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The Principle of Utility and the Principle of Righteousness: Yen Fu and Utilitarianism in Modern China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Qiang Li
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Extract

One aspect of the intellectual changes taking place in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the emergence of utilitarian ideas. Although it may be useful to think of modern Chinese thought from the perspective of the emergence of social Darwinism and nationalism, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars at the turn of thecentury derived their inspiration from utilitarianism. Utilitarianism was accepted as a weapon with which to challenge traditional social, political, and cultural ideas, and to justify social and political reforms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 109 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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8 Yi means ‘right’ or ‘proper’ and is often translated as ‘righteousness’. Li means ‘profit’, ‘utility’, or ‘interest’. In the following discussions, I will use these three English translations interchangeably.

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10 Li means rite, propriety or norm. I capitalize it in order to distinguish it from li as referring to profit, interest, utility. These two words have an identical English pronunciation yet different characters in Chinese.

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22 Both Benjamin Schwartz and A. C. Graham have suggested that the Legalist tendency of pursuing wealth and strength rather than moral ideals entailed elements of modern rationalism and behaviourism. The ‘dynamic goal-oriented nature’ embodied in Legalism, they argued, is indeed almost ‘rationalistic in the Weberian sense of instrumental rationalism’. (Schwartz, , The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, Mass., 1985, pp. 328, 347Google Scholar; Graham, , Disputers of the Tao, p. 269Google Scholar.)

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27 The English word ‘utilitarianists’ was used by Yen Fu.

28 CYFW, v. 1265.

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30 Ibid., ii. 347.

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44 Ibid., iv. 885.

45 I use ‘either directly or indirectly’ with the difference between ‘act utilitarianism’ and ‘rule utilitarianism’ in mind.

46 CYFW, i. 100–1.

47 Ibid., iv. 858–9; v. 1359.

48 Ibid., v. 1265.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., iii. 631–2.

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52 Quoted from Wakeman, Frederic Jr, History and Will, Berkeley, 1973, p. 113Google Scholar.

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54 CYFW, v. 1349.

55 Ibid., i. 14.

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59 Fu, Yen, Yuan-fu (Smith's, Wealth of Nations), i. 76–7Google Scholar.

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61 CYFW, iii. 623.

62 Ibid., i. 56.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., iii. 623.

65 Ibid., ii. 342.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 330.

68 Ibid.

69 Pusey, James, China and Charles Darwin, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, p. 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 See Bonner, Joey, Wang Kuo-wei: an Intellectual Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, p. 95Google Scholar.