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Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2017

Sungmoon Kim
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Abstract

It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue-based political theory of punitive expedition from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention. It argues that for the Mencian theory to be relevant in the modern world marked most notably by moral pluralism, it must be transformed into a democratic theory, at the center of which is the stipulation that humanitarian intervention be morally justified internally, that is, to the people of the intervening state, as well as externally, first to the people to be intervened state, and second to international society.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Spring 2017 , pp. 187 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2017 

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References

1 Bell, Dani Bell A., “Just War and Confucianism: Implications for the Contemporary World,” in Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 49Google Scholar.

2 Glanville, Luke, “Retaining the Mandate of Heaven: Sovereign Accountability in Ancient China,” Millennium 39, no. 2 (2010): 323–43Google Scholar; Stalnaker, Aron, “Xunzi's Moral Analysis of War and Some of Its Contemporary Implications,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 2 (2012): 97–113 Google Scholar; Twiss, Sumner B. and Chan, Jonathan, “Classical Confucianism, Punitive Expeditions, and Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of Military Ethics 11, no. 2 (2012): 81–96 Google Scholar; Yao, Fuchuan, “War and Confucianism,” Asian Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2011): 213–26Google Scholar.

3 In ancient China, a war that is morally sanctioned was called yizhan 義戰, which can be translated in English either as “righteous war” or as “just war.” In this paper I translate it as “just war,” with an important caveat that its connotation is culturally specific and does not necessarily overlap with what the term convey in the Western political tradition.

4 On the lineage law-cum-ritual (zongfa 宗法) that governed the political relationship during the Zhou dynasty, see Xu, Yang-jie, Zhongguo jiazu zhidushi [A history of Chinese family system] (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1992)Google Scholar; Hsu, Cho-Yun, “The Spring and Autumn Period,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., ed. Loewe, Michael and Shaughnessy, Edward L. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 545–86Google Scholar, esp. 566–69.

5 Schwartz, Benjamin I., The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is important to note that the Zhou political theory of punitive expedition is an integral part of the “normative order” predicated by the Mandate of Heaven and Mencius's account of punitive expedition, too, revolves around the political discourse of the Mandate of Heaven. As will be shown, much of Mencius's philosophical innovation stems from his virtue-ethical reappropriation of the Mandate of Heaven as one's (i.e., anyone's) personal moral decree.

6 This Zhou ideal of just war was reappropriated by later Confucians, including Mencius, as the Confucian view of just war, and with the publication of the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu Goyang Zhuan 春秋公羊傳) during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), which has the most comprehensive and systematic account of just war, the Confucian idea of just and unjust war became the normative standard throughout Chinese history. On Confucian political ethics in the Gongyang Commentary, see Yu, Kam-por, “Confucian Views on War in the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals ,” Dao 9, no. 1 (2010): 97–111 Google Scholar.

7 Mencius 7B2 (modified). Throughout this essay the English translations of the Mengzi are adapted from Mencius, trans. Bloom, Irene (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For philosophical studies on Mencius's account of punitive expedition, see Glanville, “Retaining the Mandate of Heaven,” 334–38; Kim, Sungmoon, “Mencius on International Relations and the Morality of War: From the Perspective of Confucian Moralpolitik ,” History of Political Thought 31, no. 1 (2010): 33–56 Google Scholar; Twiss, Sumner B. and Chan, Jonathan, “The Classical Confucian Position on the Legitimate Use of Military Force,” Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 3 (2012): 447–72Google Scholar; Waytt, Don J., “Confucian Ethical Action and the Boundaries of Peace and War,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. Murphy, Andrew R. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 237–48Google Scholar.

8 Also Wyatt, “Confucian Ethical Action,” 242–43.

9 Despite Mencius's vilification of the hegemon (ba 覇), during the Spring and Autumn period the hegemon, elected by other feudal lords as the most “senior” (ba 伯), was appointed by the Zhou King as the protector of the Zhou court against both rebellions from within and threats from the “barbarians” from without, thereby fulfilling the role of the Heaven-appointed officer (tianli). For formation and development of the hegemon system, see Feng, Li, Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 163–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of the important political differences between Mencius and Xunzi is that while the latter acknowledges the hegemon's limited moral standing as the Heaven-appointed officer in interstate relations during the Warring States period, the former completely rejects the hegemon's moral status and political leadership. See Twiss and Chan, “Classical Confucian Position,” 457–58. Making fuller sense of this important difference between Mencius and Xunzi with regard to ba or ba dao 覇道 (the hegemonic rule) requires a systematic philosophical comparison between their political theories of Confucian virtue politics, which goes beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that whereas Mencius, though realizing the limited utility of the hegemonic rule in maintaining an interstate peace under the Warring States reality, upheld the normative dichotomy between the Kingly Way (wang dao 王道) and anything that goes against it (including an outright tyranny and ba dao), Xunzi, following Confucius (Analects 14.16–17), acknowledged the critical moral difference between ba dao and tyranny (wang dao 亡道) and recast the moral meaning of ba dao far more positively than Mencius. On this comparison, see Kim, Sungmoon, “Between Good and Evil: Xunzi's Reinterpretation of the Hegemonic Rule as Decent Governance,” Dao 12, no. 1 (2013): 73–92 Google Scholar.

10 Mencius 2B8 (translation modified). Note that I translated fa 伐 as “attack” (rather than “chastise,” as Bloom does) and ke 可 consistently as “may.” I am grateful for one of the reviewers for drawing attention to this issue.

11 The Zhou dynasty collapsed in 256 BCE upon the invasion of Qin, which later reunified all under Heaven and created the first empire in China (221 BCE), but its moral and political authority as King had already waned significantly since the mid-fifth-century BCE. By the time of Mencius, Zhou existed only nominally and this enabled virtually all (former) feudal states (guo 國) (starting with Marquis of Hui of Wei [better known as King Hui of Liang] in 344 BCE) to arrogate to themselves the title of the King, which belonged exclusively to the Zhou Son of Heaven, reinventing themselves as equal, independent, and sovereign states. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pressing me to clarify the overall picture of interstate relations during the Warring States period. For more on the states and state formation during the pre-Qin period, see Hui, Victoria Tin-bor, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 Tiwald, Justin, “A Right to Rebellion in the Mengzi?,” Dao 7, no. 3 (2008): 276Google Scholar.

13 Mencius 11; 7B1.

14 Mencius 7B4; also see 1B11; 3B5.

15 Mencius says, “By fully developing one's mind, one knows one's nature. Knowing one's nature, one knows Heaven. It is through preserving one's mind and nourishing one's nature that one may serve Heaven. It is through cultivating one's self in an attitude of expectancy, allowing neither the brevity nor the length of one's life span to cause any ambivalence, that one is able to establish one's destiny [ming 命]” (Mencius 7A1).

16 On Mencius's developmental method of moral self-cultivation, see Ivanhoe, Philip J., Confucian Moral Self Cultivation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000)Google Scholar.

17 Ching thus notes a strong element of mysticism in ancient Confucian moral and political thought. See Ching, Julia, Mysticism and Kingship in China: The Heart of Chinese Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

18 Mencius 7A31. For Mencius's idealistic conception of Heaven as the ultimate guarantor of the moral transformation of the world, see Eno, Robert, The Confucian Creation of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 123Google Scholar.

19 Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 37–40. The textual grounds of each propositions are Mencius 1B11, 7B4 (also 1B10, 1B11, 3B5), 1A7, and 1B11.

20 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 101.

21 On the legalist paradigm, see ibid., 54–59.

22 See Sumner B. Twiss, “A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism and Human Rights,” and Cheng, Chung-ying, “Transforming Confucian Virtues into Human Rights: A Study of Human Agency and Potency in Confucian Ethics,” both in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. de Bary, Wm. Theodore and Wei-ming, Tu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 27–53 Google Scholar and 142–53 respectively.

23 For a forceful refutation of the democratic interpretation of ancient Confucian (especially Mencian Confucian) political thought, see Amine, Loubna El, Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37–47 Google Scholar. Chan captures Confucianism's noble yet undemocratic conception of political authority in terms of service conception. See Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

24 Tiwald, “A Right to Rebellion.”

25 This does not prevent a theorist from reconstructing Mencius's political thought, especially with reference to his commitment to moral equality and human dignity, and deriving democratic implications from such a reconstructed Mencian Confucianism. But one should not mistake such a philosophically reconstructed version of Mencian Confucianism for the historical Mencius's political position.

26 In this regard, the following statement of Lewis is worth paying attention to: “The key point to note about the Chinese theory of the ‘just war’ or yi bing was that it was primarily a justification of the role of the ruler within a centralized state, and thus a defense of the power of the emperor” ( Lewis, Mark E., “The Just War in Early China,” in The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Brekke, Torkel [New York: Routledge, 2006], 197Google Scholar).

27 Note that the very idea of “intervention” is plausible only against the backdrop of the international world composed of the self-governing states, and it is for this simple reason alone that the notion of humanitarian intervention cannot be directly applied to Zhou's political-ritual practice. Of course, we can reinvent Confucianism in a way in which state borders and the rights to national self-determination have less or no moral significance, but this would require a wholly different project.

28 Mencius finds a war of self-defense also morally justifiable (Mencius 1B15). Also see Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 36–37.

29 In this regard, the following statement of Schwartz is worth serious attention: “In a world in which the faith in the promise of the salvation of the world through the moral will of noble men was under attack from every quarter—even within the Confucian camp—Mencius defiantly, almost quixotically, reaffirms this faith… . Mencius continues to believe that it is only through the actions of noble men that salvation can be attained. This belief seems to be fortified and enhanced, in this case, by an apocalyptic reading of Heaven's intentions in the world of his time” (Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, 290).

30 On incommensurability between comprehensive doctrines and the comprehensive doctrine's public justificatory limits in a pluralist society, see Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

31 To clarify, while external obstacles refer to the obstacles stemming from the fact of (national and international) pluralism that is extrinsic to Confucianism and to which Confucianism has to adapt itself, internal obstacles are the ones latent to the very features of Confucianism as a system of virtue ethics.

32 Mencius 2B8. For a detailed discussion on the illegitimate royal transmission between Zikuai and Zizhi, see Hutton, Eric L., “Han Feizi's Criticism of Confucianism and Its Implications for Virtue Ethics,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 5, no. 3 (2008): 423–53Google Scholar, and Kim, “Mencius on International Relations and the Morality of War,” 54.

33 Mencius 5A5.

34 The thermometer analogy is employed by Angle, Stephen C., Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 40Google Scholar. Also see Tiwald, “A Right to Rebellion,” 272, which employs a barometer analogy. For a distinction between active and passive subjects in Mencius's political thought, see Kim, Sungmoon, “Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and Royal Transmission,” Review of Politics 73, no. 3 (2011): 371–99Google Scholar.

35 Mencius 6A17.

36 Mencius contrasts a hegemon and a true king by saying that “one who, supported by force, pretends to being humane [ren] is a hegemon… [whereas] one who out of Virtue [de] practices humaneness [ren] is a true king” (Mencius 2A3).

37 Mencius 1B11. Although Mencius does not make an argument for this prescription, he appears to endorse the method of “setting the troops of the realm [tianxia] in motion.”

38 Angle, Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy, 29 (emphasis in original).

39 In fact, I am persuaded that democratic institutions alone can meet the pluralist challenge legitimately by giving equal consideration to all citizens’ material and moral self-interests. For a similar view, see Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This judgment, however, is based on the moral superiority of democracy relative to other existing modes of political systems in contemporary politics and I am not suggesting that democracy is the good in itself.

40 This is Bell's position. See Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 46–51.

41 On the moral legitimacy of the democratic decision-making process in the face of serious moral conflict, see Richardson, Henry S., Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Some democratic political theorists are even persuaded that there are notable epistemic advantages in democratic procedures. See, for instance, Estlund, David M., Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Landemore, Hélène, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

42 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.

43 For a helpful discussion of this aspect of virtue (and virtue politics) in ancient Chinese political thought, see Wang, Huaiyu, “A Genealogical Study of De: Poetical Correspondence of Sky, Earth, and Humankind in the Early Chinese Virtuous Rule of Benefaction,” Philosophy East and West 65, no. 1 (2015): 81–124 Google Scholar.

44 Mencius 1B11.

45 Before annexing Yan, King Xuan asked Mencius, “For a state of ten thousand chariots to attack another state of ten thousand chariots and to capture it within fifty days is something that surpasses human strength. If I do not take possession of it, there must surely be calamities sent down by Heaven. What do you think about taking it?” (Mencius 1B10).

46 While Mencius has consistently used the Chinese word min 民 to refer to “people” (more accurately, laypeople), here he employs the word zhong 衆 to specify a selected “group” of the people of Yan who are qualified to represent the people of Yan as a whole, such as “trusted ministers of the noble families” (shi chen 世臣). See Kim, “Confucian Constitutionalism,” 381–82.

47 See, for instance, Beitz, Charles R., Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

48 On Mencius's attention to the moral value of human dignity, see Bloom, Irene, “Mencius and Human Rights,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. de Bary, Wm. Theodore and Wei-ming, Tu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 94–116 Google Scholar. For Mencius's (or Confucian) emphasis on the socioeconomic condition that can undergird a moral life, see Chan, Joseph, “Is There a Confucian Perspective on Social Justice?,” in Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia, ed. Shogimen, Takashi and Nederman, Cary J. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 261–77Google Scholar.

49 Bell, Daniel A., The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. Also see Bai, Tongdong, “A Confucian Version of Hybrid Regime: How Does It Work, and Why Is It Superior?,” in The East Asian Challenge for Democracy: Political Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective, ed. Bell, Daniel A. and Li, Chenyang (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 55–87 Google Scholar.

50 Bai, Tongdong, “A Mencian Version of Limited Democracy,” Res Publica 14, no. 1 (2008): 19–34 Google Scholar.

51 Mencius 4A17.