I am grateful to all five critics for their valuable comments on Confucian Constitutionalism. They have enabled me to revisit my book from fresh and multifaceted angles, and I hope that this symposium can provide a good opportunity to understand some of the core problems at stake in contemporary Confucian political theory.

Chungjae Lee raises two questions— whether Confucian democratic constitutionalism could be plausible in contemporary East Asian societies and precisely what I mean by Confucian civic culture, which serves as the sociological foundation of Confucian democratic constitutionalism. As for Lee’s first question, I am not sure what could be more compelling evidence for the East Asian reality of pluralism than the constitutionalization of the freedom of conscience, thought, expression, speech, and association in virtually all East Asian polities, except for North Korea. Many of my liberal-pluralist critics have charged me with failing to take pluralism seriously, and my defense of Confucian democracy in pluralist East Asia has focused on the radical absence of religious conflict of the sort that was instrumental to the emergence of the fact of pluralism in modern West. Though it is certainly not true that “hyperpluralism” best characterizes contemporary East Asian societies,Footnote ¹ none of them is monolithically grounded in Confucianism as the state religion or as an official political ideology. In contemporary East Asia, people enjoy a much broader range of personal autonomy and freedom than their Confucian ancestors, without being subject to rigorous Confucian ritual and legal order administered by a strongly perfectionist Confucian state.

Turning to Lee’s second point, by “Confucian civic culture,” I do not mean a set of specific Confucian doctrines or historical Confucianism that many East Asians during the modernizing period found abominable and utterly incompatible with liberal and democratic values. It refers to a constellation of Confucian values, mores, rituals, civilities, and moral sentiments that still influence East Asians’ moral judgments and public decisions. One of my book’s central arguments was that it is not so much Confucian civic culture as such but Confucian public reason—the democratic reason produced through the complex process of mutual adaptations between Confucian civic culture and democratic norms, rights, and principles—that deserves public promotion.

Nick Barber further presses me with the question of pluralism. In his view, there could be two possible paths from Confucianism to embracing pluralism—a pragmatic approach to accommodate the empirical reality of pluralism within Confucian moral prescriptions or to endorse pluralism as (intrinsically) desirable. Barber wonders which strategy guided my methodology. In Chapter 3, I made it clear that Confucian democratic constitutionalism understands pluralism not so much as a value holding intrinsic worth but as the societal condition ushered in by Western modernization, to which contemporary East Asians need to adapt their public lives. Here, pluralism, though external to traditional Confucianism, is something for East Asians to learn in order to live with differences and disagreements, thus engendering Confucianism’s internal transformation through interactions with both other comprehensive doctrines in civil society and democratic principles, rights, and institutions. Confucianism thus transformed is more inclusionary, progressive, and democratic.

Barber’s next question concerns the ambiguous relationship between Confucianism and the value of democratic processes. Can the thin equality claim I developed in Chapter 1 sufficiently undergird the argument for democratic processes solidly justified by Confucian ideas? As Barber rightly notes, I argue that in a Confucian democracy democratic institutional structures are pragmatically justified based on their instrumental values. Democratic structures, pragmatically justified at the initial state of democratic transition, are to produce noninstrumental values for the people partaking in the democratic way of life embedded in Confucian values, mores, civilities, and moral sentiments. My view is that this type of Confucian democracy is more realistic in the contemporary East Asian context, given the existence of Confucianism as a civic culture that is far from being fully comprehensive.

Committed to inclusionary, progressive, and democratic Confucianism, I am reluctant to embrace Barber’s invitation to generate a more robust form of Confucian constitutionalism in which the division between the public and the private is rejected and the public significance of private groups, including the family, is explicitly acknowledged. Though Confucian democratic constitutionalism does not appeal to the conventional liberal distinction between the right and the good, it does not dismiss the distinction between the public and the private by categorically affiliating the former with the right and the latter with the good. Promoting the mutual constitution between the right, otherwise of Western provenance, and the good, nested in Confucian values, Confucian democratic constitutionalism leaves the question of how to draw the boundary between the public and the private to Confucian public reason, the shared reason of Confucian democratic citizens.

Winnie Sung’s primary concern is whether Confucian democratic constitutionalism can meet the Confucian and pluralist demands diachronically. She worries that even if Confucian constitutional democracy might start by accommodating the pluralist demand to core Confucian values and public identity, the situation will eventually emerge in which Confucian public identity has been irrecoverably diluted as the society becomes more pluralistic, which Confucian constitutional democracy allows.

Though I consider Confucian rituals essential components of civic Confucianism, providing moral and cultural resources for generating Confucian public reason, I also present them in Chapter 2 as civility-inducing constitutional practices, which can help the members of society, subscribing to diverse comprehensive doctrines, bracket their differences as private individuals and enter into reason-giving and reason-receiving dialogues as public citizens. I do not think that the social value of Confucian rituals would be diminished as their “constitutional” values are publicly acknowledged and their specific forms and contents are socially debated among the people.

Second, we should ask what it means that Confucian values and rituals are thinning out, thus diluting Confucian public identity. Sung uses an example of two individuals holding different views of how best to realize the Confucian ideal of filial piety in a pluralist East Asian society. Her point is that, even if they have shared Confucian identities, say, as a Christian Confucian and a Buddhist Confucian, what they can do at most would be to arrive at a compromise rather than form a shared public identity. Public reason Confucianism does not require identity-decoupling under the assumption that shared public identity can be formed when each member of the political community, all having dual or multiple identities, appeals only to their Confucian identity. Instead, what it requires is, first, the baseline civic commitment to Confucian values such as filial piety and ritual propriety on the part of democratic citizens and, second, such values be embraced as the resources of the citizenry’s public reasoning, which would be qualitatively different from liberal public reasoning on important public matters. Can we call public identity arising from the collective exercise of Confucian public reason a mere compromise? All I can say is that the use of Confucian public reason does not attenuate Confucian values, rituals, and civilities, which seems to posit the immutability of Confucian civic culture. It only helps reformulate Confucian values, rituals, and civilities in light of Confucian public reason so that they can acquire a novel normative significance for East Asians.

Nicholas Tampio raises a big question: Why Xunzi, given his account of human nature as bad, rejection of social and political equality, and espousal of an authoritarian state? If there are other Confucian (or East Asian) thinkers or textual resources that can more easily lend support to my philosophical project to reconstruct egalitarian Confucian dignity and ultimately justify democratic constitutionalism based on it, why risk interpreting Xunzi as an inspiration for democratic theory? A specific question Tampio raises concerns my interpretation of Xunzi 9.4, in which ruler and people are likened to a boat and the water, respectively. In Tampio’s view, Xunzi’s analogy does not vindicate my reading of it as illustrating the people’s active and morally justified political agency to overthrow a bad ruler or their possession of political power. Rather, it highlights good performance as the foundation of political authority.

The point is well taken, but it is hardly new for contemporary political theorists to reconstruct the political thoughts of non-democratic thinkers of the past for liberal or democratic purposes. It would be ludicrous to call Machiavelli a democrat, yet some contemporary scholars explore Machiavellian democracy. The royalist Hobbes was never a friend of liberal individualism, as it is understood in contemporary political theory, and yet some liberals reinterpret him as a harbinger of liberalism. In Confucian Constitutionalism, my most eminent concern was how to give Confucian egalitarian dignity a firm textual ground, and I felt a strong need to reinterpret Xunzi, commonly understood as the archrival of Mencius, who is the most authoritative inspiration for Confucian egalitarian dignity, along the same lines because his “human nature is bad” thesis could easily be exploited by Confucian meritocrats for justifying their inegalitarian account of Confucian dignity and by implication, political meritocracy. It requires a complex explanation as to how we should interpret Xunzi 9.4 and what kind of “citizenship” he wanted to create if we apply this Western concept to ancient China for heuristic purposes, but space does not allow me to explore these important questions here.

David Owen also questions my interpretation of Xunzi. In Owen’s view, I read Xunzi’s defense of meritocratic rule as an appeal to the deontic equalitarian principle of justice, and this leads him to wonder if Xunzi’s statements in question could be understood in prudential terms and his normative concern for justice could also be rendered in a way compatible with a weak (non-intrinsic) egalitarianism. In highlighting Xunzi’s paramount concern with the well-being of the worse-off in his description of the rise of civil political order and calling the pre-civil state of domination and oppression “the circumstances of injustice,” I did not intend to present Xunzi as a deontic equalitarian. As Owen rightly notes, my egalitarian interpretation of Xunzi’s idea of human dignity is not predicated on the deontological assumption of human rationality and the demand for justice it entails. Nor do I argue that Xunzi upheld equalitarian dignity as intrinsically good. My egalitarian interpretation of Xunzi’s conception of human dignity is still compatible not only with his prudential understanding of humane government, the telos of which lies in serving the well-being of the people, but also with the meritocratic rule he stipulates as an ideal mode of government. Xunzi was not the champion of strong well-being consequentialism blatantly upholding the overall promotion of the well-being of the people at the expense of the basic interests of specific individual members of the political community, especially those who are worse off. With Owen, we may call Xunzian egalitarianism a weak non-intrinsic egalitarianism, which is consistent with weak well-being consequentialism, the underlying ethical theory of Confucian democratic constitutionalism.

Owen also wonders how Matthew Kramer’s distinction between edificatory perfectionism and aspirational perfectionism might apply to my account of moderate Confucian perfectionism.Footnote ² I present public reason Confucianism as a moderate perfectionism in which the Confucian way of life, accommodated by democratic principles, rights, and institutions under the fact of pluralism, is publicly promoted through the use of public reason that is embedded in Confucian values, mores, civilities, and moral sentiments. Since public reason Confucianism aims to create a democratic condition of justice in which equal citizenship can be protected and promoted in Confucian-democratic terms, it is consistent with aspirational perfectionism. The connection between public reason Confucianism and edificatory perfectionism is somewhat ambiguous, although they do not have to be taken as mutually exclusive. While edificatory perfectionism aims to promote morally laudable characters among the members of the political community with a view to their moral excellence and flourishing while respecting personal autonomy, public reason Confucianism is far more interested in the promotion of democratic citizenship and a set of civic virtues that underwrite it. It could be more active in promoting certain civic virtues that might be directly instrumental to developing moral agencies considered to be vital to human excellence and flourishing, but, in general, it leaves the question of personal moral development to each person who may belong to diverse moral communities and social associations. Even when public reason Confucianism indirectly promotes certain virtues and agencies that are conducive to the development of human moral excellence, it does so within the normative boundary set by Confucian egalitarian dignity.