaining about Heaven for its irony or injustice, he turns his attention to the mission that it has given to him and his—equally Heaven-given—inner power (de) to carry it out, implying that he would continue to carry on his mission in spite of his past and current ordeals. In another passage, Confucius says,

There is no one who understands me. [However] I do not complain against Heaven, nor do I blame Man. In my studies, I start from below and get through to what is up above. If I am understood at all, it is, perhaps, by Heaven.⁴⁰

Though the passage does not seem to concern Confucius’s political mission in any obvious way, it clearly shows the general attitude Confucius has toward Heaven in contingent situations where his virtue has not produced a favorable political result: while it must be Heaven who has created the frustrating situation in which he feels that no one understands him, he nevertheless declares that in the end it is Heaven alone who understands him! Here we see no reason to speculate that political failure would have led Confucius to retreat from political involvement and singularly devote himself to personal moral self-cultivation and ritual practice. Rather, the ethos we find is his sense of awe toward the inscrutable Heaven as the source of contingency, and his renewed commitment to his Heaven-endowed (moral and political) mission. Contrary to Eno’s judgment, what we see here is a great sense of responsibility, a responsible commitment to the world of contingency.

Mencius’s attitude to Heaven does not seem to be meaningfully different from Confucius’s. Consider the following conversation between Mencius (M) and Chong Yu (C), one of his students, which Back believes shows the difference between Mencius’s ethics of confidence and Confucius’s ethics of faith rather dramatically.

C: Master, you look somewhat unhappy. I heard from you the other day that a gentleman reproaches neither Heaven nor man.

M: This is one time; that was another time. Every five hundred years a true King should arise, and in the interval there should arise one from whom an age takes its name. From Chou [Zhou] to the present, it is over seven hundred years. The five hundred mark is passed; the time seems ripe. It must be that Heaven does not as yet wish to bring peace to the Empire. If it did, who is there in the present time other than myself? Why should I be unhappy?⁴¹

Back suggests that this statement should be understood as Mencius saying, “I have already reached a certain level of moral excellence, why should I be unhappy? It is not my fault that I do not meet with the opportunity.”⁴² As Back points out, Mencius’s idea of moral economy looks more rationalistic than Confucius’s, as he holds greater confidence in Heaven’s periodic intervention in human history. However, this does not mean that Mencius is attributing the source of his unhappiness to Heaven, thus rationalizing the futile consequences of his political endeavor.⁴³ Nor is it the case that Mencius is attempting to avoid his responsibility by shifting attention to Heaven’s contingent, hence uncontrollable, nature. Mencius is not unhappy because he believes in the ultimate ethical operations of Heaven, which will bring peace to the world. But it appears that he finds Heaven’s delayed intervention puzzling and deeply regrettable as it should have happened a long time ago. Like Confucius, however, he does not blame Heaven but rather draws attention to his readiness to take up the heavenly mission if an opportunity were to arise.

Mencius’s point seems to be that instead of giving in to frustration upon Heaven’s inscrutability and its seemingly ironic operations, a gentleman, by virtue of his cultivated moral power, should maintain perseverance to carry on his prophetic mission in the world of the “warring states” where contingency as the failure of moral economy between virtue and political position/success depicts the “normal” state of affairs rather than moral economy’s incidental breakdowns.⁴⁴ Therefore, the initial puzzlement does not drive him to political paralysis. Quite contrarily, the Mengzi portrays Mencius generally as someone who eagerly engages with the rulers (and the ministers) of various states with hopes to make at least one of them a true king (wang 王)—a title which ought to belong only to the universal ruler with the Mandate of Heaven—and bring about a benevolent government (ren zheng 仁政). Again, what we encounter here is not so much an attempt to shield oneself from the consequences of one’s actions, not even from unforeseen and unpredictable outcomes,⁴⁵ but a remarkable sense of responsibility for the world that is massively contingent rather than rationally predictable, Mencius’s attempt to make rational sense of it notwithstanding. Instead of exonerating himself from moral responsibility for unforeseen and unpredictable outcomes, Mencius faithfully followed the lead of Confucius by continuing to work towards his Heaven-given mission in the world that was constantly frustrating him, by giving advice to and remonstrating with the rulers. For both Confucius and Mencius this is the only way a virtuous Confucian who holds no formal political position can express his moral and political responsibility toward a world that is contingent.

Responsibility (II): The ruler

Thus far, we have discussed the Confucian sense of responsibility in a world of contingency, which increasingly characterized the political circumstances of the Spring and Autumn and especially the Warring States periods. Central to my argument has been that the clear-cut and unambiguous demarcations between Heaven’s prescriptive and descriptive roles, between moral economy (i.e., Heaven’s natural moral operation) and contingency (i.e., Heaven’s aberrations from its natural course of moral operation), and between what is within and outside human control, despite partial utility as analytical distinctions, prevent us from coming to terms with the Confucian non-causal sense of responsibility for a world in which the breakdown of political moral economy has become the norm. In this section, I continue to examine the Confucian sense of responsibility by paying attention to the more saliently political context. Specifically, I investigate how Mencius understands the ruler’s responsibility, who has no place to retreat to during times of political failure. Once again, I begin with Back’s analysis of Mencius’s conception of moral economy.

According to Back, Mencius “tried to give a logical and plausible account for the workings of moral economy” by positing that rulership should be held by a virtuous (admittedly, the most virtuous) person and that a virtuous ruler would draw the people like water flowing downward, thus being able to unify the whole world.⁴⁶ There is no disagreement on this claim, which is embedded in the “sage-king paradigm” that all Confucians hold, according to which (universal) kingship should belong to the most virtuous person. However, singling out the ruler to vindicate moral economy between virtue and political position/success invites a thorny question, which, as we will see shortly, has critical implications for the Confucian sense of responsibility.

The kernel of the problem lies in the fact that the supposed causal direction in Confucian political moral economy does not work with the case of the ruler. Recall that the version of political moral economy that Back has in mind holds that the (eventual) causal relation between virtue and political position/success and the direction of the supposed causality is necessarily from the former to the latter. That is, it is one’s possession of virtues that undergirds the whole paradigm of political moral economy. This moral paradigm makes perfect sense in the cases that involve Confucian scholars as the agents of moral economy because for them political position/success is the (tentative) “goal,” a non-moral instrument to realize their profound moral-political aim. With Confucian scholars, political moral economy’s supposed causal relation between virtue and political position/success stands well as an evaluative framework. However, the situation is dramatically different when it comes to rulers who attain kingship, the highest political position, not by virtue but by hereditary right. Does this not signal the complete breakdown of political moral economy as it demonstrates no connection between virtue and kingship, the epitome of all non-moral goods including wealth, honor, and power that a man can ever dream of possessing?⁴⁷ How can the Confucian make sense of the obvious dilemma this case creates, that in reality kingship is generally occupied by the less than virtuous person, even an immoral one? The ubiquity of non-virtuous rulership, institutionally backed by the hereditary system, tempts one to believe that contingency is an essential feature of the political world.

Now, if the problem of contingency in politics was an incidental phenomenon peculiar to the Warring States period, arguably the most violent period in Chinese history, and only under this period’s special political circumstances non-virtuous rulership arose as the contingent exception, Back’s general thesis on the natural operations of Heaven toward political moral economy may remain valid. The problem is that for Mencius contingency is internal to the political institution of kingship itself, around which Confucian political theory is pivoted, with the rise of the first dynasty in ancient China starting with the first father-son transmission of the throne. Since Mencius is known as an advocate of the “abdication doctrine,” according to which the throne should be handed down from the incumbent virtuous ruler to another virtuous man by means of abdication, thus subscribing in principle to political moral economy, it is important to examine how he responds to the rise of hereditary kingship, a radical and institutional disruption of the supposed moral economy. Consider the following famous conversation between Mencius (M) and Wan Zhang (W), his student.

W: It is said by some that virtue declined with Yu who chose his own son to succeed him, instead of a good and wise man. Is this true?

M: It is not. If Heaven wished to give the Empire to a good and wise man, then it should be given to a good and wise man. But if Heaven wished to give it to the son, then it should be given to the son. In antiquity, Shun recommended Yu to Heaven, and died seventeen years later. When the mourning period of three years was over, Yu withdrew to Yangcheng, leaving Shun’s son in possession of the field, yet the people of the Empire followed him just as, after Yao’s death, the people followed Shun instead of Yao’s son. Yu recommended Yi to Heaven [but the people] went to Qi [Yu’s son] instead of Yi, saying, “This is the son of our prince.”…

Shun and Yu differed from Yi greatly in the length of time they assisted the Emperor, and their sons differed as radically in their moral character. All this was due to Heaven and could not have been brought about by man.…

A common man who comes to possess the Empire must not only have the virtue of a Shun or a Yu but also the recommendation of an Emperor. That is why Confucius never possessed the Empire. On the other hand, he who inherits the Empire is only put aside by Heaven if he is like Jie or Zhòu. That is why Yi, Yi Yin and the Duke of Zhou never came to possess the Empire.⁴⁸

Here Mencius makes important qualifications with regard to political moral economy implied in the abdication doctrine. First, the mere fact that one possesses the highest virtue does not guarantee his ascendance to kingship. Already we can find that the core assumption of political moral economy does not stand in Mencius’s political theory. According to Mencius, it is absolutely up to Heaven to decide who will become the next ruler between the virtuous man and the son of the incumbent ruler. Here Heaven is presented at once as the transcendent guarantor of political moral economy (between virtue and kingship) and as its interrupter. Second, it can still be argued that Mencius upholds moral economy by stipulating that when Heaven chooses the son of the incumbent ruler, he must also be virtuous. Although Mencius does not clarify which factor is more critical between Heaven’s favor and the candidate’s moral virtue, he makes it clear that the candidate’s virtue per se does not guarantee his rulership unless he is simultaneously favored by Heaven. Third, if the will of Heaven is just as important, if not more, as the candidate’s virtue, how can it be revealed? In the earlier part of the statement, Mencius seems to say that the people’s favor reflects the will of Heaven. If this observation is correct and there is no third factor interfering with the happy congruence between Heaven and the people, Mencius can surely be called a proto-democrat. The problem with this widely held (mis)interpretation lies in that it dismisses the decisive importance of the incumbent ruler’s recommendation. Mencius’s argument is that in reality the will of Heaven is most unambiguously represented by the incumbent ruler, who reigns as the son of Heaven (tianzi 天子) with the Mandate of Heaven.⁴⁹ All in all, Mencius does not subscribe to any simple and obvious version of moral economy in relation to the political agent. The political world in Mencius’s conception is already and deeply contingent in which there is no happy congruence between virtue and political position/success.

In my view, the finding that is more directly germane to the current examination can be drawn from the last sentence of Mencius’s statement quoted above. At first glance, Mencius seems to vindicate political moral economy by stipulating that the ruler can lose his position if his government is judged by Heaven as tyrannical. But he qualifies this pure form of political moral economy by acknowledging two things: first, the conventional mode of royal transmission after the foundation of the dynasty is inheritance (“he who inherits the Empire”) and second, unless the incumbent ruler is as bad as notorious tyrants such as Jie and Zhòu, his position would not be taken away even if there exists a far more morally superior candidate. With these two stipulations Mencius reveals what Eno calls his “institutional conservatism”:⁵⁰ although he believes that abdication is the most legitimate way to transmit the throne, his concern with constitutional sustenance of the Confucian polity leads him to embrace hereditary system as a realistic alternative to abdication, which as history witnessed can easily be manipulative in the service of ambitious ministers within and aggressive foreign rulers without.⁵¹ Moreover, even if the incumbent ruler is immoral and there is a viable alternative, restoration of the ideal state of political moral economy by replacing the reigning ruler with a virtuous man will not be authorized by Heaven, as long as the ruler in question is not as bad as Jie and Zhòu.

In sum, in Mencius’s political thought, political moral economy (and associated moral idealism) yields to his astute political realism. Notwithstanding his theoretical advocacy of the abdication doctrine, Mencius does not seem to posit moral economy in the political context. For him contingency, though signifying the failure of moral economy, rather describes the everyday conditions surrounding political life, as virtue, the sole quality required for rulership, is highly susceptible to situational variations.

Mencius does not stop here, however, forfeiting his moral idealism and turning to amoral political realism. What is truly remarkable about Mencius as a political thinker is that upon his realization of the impossibility of a pure form of political moral economy that he would otherwise champion, he recalibrates his political theory toward what can be called reverse moral economy. His new guiding political question is something like this: if the ruler is already there by his hereditary right, hence regardless of his possession of moral virtue, and the abdication doctrine embodying ideal moral economy has great potential to be politically destabilizing, how can the Confucian project of virtue politics still be realized under this contingent condition? The gist of the challenge is how to achieve the ideal end-state of political moral economy in which the ruler’s virtue and his supreme political position are in congruence, when in reality he has attained that position through non-moral means. The heart of this new political challenge is to make one who is already enjoying the highest political position actually virtuous as the position morally requires (according to Confucian moral economy), reversing the path to achieving moral economy.

Central to reverse moral economy is the virtuous Confucian’s moral admonition to the ruler and the ruler’s subsequent moral transformation. The case of King Xuan of Qi would be helpful here. King Xuan is known for his pursuit of ba dao 覇道 (commonly translated as the hegemonic rule), which Mencius vilified as an immoral mode of statecraft that goes directly against the Kingly Way (wang dao 王道),⁵² and his ba dao policy is best shown in his attack and eventual annexation of Yan.⁵³ Book 1 of the Mengzi has several anecdotes in which Mencius persuades this ruthless ruler with moral virtues. For instance, when King Xuan shows an interest in becoming a true (universal) king, Mencius reminds him of a recent incident where the king saw an ox shrinking with fear in anticipation of being killed for consecration, but he then spared it out of compassion. Mencius then points out that having this heart and extending it to the people is central to becoming a man of ren, upon which, as Confucian moral economy stipulates, he will become a true king. Employing analogical reasoning, Mencius says,

Your bounty is sufficient to reach the animals, yet the benefits of your government fail to reach the people. That a feather is not lifted is because one fails to make the effort; that a cartload of firewood is not seen is because one fails to use one’s eyes. Similarly, that peace is not brought to the people is because you fail to [practice] kindness. Hence your failure to become a true King is due to a refusal to act, not to an inability to act.⁵⁴

The following statement contains Mencius’s more concrete policy advice toward benevolent government. This time, his audience is King Hui of Liang, who among the feudal lords during the Warring States period was first to appropriate the title of “king” (wang 王), which used to belong exclusively to the Zhou overlord as the son of Heaven.

If Your Majesty [practices] benevolent government towards the people, reduces 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.”⁵⁵

The specific contents of Mencius’s admonishment to King Xuan and King Hui are worth serious investigation as they show concrete ways—moral-psychological as well as public-political—for a ruler who has ascended the current position by hereditary right to become a true king, thereby restoring the ideal state of political moral economy. In the present context two things are worth noting as Mencius, a Confucian political actor, admonishes the reigning ruler: first, Mencius re-appropriates the traditional feudal minister’s ritually sanctioned right to remonstrance as an indispensable component of his Confucian political theory in which the virtually same right is given to a virtuous Confucian scholar(-minister) like himself;⁵⁶ and second, this maneuver, which was to exert an enduring influence on subsequent imperial Chinese history, was prompted by Mencius’s astute recognition of the fundamentally contingent nature of the political world, reflected in the very institutional feature of kingship in its real political manifestation.

Now, as Mencius recognizes, under the hereditary system, which itself belies the ideal of political moral economy, no ruler, perhaps except for the cases of the dynasty founder and occasional usurpers, has volunteered for his position, nor has any ruler earned his position by means of virtue. What this means is that from the ruler’s perspective, nearly everything about his position is out of his control because his political status is the very outcome of the breakdown of moral economy. The question that naturally arises then is on what grounds Confucians like Mencius can ascribe responsibility to the ruler. The most rational answer would be one inspired by the causal conception of responsibility, that even if one’s current ruling position is a contingent outcome, as long as he remains in his role and makes decisions in the capacity of the ruler, he should be held—by tian but not directly by the laypeople—responsible for their consequences, that is, for what was within his control, though. Once again, Mencius’s approach to the ruler’s responsibility is counterintuitive. Consider the following conversation between Mencius (M) and King Hui of Liang (H).

H: I have done my best for my state. When crops failed in He Nei I moved the population to Ho Dong and the grain to He Nei, and reversed the action when crops failed in Ho Dong. I have not noticed any of my neighbours taking as much pains over his government. Yet, how is it the population of the neighbouring states has not decreased and mine has not increased?

M: [W]hen food meant for human beings is so plentiful as to be thrown to dogs and pigs, you fail to realize that it is time for garnering, and when men drop dead from starvation by the wayside, you fail to realize that it is time for distribution. When people die, you simply say, “It is none of my doing. It is the fault of the harvest.” In what way is that different from killing a man by running him through, while saying all the time, “It is none of my doing. It is the fault of the weapon.” Stop putting the blame on the harvest and the people of the whole Empire will come to you.⁵⁷

If we put aside our Mencius-influenced perception of King Hui as a belligerent ruler drawn to ba dao, the king’s response to starvation does not seem to be utterly irrational. Moreover, there is no reason to question the sincerity of his concern with the well-being of the people as far as his response is concerned. At any rate, compared with other rulers, King Hui does seem to have legitimate reasons for being proud of the way he responded to the problem that had been troubling many states in Mencius’s time, which he did not cause. Surprisingly, though, Mencius pinpoints King Hui as if he were the direct cause of the failed harvest and ensuing starvation. Mencius’s reasoning takes the appearance of one based on causality: the current situation in which people are dying out of starvation has (almost) nothing to do with natural calamities such as flooding or drought resulting in bad harvest; it has everything to do with the ruler’s bad public policies (i.e., failing to realize when to garner and when to distribute), hence his full responsibility.

However, is Mencius’s response to King Hui in ascribing him full responsibility reasonable? Even if it is granted that the king has not been implementing adequate public policies so as to enhance the well-being of the people proactively, it seems unreasonable to blame him for the unexpected bad situation, caused by natural calamities. In this case, a more reasonable approach may be to demarcate between what is within and outside the ruler’s political control and hold him responsible only for the outcomes of what is clearly within his control. Mencius’s fault, one may argue, lies in failing to note this important demarcation, aimed to delineate the political realm of responsibility, and consequently holding the ruler responsible for the contingent situation, which is largely beyond his control. In this view, King Hui should be found culpable only for the bad consequences directly resulting from his specific responses to the bad harvest, not for the outcomes caused by the bad harvest in toto.

Then, how can we make sense of Mencius’s seemingly failed reasoning? But is this truly failed reasoning? The judgment that Mencius’s reasoning is flawed or unreasonable is plausible only if we approach it from the standpoint of the causal conception of responsibility. As we have seen earlier, however, Mencius’s approach defies the simple causal relation and this defiance is the natural corollary of his refusal to make a vivid distinction between what is within and outside human control. Despite its causal outlook, the real point to which Mencius seems to want to draw King Hui’s attention is his moral-sentimental ability to see what is logically outside his control as if it were within his control and what is a natural calamity as if it were his own doing. This ability to extend one’s responsibility for what is within his control to what is outside his control (i.e., contingent outcomes) is rooted in the ruler’s innate moral sentiment, compassion in particular, and it is something that Mencius believes a ruler, just like anyone else who possesses this moral sentiment, can cultivate.⁵⁸

This conclusion brings us back to our earlier discussion of Heaven. In the statement by King Hui, “It is none of my doing. It is the fault of the harvest,” the “harvest” can be replaced by Heaven, because what the king means is that the bad harvest was caused by something beyond human control—namely Heaven. Seen in this way, King Hui’s statement is to invoke Heaven in order to shield himself, who is not a Confucian, from responsibility. So, Eno’s and El Amine’s argument that Heaven was appealed to by Confucians to shield themselves from responsibility proves to be clearly wrong. This sort of instrumental approach to Heaven is what the non-Confucian rulers during the Warring States period, preoccupied with realpolitik, commonly employed to indeed shield themselves from responsibility, not the position taken by Confucians, most of whom held no political positions. Heaven can be “created” to rationalize one’s failed mission only by those who do not believe in it as the ultimate, though inscrutable, guarantor of moral economy. For Mencius, what is important was the ruler’s expanded sense of responsibility even for the unexpected outcomes of Heaven’s inscrutable operations, and it was for the complete lack of the non-causal sense of moral and political responsibility which Heaven demands of the ruler for the well-being of the people that Mencius criticized King Hui.

Conclusion

In this paper I examined the Confucian sense of responsibility from the analytical framework of moral economy and contingency and argued that early Confucians, such as Confucius and Mencius, despite their slightly differing conceptualizations of moral economy, subscribed to the non-causal sense of moral and political responsibility. Central to my argument has been that the clear-cut demarcation between what is within and outside human control, though useful for the causal conception of responsibility, is critically limited in making sense of the Confucian sense of responsibility, and that Confucian moral economy in relation to political position/success (what I called political moral economy) can be better understood in terms of reverse moral economy, the aim of which is to restore the ideal state of political moral economy in a world of contingency. I have also discussed why the question of responsibility should be approached differently in the Confucian context depending on who the agent is between the Confucian scholar and the (non-Confucian) ruler, attributing the relevance of reverse moral economy only to the latter.

By way of conclusion, I would like to stress the critical importance of who the agent is once more in studying the Confucian sense of responsibility. Existing studies on this issue are singularly focused on the implications of the prescriptive and descriptive roles of Heaven or the clear-cut distinction between what is within and outside human control for the Confucian’s sense of responsibility or lack thereof. One of my purposes in this paper was to point out the critical limitation of such frameworks in Confucian political theory by showing how Confucians took seriously the contingent nature of their political enterprise and struggled with it without giving up their moral mission given to them by the inscrutable Heaven. That being said, in my view, the greater deficit in the existing literature is the nearly complete lack of attention to the ruler as a political actor in relation to the Confucian conception of Heaven, the question of contingency, and the sense of responsibility. It is not merely because the ruler plays a significant role in Confucian political theory—after all, no Confucians envisaged an alternative form of government than a one-man monarchy. The main reason is that among the three key actors in Confucian political theory—the ruler, the Confucian scholars (or scholar-ministers) and the people—the ruler, by virtue of his radically contingent condition, is the least Confucian, most easily tempted by the lure of realpolitik (which completely rejects the norms of moral economy), and thus the main audience of Confucian political theory. How to Confucianize the ruler was the Confucians’ central concern, and the expanded sense of moral and political responsibility was one of the most powerful ways for the Confucians to harness the ruler’s political ambition toward the well-being of the people, not only his own people but more importantly all under Heaven, whose sufferings he has nothing to do with directly.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The earlier version of this paper was presented at the international workshop called “The Problem of Contingency in East Asia,” held at Sungkyunkwan University (Seoul, South Korea), on June 24, 2016. I am grateful to Youngsun Back, So Yi Chung, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Michael Ing, Philip J. Ivanhoe, and Sarah Mattice for their valuable comments.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The current version of the paper was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [Project No. 11670216].