美中全球议题对话项目

Confucianism offers interesting prospects for thinking about cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, Confucianism is often said to promote a way of thinking that emphasizes the importance of human relationships, as those between good friends, work colleagues, neighbors, and (above all) family members. This might make it seem an awkward fit for cosmopolitanism, which is often taken to recommend that we promote the interests of human beings as such, independently of their connections to ourselves. Furthermore, Confucianism holds out the prospect of offering a moderate and psychologically realistic form of cosmopolitanism, and this gives it a major advantage in current debates about cosmopolitanism and global justice. 

In this paper, I will look closely at two general ways of justifying concern for non-citizen strangers within a Confucian worldview. The first invokes the famous ideal of “graded love” or “care with distinctions,” usually understood as an essential component of the virtue of humaneness (ren 仁, sometimes translated as “benevolence,” “humanity,” or “goodness”). A second way of underwriting Confucian cosmopolitanism is inspired by those scholars who say that Confucian ethics are fundamentally “role-based” or in some deep sense “relational,” so that all of a Confucian’s significant moral values should be derived from their relationships in some sense. As I will show, there is a defensible version of the claim that Confucian ethics—even the cosmopolitan elements—are fundamentally relational, although the defensible version presupposes a much more qualified and modest sort of relationality than some scholars have assumed, focusing on what I characterize as “fellow humanity” and its indicators.

There are many types of cosmopolitanism, some of which have direct implications for our duties to citizens of other states, or for international law, or for the development of transnational political institutions. The focus of this essay is what I will call civic cosmopolitanism. Civic cosmopolitanism has direct implications for the sense of shared identity that we as individuals should develop, a sense that is closely linked to norms regarding how we behave toward people of all states or nations. This shared identity should have certain implications for the sorts of lives they live and the people they become. 

There are moderate and radical variants of civic cosmopolitanism. One of the most radical variants says that people should see themselves as having the same obligations to other peoples as they would have to fellow citizens. A more moderate alternative doesn’t go so far as to say that we should regard ourselves as citizens of the world. It is enough that we see ourselves as having some sort of relationship that is thinner than shared citizenship and yet still substantial or consequential enough to underwrite meaningful commitments to protect or promote the interests of other peoples, or to promote joint projects for one another’s sake or the sake of the whole. Moderate civic cosmopolitanism requires more than lamentation but less than treating as fellow citizens.

My specific question is about the relations that form the basis of the Confucian cosmopolitan’s ethical attitudes toward non-citizen strangers. Whatever the reasons to render aid, they are agent-neutral and do not depend in any necessary and significant way on my relationship to them. Nevertheless, I want to explore a way of thinking about cosmopolitanism that will be friendlier to the Confucian ethical and social worldview, which tends to pay closer attention to relations or connections between self and other. I also think that my approach is in a deep sense quite faithful to cosmopolitan thinking and debate from the very beginning. Insofar scholars of cosmopolitanism have wrestled with questions about the proposal that we are all “citizens of the world,” they have been concerned not just with what we should do for non-citizens, but also with the sort of community that we share with them. Do we best understand ourselves as fellow citizens, (distant) neighbors, quasi-siblings, or something else? Finally, my view is that when it comes to other-directed concern in ethics and political philosophy, thinking about our relationships is inescapable.

My next step will be to consider two ways in which Confucians might ground moderate civic cosmopolitanism. The first will be through the value of “care with distinctions,” understood as a necessary feature of basic human virtue. The second way of grounding cosmopolitanism will work from the presupposition that all of Confucian ethics is based on relationships, and that Confucians would see themselves as having obligations to non-citizen strangers in virtue of being in some sort of relationship with them. Historical Confucians debated and developed compelling arguments for a certain conception of virtuous care that is sometimes called “graded love” or “care with distinctions.” I find at least two influential lines of argument for care with distinctions. First, care with distinctions is necessary for special relationships, which are a central and indispensable part of the human good and the ethical life. Second, any system of ethical value that fails to take proper account of our natural inclination to care about those near and dear to us—especially about members of our family—simply won’t be adequately grounded or “rooted” (ben 本) in human nature, which is destined to make for all kinds of ethical and perhaps metaethical mischief.

My primary question is about how Confucian cosmopolitans conceive of the self’s relationship to non-citizen strangers. This is a somewhat nebulous question that can be construed in different ways for different purposes, so let me say a bit more. For Confucianism as I understand it, it is very much a part of the ethical and sociopolitical worldview that people have some care or concern for non-citizen strangers. There are reasons or considerations that Confucians would cite in favor of taking such an interest, reasons or considerations that can be captured in an understanding of the Confucian cosmopolitan’s own relationship to them. This understanding will play a multifaceted role. At the very least, Confucians will offer the reasons as grounds for being concerned about non-citizen strangers. 

Confucian ethics is sometimes described in various ways as an ethics fundamentally concerned with human relationships. There are many different variations of this claim in the secondary literature, so let us start with a relatively crude version of it for now and then put it under more careful scrutiny to determine which variants or in what respects it might be true and significant. Preliminarily, we might say that Confucianism is fundamentally relational in the sense that the content of all first-order ethical norms invariably depends on the ethical agent’s relationships to others. 

When scholars say that Confucian ethics is fundamentally relational, they usually take this to be something distinctive about Confucianism, and the preliminary formulation doesn’t yet say anything distinctive. For example, many non-Confucian philosophers, including the ones that supposed to epitomize Western ethics (such as Kant and Plato) would have no difficulty conceding that a person’s relationships are among the factors that should be taken into account when spelling out the content of first-order ethical norms. Both acknowledge that the precise features of good or virtuous behavior will depend on whether one is interacting with a spouse, a son or daughter, a teacher, a work supervisor, etc. 

Earlier I pointed out that if one construes “relationship” broadly enough, the claim that Confucian ethics is fundamentally relational turns out to be trivially true—everyone thinks that relationships to others matter in some sense (at the very least we have to have the sort of relationship that allows us to know that the others actually exist). Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Roger T. Ames don’t seem to have “relationships” in that very loose sense in mind. Rather, they have in mind relationships that can be characterized in terms of social roles, things like being a parent, child, sibling, student, teacher, co-worker, or spouse. When Rosemont gives the relational self as he envisions it, he mentions relationships like being a father and neighbor, and not relationships in the thin sense of merely knowing a person’s existence. Let us call these sorts of social roles relationships in the thick sense of the term.

If the role-ethical account of Confucianism is true, it poses a major challenge to the very idea of Confucian cosmopolitanism. For moderate civic cosmopolitans, they see themselves as having at least some meaningful commitments to non-citizen strangers, and yet it would seem that on the role-ethical reading of Confucianism, that is only possible if they have some sort of relationship with the non-citizen strangers. This then leaves Confucian cosmopolitans with a dilemma: either they would have to concede that they have no particular ethical norms at all with regard to non-citizen strangers, or they must contend that they are, in some sense, related to non-citizens strangers after all. 

In most cases where Confucians do believe we have obligations to total strangers in other nation-states, it would be a stretch to say that we have other-mediated shared ends or care about particular individuals non-fungibly. Perhaps a humane Confucian leader believes that she should join forces with leaders of every other nation to reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation. That is a shared end, surely, but it is not meaningfully other-mediated. Perhaps a humane Confucian citizen donates to a philanthropy that provides temporary shelters to thousands of dislocated Syrian families. It is unlikely that care for the particular victims plays a meaningful role in providing the ground or justification for her doing so. Accordingly, I do not have much hope that relationships in the thick sense alone can serve as a basis for Confucian civic cosmopolitanism.

That said, there may be another sense in which Confucian ethics is fundamentally relational. On the interpretation that I have found more plausible, the Confucian basis for caring about non-citizens strangers is that they are “fellow human beings.” It is in virtue of being fellow human beings that humane Confucians care moderately about them, and it is by seeing them as fellow human beings that they are motivated to care for them. On its face, for someone to take a non-citizen stranger as a fellow human being is to see the stranger as having a relationship to them—specifically, it sees the stranger as a member of the same species as them. This is not a “relationship” in the particularist, non-fungible sense that scholars like Ames and Rosemont seem to have in mind, but it is a relationship in an interesting sense. 

There are two ways of construing the ethical significance of insight that non-citizen strangers are fellow human beings. On one construal, what matters most is just that they are human beings. The fact that I happen to be of the same species is incidental, and not very significant for purposes of figuring out what I should do about their suffering. On another way of construing it, however, the fact that they are fellow human beings is ethically significant. Our similarity in kind is part of what puts non-citizen strangers several rings in from the outermost of the concentric circles, what should distinguish my ethical commitments to them from my ethical commitments to non-human animals, plants, and so on.  Given the very important role that biological connections and resemblances tend to play in Confucian ethics more generally, it doesn’t seem a stretch to me that Confucian ethics might construe “fellow human beings” in the more relational way. At least for many of the authoritative Confucian philosophers who took themselves to be following Mengzi, it could be that all first-order ethical norms are deeply dependent on at least one important relational property, the property of “being of the same species” or “being of a different species.” If this is correct, then Confucian ethics could be cosmopolitan even while being fundamentally relational, but relational in a much thinner sense than the proponents of role ethics have suggested.

This essay is an excerpt of a longer paper, written as part of the author's participation in the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues' U.S.-China Research Group on Cosmopolitanism, that will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture.

Justin Tiwald is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University.