Table Of ContentPhilosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
David Solomon
P.C. Lo Editors
The Common
Good: Chinese
and American
Perspectives
The Common Good: Chinese and American
Perspectives
Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture
Volume 23
Senior Editor
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Department of Philosophy, Rice University, and
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas
Editor
Mark J. Cherry, Department of Philosophy, St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas
Assistant Editor
Lisa Rasmussen, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina,
Charlotte, North Carolina
Editorial Board
Stanley Hauerwas, Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Maureen Kelley, Department of Pediatric Bioethics, University of Washington,
Seattle, Washington
Terry Pinkard, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C.
C. Griffi n Trotter, Center for Health Care Ethics & Emergency Medicine,
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri
Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., President, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/6446
David Solomon • P.C. Lo
Editors
The Common Good:
Chinese and American
Perspectives
Editors
David Solomon P.C. Lo
Department of Philosophy Centre for Applied Ethics
University of Notre Dame Hong Kong Baptist University
Notre Dame , IN , USA Kowloon Tong , Hong Kong SAR
ISSN 0928-9518
ISBN 978-94-007-7271-7 ISBN 978-94-007-7272-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
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Contents
Part I Introduction
1 The Common Good ................................................................................. 3
P.C. Lo and David Solomon
Part II The Philosophical Background for the Common Good
2 Beyond the Common Good: The Priority of Persons .......................... 21
H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
3 Attacks on the Family East and West: Evidence
for the Erosion of a Common Good ...................................................... 45
Stephen A. Erickson
4 Why Modern Ethics Rejects the Common
Good: Some Suggestions......................................................................... 65
David Solomon
Part III Chinese Philosophical Reflections on the Common Good
5 The Concept of “Datong” in Chinese Philosophy
as an Expression of the Idea of the Common Good ............................. 85
Albert H. Y. Chen
6 The Common Good in Moism: A Reconstruction of Mozi’s
Ethics of “Inclusive Care” and “Reciprocal Well-Being” ................... 103
Ellen Zhang
7 The Common Good and Filial Piety:
A Confucian Perspective ........................................................................ 129
Jue Wang
v
vi Contents
8 Common Good and the Ethics of Global
Poverty: A Confucian Perspective ......................................................... 155
Jonathan Chan
9 Between the Family and the State: The Common
Good and the Confucian Habits of the Heart ....................................... 169
P.C. Lo
10 A Confucian Notion of the Common Good
for Contemporary China ........................................................................ 193
Ruiping Fan
Part IV The Common Good and Aristotelian/Thomistic Philosophy
11 The Common Good and the Virtuous Political Leader ....................... 221
Karen C. Chan
12 Why Justice Is Not Enough: Mercy, Love- Caritas,
and the Common Good ........................................................................... 243
Mary M. Keys
13 Who Is Responsible for the Common Good? Catholic
Social Teaching and the Praxis of Subsidiarity .................................... 261
Dennis P. McCann
Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... 291
Index ................................................................................................................. 293
Part I
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Common Good
P.C. Lo and David Solomon
The common good is an essentially contested concept in contemporary moral and
political discussions. Although the notion of the common good has a slightly antique
air, especially in discussions in the North Atlantic, it has fi gured prominently in both
the sophisticated theoretical accounts of moral and political theory in recent years and
also in the popular arguments brought for particular political policies and for more
general orientations toward policy. It has been at home both in the political arsenal
of the left and the right. It has had special signifi cance in ethical and political debates
in modern and modernizing cultures. Broadly Aristotelian views about community,
family, and the common good have played an important role in Western debates about
the impact of modernizing trends on traditional intermediate institutions. Similarly,
debates in East Asian cultures traditionally infl uenced by Confucian teachings have
worried about these same infl uences. Both Aristotelianism in the West and
Confucianism in the East have been to some extent pushed aside from the center of
contemporary political debate, but both remain options frequently sought out by
those uncomfortable with some of the more unsettling features of modern culture.
In both the Chinese and the North Atlantic discussions of the common good, the
discussion takes place in the presence of a looming political ideology that has domi-
nated twentieth century life. In China, Maoist-Marxist thought in combination with
statist capitalism, which fueled the revolutionary changes in Chinese life during the
last half of the twentieth century, provided the background for Confucian attempts
to revive the notion of the common good. In North Atlantic conversations, it is the
increasingly well-defi ned commitments of the secular, liberal state that loom over
P.C. Lo (*)
Department of Religion and Philosophy and Centre for Applied Ethics ,
Hong Kong Baptist University , Hong Kong , SAR
e-mail: [email protected]
D. Solomon
Department of Philosophy , University of Notre Dame , Notre Dame , IN , USA
e-mail: [email protected]
D. Solomon and P.C. Lo (eds.), The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives, 3
Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture 23, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4_1,
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
4 P.C. Lo and D. Solomon
the conversation. Confucians try to sustain (or perhaps refashion) their traditional
commitments in a social context utterly dominated by debates between neo-Marxist
and liberal ideologies, while Western thinkers writing in a cultural context where
Marxist thought has largely ceased to be a realistic option must cope with the
dominance of the prevailing secular individualism, increasingly more precisely
articulated in the work of such philosophers as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and
their students—and such late liberals as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault.
The chapters in this volume grew out of two conferences that brought together a
group of Chinese philosophers with serious scholarly interests in Confucian thought
and a group of American philosophers trained in Western philosophy, but with an
interest in Confucian attitudes toward the common good. All of the philosophers in this
group found the notion of the common good important in their work, but there were
a variety of attitudes towards its ultimate usefulness in dealing with contemporary
problems in moral and political thought. All of the contributors were, however,
interested in a dialogue in which the North Atlantic approach to these issues
confronted the Chinese approach. The fi rst conference was held on October 29–30,
2009, at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and was sponsored by the Center
for Applied Ethics at HKBU under the direction of the Director of the Center,
P.C. Lo. The second conference was held on March 20–21, 2011, at the University
of Notre Dame and was sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture
under the direction of the Director of that Center, David Solomon. At the fi rst
conference, chapters were circulated before the conference and each chapter was
subjected to rigorous criticism by the other members of the group. Participants’
revised chapters were again circulated before the second conference, and each chap-
ter was again subjected to criticism by all the participants.
These chapters do not fall into a tidy set of categories, nor did the conversations
at the two conferences from which they emerged always fl ow smoothly. The orga-
nizers of these conferences thought that open dialogue was more important on these
matters than regimented discussion. There were a variety of questions posed by the
chapters and by the critical discussions of them. Important questions were raised
about the interpretation of both the Confucian tradition of the common good and the
broadly Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, which has largely carried the discussion of
this notion in European philosophy. In neither tradition is there a clear consensus
about what the favored view of the common good might be. Chinese and Western
commentators raised concrete questions about how the concept of the common
good might be made relevant to current concrete political issues. There was special
interest in the role the common good might play in dealing with trends of secularism
both in China and the West, and in what is increasingly being called the crisis of the
family. One chapter focused precisely on the relation of the common good to large-
scale failures in eldercare in contemporary China. A number of the contributors
were also especially interested in the project of building and sustaining “intermediate
institutions” of a variety of sorts to fi ll in the space between rampant individualism
and the threat of totalitarianism. Fundamental philosophical questions were raised,
especially by the North Atlantic contributors, about the meaning and signifi cance
of the notion of the common good and also about the philosophical underpinnings
