Author: m24

This article explores the notion of care and justice in the relation between care ethics and justice ethics in Confucianism. The author, Li Chenyang, supports his findings by specifically focusing on the readings of Mencius, a Confucian philosopher of the fourth generation disciples of Confucian himself. Likewise, he explores the questions whether Confucian ethics embraced, or if they should embrace, universal values and impartiality; do they consider the concepts of care and justice. Li argues the notion of ‘configuration of values’.

Both care and justice, as values, are both present in Mencius’s moral philosophy. However, Li believes them not to be contradictory to one another. Instead, as a ‘configuration of values’, Mencius’s divulges into the values of care and justice ethics as two separate configured perspectives. Indeed, Mencius promotes universal love, whilst, likewise, severely critizing Mohism (another ancient Chinese philosophy that, more substantially than Confucianism, advocated for the unified ethical and political order grounded in consequentialist ethic which emphasized impartial concern for all people). Li shows that Mencius viewed universal love as a good thing, whilst at the same time believing that it should not be placed above one’s responsibility of love specifically to one’s own parents. The duty to one’s family was a primary duty of the utmost importance for Mencius, as for most Confucians in general; Li showed how this duty could not be compromised by other duties except in exceptional extreme circumstances.

Li introduces and explores one passage in particular of Mencius, bringing own evaluation and analysis of the text. Li makes several conclusions: firstly, an individual was wrong in using his own power to interfere with judicial procedures; secondly, as a son, however, he should take whatever actions reasonable to him as the son in order to help his father. Essentially, the son should have abdicated and hired a lawyer – in the context of the passage – this way justice would be enacted, but it would not be by the son’s hand that the father would be punished, and, instead, perhaps protected.

However, be that as it may, Li continues to expand on other possible scenarios that could have been enacted in this case. As this is a case of conflict between the value of filial piety and the value of justice, Li tries other possibilities. Firstly, Mencius could have put forward filial piety without justice, thus, in the Li chosen passage, the emperor, son, would not have used his power as the emperor to interfere with the state’s prosecution. Instead, he should have ordered for the charges against his father themselves to be dropped. Or, secondly, Mencius could have advocated for justice alone, without its relationship to filial piety, which would have meant that the son would have fully supported the state’s prosecution of his father as any man under the law. Thirdly, the case if Mencius had pushed filial piety and justice equally, thereby remaining stagnant, unable to choose, through the ‘flip of a coin’ making his decisions on what the son should do. The last two propositions counter justice and filial piety against one another, as one higher than the other, meaning: if justice over filial piety, the son, though hesitant, should have supported state justice against his father, whilst looking away from his post as his son, even stepping down as emperor if necessary; or, likewise, if filial piety was more important than justice, the son would not stop the state’s own decisions, but, instead, as the ultimate filial sacrifice, step down from the throne and take his father away into exile. This debate, as Li shows, depicts Mencius thought of advocating for both care and justice as single-aspect perspectives, though not as his equal belief in both care ethics and justice ethics.

Such moral dilemma was not unresolvable in Mencius’s eyes. Li affirms that care and justice do not always have to be in conflict, and that care ethics and justice ethics may, in the end, endorse the same course of action. However, when these two values should conflict, upholding one would always involve the cost on the other. Li argues that Confucian ethicists are more willing to side with impartiality than justice ethicists in order to preserve family relationships. Filial piety, as in, care ethics in this case, will always come before justice ethics in Confucianism, as advocated by Mencius.

Shuzo Kuki, a prominent Japanese philosopher of the early twentieth century, is best remembered for his seminal work, ‘Iki no Kozo’ (The Structure of Iki). His book was published in 1930; it explores the aesthetic concept of ‘iki’, which is a term that encompasses a sophisticated style prevalent in the late Edo urban culture of Japan. Kuki argued, that ‘iki’ embodied both ideas of cosmopolitanism and modernity, comparable to that of Western cultures. Furthermore, especially after the second world war, Kuki’s work would become more well known on the global scale, sparking recognition as a successful synthesis of both Western and Japanese aesthetics. 

Leslie Pincus, in her work ‘Fascism and Aesthetics’, critiques the general presupposition of a favourable western interpretation of Kuki’s philosophy. Indeed, she makes the argument that there is a link between Kuki’s modern aestheticism and political fascism, believing that Kuki both admired and was antagonistic towards the West, fearing complete cultural colonisation, which is why he tried to assert Japan’s cultural superiority over the West. Pincus calls for a reevaluation of Kuki’s legacy; to reexamine the extent to which his work influenced cultural nationalism in Japan. She believes that by romanticizing the imperial rule as having ‘traditional harmony’, it led to the Japanese assertion of fascist ideologies, who sought to impose these ideas that perhaps never even existed in history to begin with. Pincus offer’s a critical look on Kuki’s work, relating it to still have prevalence in the discussion of Japanese nationalism, modernity, and the ongoing dialogue between the West and Japan nowadays.  

The author brings attention to Esperanto being misunderstood as a failed project that has survived as a “utopian curiosity” kept alive by a “handful of intelligentsia”. Likewise, the author offers the view that Esperanto revises our understanding of internationalism in Japan, which is too often seen simply as a product of World War I and shaped exclusively by the democratic and internationalist promises made by the Allied nations at that time. By tracing instead the rise of Esperantism to the Russo-Japanese War, the author offers the origins of worldism in Japan instead to an indigenous intellectual and cultural critique of Japanese imperialism and the corresponding hierarchical world order.

Esperanto was a communicative transnational tool that enabled the free formation of transnational societies and associations. The author believes that Esperanto in Japan was to amplify the diversity and equality between local cultures and vernacular languages, irrespective of their belonging to the different nation states. The author views the phenomenon as the linguistic glue for individuals, groups, and associations as it promoted the expansion of cultural encounter mutual influence, and differentiation among cultural entities.

This article focuses on how Japanese Esperantism developed after the Russo-Japanese war in a manner that departed from the global Esperantism. This article does not offer a total picture of the Japanese Esperantism, but rather zeroes on its intellectual origins and its rise in Japan. The author believes it to be acting as a means to delineate “worldism”, a popularly circulated version of world order practiced by early Esperanto supporters in Japan. Because many Esperantists, including many of its best-known figures, in Japan, never became members of an Esperanto organization, this article, likewise, approaches Esperantism as a nongovernmental movement rather than a nongovernmental organization.