Two kinds of Confucian perfectionism

Over the past two decades, political theorists of East Asia and beyond have been struggling with nonliberal political regimes and practices pertinent in East Asia’s Confucian philosophical and societal contexts, resulting in the emergence of Confucian political theory as an important subfield in political theory. Earlier in this development, the major concern was constructing Confucian democracy as an alternative to the dominant Western-style democracy by critiquing its underlying liberal premises, then dialectically reconnecting the ideals and institutions of democracy, decoupled from liberalism (particularly liberal rights-based individualism), to Confucian ethics and practices.Footnote ¹ Overall, in its developing stage, Confucian political theory was primarily a democratic project, even though the robustness of its democratic character was sometimes questioned, especially against the societal backdrop of pluralism.

What is distinctive about the more recent developments of Confucian political theory, often formulated in terms of political meritocracy, is its deep skepticism of, even objection to, democratic ideals (such as popular sovereignty and political equality) and democratic practices (such as competitive election based on “one person one vote” and universal political participation).Footnote ² Daniel Bell, an ardent advocate of political meritocracy, defines the term as “the idea that a political system should aim to select and promote leaders with superior ability and virtue.”Footnote ³ Most often, in efforts to justify their normative position, advocates of Confucian political meritocracy draw attention to various social and political problems of Western liberal democracies – problems that they argue are directly correlated with popular sovereignty and political equality. Some even point to the recent economic success of China or Singapore to make a case for political meritocracy. Bell is most vocal in this regard when he asserts, “the world is watching China’s experiment with meritocracy. China, unlike Singapore, can ‘shake the world.’ In the early 1990s, nobody predicted that China’s economy would rise so fast to become the world’s second largest economy. In twenty years’ time, perhaps we will be debating how Chinese-style political meritocracy set an alternative model – and perhaps – challenge to Western-style democracy.”Footnote ⁴

Justification for Confucian meritocracy as a normative theory goes even further than these practical concerns. Though varied in their individual proposals, advocates of Confucian meritocracy largely share some perfectionist assumptions: (1) Confucian ethics is a kind of perfectionist ethics that assumes the existence of an objectively good life and thus aims for moral perfection of the people; (2) given the inseparability between Confucian ethics and politics, the supreme goal of Confucian politics lies in promoting the objectively good life (as stipulated in Confucian ethics) as well as securing socioeconomic conditions that enable such a life; and therefore (3) the state in a Confucian polity is morally authorized to promote a particular (Confucian) conception of the good life in a noncoercive way. There are two underlying arguments here: first, democracy is largely instrumentally valuable or altogether unimportant as long as the perfectionist ends are promoted by the state without the use of violence or illegitimate coercion, and second, the key agents of state perfectionism are “leaders with superior ability and virtue.”

When philosophically justified in terms of perfectionism, Confucian meritocracy poses a formidable challenge to Confucian democrats wrestling with democratic citizenship and participation in the Confucian societal context. Simply put, it is difficult for Confucian democrats to deny the heavy perfectionist elements in early Confucianism, by which both they and the champions of Confucian meritocracy are equally inspired,Footnote ⁵ and therefore it is also difficult for them to reject the attempt to rejuvenate and enact Confucian perfectionism and by implication Confucian meritocracy – or, put together, Confucian meritocratic perfectionism – in modern East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage. Thus, it is not surprising that David Hall and Roger Ames, advocates of Deweyan Confucian democracy, condone, if not actively support, political meritocracy, notwithstanding their strong commitment to universal political participation.Footnote ⁶ The dilemma for them and many other “Confucian” democrats, including myself, is therefore as follows: on the one hand, Confucian democrats are also perfectionist as long as they wish to make East Asian polities a Confucian (democratic) polity, and hence nonneutral to other competing ideas of the good life including liberalism;Footnote ⁷ on the other hand, Confucian democrats embrace democracy (and the ideals and values integral to it such as popular sovereignty and political equality) as noninstrumentally valuable under the modern circumstances of social diversity, value pluralism, and moral disagreement, and reject (or wish to reject) political elitism implicated in traditional Confucian ethics and political philosophy.Footnote ⁸ We can call this dilemma faced by Confucian democrats the perfectionism dilemma.

The aim of this book is twofold. First, it attempts to relieve Confucian democrats from the perfectionist dilemma by defending Confucian democratic perfectionism, a mode of comprehensive Confucian perfectionism that not only can accommodate the plurality of values in civil society but also is fully compatible with constitutive values of democracy such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. After defending Confucian democratic perfectionism against the recent challenge of Confucian meritocratic perfectionism, it then explores what I call public reason Confucianism, a particular style of Confucian democratic perfectionism that is, as will be argued, the most attractive option in contemporary East Asian societies that are historically and (public) culturally Confucian.

Difficulties of Confucian meritocratic perfectionism

One of the major problems in recent proposals of Confucian meritocratic perfectionism is their shifting attitudes toward democracy. For instance, while arguing for the perfectionist promotion of Confucian values (such as filial piety) and family-oriented public policies (such as family ownership of property) in East Asian countries,Footnote ⁹ Daniel Bell finds it “tempting to conceive of the possibility of reconciling the Confucian emphasis on rule by wise and virtuous elites [required due to the sheer complexity of public affairs] with the democratic values of popular participation, accountability, and transparency.”Footnote ¹⁰ Famously, Bell’s solution is to create a bicameral legislature, with a democratically elected lower house and a “Confucian” upper house composed of representatives selected on the basis of competitive examinations in the Confucian classics, among other things. What imparts to this arrangement a distinctively “Confucian” mark is the constitutional formula providing supermajorities in the upper house with the right to override majorities in the lower house.Footnote ¹¹ Bell’s institutional proposal, which resonates strongly with the Chinese Confucian scholar Jiang Qing’s tricameralism (consisting of the house of Confucian scholars, the house of the nation, and the house of the people),Footnote ¹² has influenced many contemporary Confucians, though these scholars – whom I call throughout this book advocates of Confucian meritocracy or simply Confucian meritocrats – disagree on what should be the proper method of nondemocratic selection of members of the upper house: while Tongdong Bai and Ruiping Fan embrace Bell’s exam model,Footnote ¹³ Joseph Chan and Chenyang Li prefer recommendation over examination.Footnote ¹⁴

It is important whether or not Confucian meritocrats’ institutional proposals are politically plausible in contemporary East Asian societies, but this practical question goes beyond the scope of this book. My prominent concern here is rather with a theoretical difficulty underlying such proposals, that is, whether or not these scholars can have both (bits of) meritocracy and (bits of) democracy in their proposed way(s), which they understand as grounded in completely different, even opposing, sources of legitimacy, without compromising the theory’s internal coherence. If we prefer “Confucian democracy” over liberal democracy solely because of the substantive, putatively Confucian goods it can bring about,Footnote ¹⁵ in other words, if our perfectionist justification of Confucian democracy is entirely consequentialist, why do we care about democratic procedures such as popular election operating on the principle of “one person one vote (OPOV),” even in the lower house or in local public affairs? What good (Confucian) consequences can we reasonably expect from such democratic institutional mechanisms?Footnote ¹⁶ Why not simply advocate a traditional Confucian one-man monarchy, operating on the idea of a benevolent government (renzheng 仁政) or Platonic philosopher-kingship, if what matters is good consequences and if good consequences are correlated in a non-question begging way with the ruling elites’ epistemic competence and moral virtue?Footnote ¹⁷ Or, if we reject (for the most part) democratic ideals of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation in our meritocratic understanding of Confucian democracy, on what normative grounds can we justify democratic practices of popular election and political participation, and how can they be justified in ways that can simultaneously and coherently endorse the value of meritocracy, again understood as rule by the elite, and its attendant political institutions? Moreover, if we need to introduce democratic mechanisms into our preferred meritocratic institutional settings in order to check the meritorious upper house, why do we not simply opt for equally nondemocratic or less democratic measures, such as a nondemocratically selected judiciary or bureaucracy, as the counterbalancing force of our otherwise “knowledgeable and virtuous” leaders? But if members of the meritorious upper house also need be checked by and held accountable to ordinary citizens, what is the point of pitting meritocracy against democracy in the first place? Why do we not instead reconceptualize democratic representation (e.g., with emphasis on the co-subject dimension of our citizenship as much as its co-author dimension) and/or devise new institutional mechanisms of democracy that can make political decisions epistemically superior as well as politically accountable?Footnote ¹⁸ In short, why should we care about democracy (even the Schumpeterian minimal democracy) if we are strongly convinced of the disvalue of democracy?

We can approach the same issue from a related yet somewhat different angle. Political scientists working in the field of democratic transition and consolidation have long struggled with the problem of what Giovanni Sartori aptly called “conceptual stretching.”Footnote ¹⁹ According to Sartori, a qualitative (i.e., value-ridden or normative) concept such as democracy travels and ought to travel to different cultural contexts, and because of this conceptual traveling we can have an interesting category of comparative political analysis. The problem is that when traveling across cultures, the concept in question is often stretched and this poses a critical obstacle to reliable measurement and rigorous comparison. This is not to say that conceptual traveling always presents a liability in social science research – quite to the contrary, it can occasionally contribute to conceptual innovation. For instance, if we understand democracy minimally in terms of periodic competitive election, the proliferation of various conceptual forms of democracy, or “democracy with adjectives,” is the most likely consequence. In fact, contemporary political science is saturated with alternative conceptual forms such as “authoritarian democracy,” “neopatrimonial democracy,” “military-dominated democracy,” and “protodemocracy.”Footnote ²⁰ The challenge for political scientists, then, is how to achieve conceptual innovation without abandoning the precision of the concept.

“Confucian democracy” is a powerful instance of conceptual traveling and an interesting case of democracy with adjectives. We can celebrate Confucian democracy as a concept only if it illuminates a form of democracy, distinct not only from various sorts of liberal democracies but also from other forms of non-Western democracies. Though Confucian democracy, by definition, does not have to be modeled after a Western-style liberal democracy, it must meet certain minimum requirements to be called a “democracy” at all. For political scientists such minimums include, among other things, regular competitive election both for selection of political representatives and for peaceful handover of political power, as well as an autonomous civil society that can offer citizens a space for public contestation.Footnote ²¹ What should not be forgotten here are the things implicated with these institutional minimums (and other additional institutional arrangements) – namely the foundational democratic ideals of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to participation.Footnote ²²

As a subject of comparative political analysis, Confucian democracy may be characterized by its own unique modes of electoral system, election mechanism, civil society, political authority, and the relationship between state and civil society, qualitatively (or culturally) different from those we are familiar with in Western liberal democracies. In addition, the way democratic ideals of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation are manifested in Confucian democracy might also be distinguished from the way they are understood and practiced in Western liberal democracies. And of course, Confucian democracy can have additional cultural institutions, practices, and values that may reinforce, supplement, or, if necessary, constrain democratic institutions and practices of Western provenance, as long as they do not undermine democratic ideals or principles that citizens have constitutionally affirmed. In no event, however, can our refusal to model blindly Western-style liberal democracy and explore instead a Confucian democracy lead us to support a polity that demands serious compromises of democratic ideals themselves, which make democracy morally valuable. What we deal with then is not so much an innovated concept of democracy but a democracy whose concept has been stretched, a regime that goes beyond not only liberal democracy but democracy in toto.Footnote ²³

It is true that there is meaningful difference between normative political theory, aimed at a philosophical articulation of the normatively attractive mode of democracy, and empirical political science, the main interest of which lies in producing a reliable category of scientific measurement and comparison.Footnote ²⁴ That said, the lesson from the problem of conceptual stretching for a normative theory of Confucian democracy is rather obvious: it is implausible to adopt the institutions of democracy (mainly election), without its underlying principles and values, by arbitrarily decoupling the concept of democracy from its related philosophical postulates.Footnote ²⁵ From a philosophical standpoint, however, democracy is a constellation of interrelated postulates such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. As I said earlier, what kind of a constellation Confucian democracy is and how distinct it is from other democracies are valid questions, philosophically as well as empirically. It seems arbitrary, for instance, to espouse democratic election based on the principle of OPOV without acknowledging the underlying moral principle of political equality.Footnote ²⁶ And as I show in Chapter 6, when we embrace popular sovereignty and political equality as related postulates of democracy, it is difficult not to acknowledge the right to political participation as another postulate of democracy, given the moral demand to respect every citizen’s dignity and his or her material and moral interests.

That being said, there are seemingly three ways to address these difficulties of Confucian meritocratic perfectionism. One way to forestall the charge of conceptual overstretching is to rename what has been called Confucian democracy with, for example, “Confucian aristocracy” (Ruiping Fan), “Confucian constitutionalism” (Jiang Qing), “Confucian perfectionism” (Joseph Chan), “Confu-China” (Tongdong Bai), or simply “(Confucian) political meritocracy” (Daniel Bell). That is, we can simply shift our conceptual focus away from Confucian democracy to something else that contains some democratic components. However, this move does not fully relieve the theoretical difficulties we have discussed thus far. Our earlier questions – why should we bother with democracy if its disvalue is so obvious and practically unbearable? and what is the normative basis for election given the rejection of political equality? – still remain unanswered.

Another, more plausible, way to avoid these sorts of theoretical difficulties is to call the polity in which meritocratic and democratic institutions are mixed a “mixed regime” in the sense that Western republican theorists, most notably Aristotle and Montesquieu, understood the term.Footnote ²⁷ This, however, raises a different theoretical difficulty. In the republican tradition a mixed regime is pursued not merely to attain political order and stability, but, far more importantly, to secure political liberty and public freedom – hence Montesquieu’s fascination with the constitution of England. Ironically, the best modern example of a mixed regime is found in the United States of America, the most frequent target of criticism by Confucian meritocrats as the epitome of all negative things that liberal democracy stands for. Daniel Deudney famously dubbed the American constitutional system (i.e., the Philadelphian system) as “negarchy,” a mixed regime that structurally resists both one-man tyranny and the tyranny of majority, thereby creating a space for political liberty and public freedom.Footnote ²⁸ Deudney shows not only that a mixed regime, whose polar opposite is despotism, aims at a particular set of political goods, all revolving around political liberty, which most Confucian meritocrats either reject outright (by associating them with liberalism) or simply bypass, but also that there is no inherent tension between a mixed regime and (constitutional) democracy with all its conceptual postulates.Footnote ²⁹ This is essentially a matter of institutional design.

Though there is no prima facie reason that a Confucian mixed regime must be modeled after either the Roman-republican or American-democratic mixed regime, we cannot brush away the overarching political purpose of instituting a mixed regime and the regime’s coherent operative mechanism serving that purpose. In any event, we cannot rationalize any undisciplined (philosophically as well as politically) mixing of a bit of aristocracy and a bit of democracy in the name of mixed regime, as understood in political theory, without laying out the supreme purpose of the regime and articulating how the regime coherently buttresses its constitutional goal, especially when we reject or only selectively embrace democratic principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. As they stand, proposals for a “Confucian mixed regime,” singularly concentrated on the tyranny of the many and which wrongly identifies it as the natural outcome of popular sovereignty, do not clearly articulate which moral and political goods the regime stands for and how to guard the guardians. They offer neither convincing empirical evidence to demonstrate nor a compelling philosophical reason for why political meritocracy, as they define the term, is normatively superior to representative democracy, which is just another good example of the mixed regime.Footnote ³⁰

Finally, one can avoid the theoretical difficulties of Confucian meritocratic perfectionism by embracing democracy largely for instrumental reasons, and this is the strategy many liberal perfectionists employ. Steven Wall, for one, vindicates the idea that perfectionism is a kind of consequentialism with his notion of complex instrumentalist monism in justifying political authority and the legitimacy of political procedures. In his critique of Thomas Christiano’s dualistic account of justified democratic authority,Footnote ³¹ Wall expounds upon instrumentalist monism, according to which the legitimacy of political procedures (democratic or otherwise) is evaluated solely in terms of their results.Footnote ³² In his argument Wall distinguishes complex instrumentalist monism, his preferred view, from simple instrumentalist monism. The distinctive feature of complex instrumentalist monism is that it focuses not only on the “tasks of government,” the problems that citizens need government to solve, but also on the “effects of governing,” that is, the full range of consequences of governing.Footnote ³³ Simply put, complex instrumentalist monism promotes the good tasks of government, the direct target of its consequentialism, as well as the good effects of governing without developing an internal contradiction. In this view, democratic values, such as public equality, common citizenship, and political participation, are not so much the tasks of government but the effects of governing. Wall asserts that “the complex view … rejects the claim that democratic procedures are intrinsically just. That is, it rejects the claim that the method by which political decisions are made should be intrinsically fair, irrespective of its contribution to good outcomes.”Footnote ³⁴

Wall’s view has strong resonance with Joseph Chan’s moderate perfectionism, by which several Confucian meritocrats are inspired.Footnote ³⁵ Since I thoroughly examine in Chapter 1 whether Chan’s instrumental justification of democracy (and his notion of moderate perfectionism) offers a philosophically robust justification for Confucian meritocratic perfectionism in contemporary East Asia, let us point out just two difficulties here, those that in my view pose a general, more critical challenge for Confucian meritocratic perfectionists than for liberal perfectionists. The first difficulty arises from the elitism that Confucian meritocratic perfectionists tend to endorse but to which liberal perfectionists explicitly object.Footnote ³⁶ As noted, Confucian meritocratic perfectionists tend to tie their perfectionism too tightly to political elitism by integrating meritocratic institutions into their overall normative vision, such as the nondemocratically selected upper house, justified independently of core democratic ideals. Once integrated into a perfectionist theory, elitism, working through the coercive power of the state, slowly corrodes the normative force of democratic institutions and practices from within that are only instrumentally justified, then transforms the ostensibly democratic regime into something qualitatively different. This sort of normative corrosion does not necessarily happen in liberal perfectionism (though it is possible) because valuing democracy for instrumental reasons is not directly tantamount to taking it lightly, nor does it necessitate a search for an alternative nondemocratic or partially democratic regime. In short, while the why democracy? question does not necessarily arise for liberal perfectionists, it constantly hunts down Confucian meritocratic perfectionists because of their political elitism.

The second difficulty of Confucian meritocrats’ instrumental adaptation of democracy is related to what Jeremy Waldron calls circumstances of (modern) politics, which are marked by value pluralism and moral disagreement, and which increasingly characterize East Asian societies. The gist of this difficulty lies in how Confucian perfectionism as a comprehensive moral doctrine (a la Rawls) can come to terms with the plurality of values in civil society and the moral disagreement resulting from it when it is undergirded on nondemocratic political meritocracy. Once again, liberal perfectionists are less vulnerable to this difficulty, if not completely insulated from it, first, due to their outright rejection of any form of elitism, second, due to their perfectionist valorization of personal autonomy, and third, due to their comprehensive commitment to liberalism, which together work favorably to make room for and support pluralism.Footnote ³⁷ Given the coerciveness of political power and law, how can Confucian perfectionism, operating on nondemocratic meritocracy, effectively accommodate and further avoid unjust suppression of citizens’ diverse moral interests? Under the fact of pluralism, on what basis can we determine the merit of the members of the meritocratic upper house or the “constitutional academy,” the highest constitutional authority of the putative Confucian polity, without being embroiled in moral controversy and political contestation?Footnote ³⁸ If the merit in question is solely based on (fully comprehensive) Confucianism or, more problematically, it is what the (Confucian) elites declare it to be, how can we promote the differentiated moral well-being of citizens in a pluralist society?Footnote ³⁹

The theoretical difficulties that Confucian meritocratic perfectionism is chronically exposed to and the unsatisfactory responses to them give rise to a need for an alternative normative political theory that is both Confucian-perfectionist and robustly democratic, as well as more responsive to the fact of pluralism. I present Confucian democratic perfectionism as such an alternative and articulate public reason Confucianism as the most attractive version of Confucian democratic perfectionism practicable in contemporary East Asia.

Confucian democratic perfectionism

Public reason Confucianism

While Confucian democratic perfectionism is a particular kind of democratic perfectionism, public reason Confucianism is a specific mode of Confucian democratic perfectionism that best articulates the complex relationship between Confucian cultural values and Confucian democratic citizenship under the institutional constraints of democratic constitutionalism and within the normative parameters of democratic principles. It also provides a robust democratic theory of Confucian democratic perfectionism that is socially practicable in contemporary East Asia’s increasingly pluralist and multicultural societal context. As a political theory, what is distinct about public reason Confucianism is that it mediates between public reason, commonly affiliated with liberal neutrality, and perfectionism, which endorses the state’s nonneutral promotion or prohibition of particular goods or values. Seen in this way, public reason Confucianism is an important subset of what can be called public reason perfectionism.

Public reason perfectionism is a normative position that stipulates that (1) public reason, understood as the reason of democratic citizens, is not independent of but is deeply influenced by the most dominant comprehensive moral or religious doctrine of the background culture in civil society, which generally but not fully defines the polity’s public character; and (2) the state, democratically controlled by its citizens, should operate on public reason, which not only gives citizenship a distinctive public character (as liberal, Muslim, or Confucian) but also induces social pluralism to be reasonable in light of the overarching public purpose of democratic citizenship. Though universally applicable as a normative theory, public reason perfectionism is of special relevance in non-Western, culturally nonliberal societies where a particular cultural or religious system has long enjoyed salient social, cultural, and political hegemony until the “Western impact” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and still remains influential, especially in forms of mores, habits, and moral sentiments, even while at times massively modified by liberal values. What makes public reason perfectionism (which can potentially be nonliberal) robustly democratic nonetheless is that the content of public reason, tethered with a particular comprehensive doctrine to which citizens partially subscribe, is open to democratic contestation both in formal public forums and in civil society.

There are two important democratic advantages of this unusual nexus between public reason and comprehensive perfectionism (i.e., perfectionism based on a particular comprehensive doctrine). First, by connecting comprehensive perfectionism with public reason, the quintessential political question of whether political authority of our otherwise perfectionist polity is democratic or nondemocratic is firmly settled. A comparison might be helpful here. Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority is centered on what he calls the normal justification thesis (NJT), which derives the right to command from a practical reason for better compliance.Footnote ⁴⁸ Political liberals find the political reasoning implicated with NJT deeply illiberal because it violates personal autonomy, despite Raz’s declared commitment to this liberal value.Footnote ⁴⁹ From a democratic standpoint, however, the problem with the service conception of authority undergirded on NJT lies in the fact that it does not necessarily require the political authority to be democratic, making it vulnerable to the charge of (undemocratic) paternalism.Footnote ⁵⁰ That is, in Raz’s liberal perfectionism, it is a matter of political contingency whether or not the perfectionist political authority in question is formed by citizens’ collective self-determination.Footnote ⁵¹ Public reason perfectionism redresses this democratic deficit in the dominant theories of (liberal) perfectionism by making democratic citizens’ shared reason the single source of political authority, while not using it purely in the service of (neutralist) procedural justice and public justification. Inextricably intertwined with a comprehensive doctrine, public reason perfectionism refuses the normative severance between the right and the good, the hallmark of public reason liberalism.Footnote ⁵²

The second democratic advantage of public reason perfectionism is that it takes seriously the coerciveness of political power. Some political theorists tend to believe that political coercion is diametrically opposed to individual freedom and rights, or in the case of Confucian political theorists, to benevolent government. But this is a serious misunderstanding. When the state makes laws and implements public policies, citizens are bound to comply with them and failure in compliance entails legal liability. Political power is coercive precisely in this sense. Though political power is by nature coercive, coercion can be either legitimate or illegitimate (or more or less legitimate or illegitimate) depending on who exercises it and for what purposes it is exercised.Footnote ⁵³ In addition, coercion can be more or less agreeable to those for whom it is exercised, depending on how it is exercised. The problem with the Razian service conception of authority is that it does not fully engage with the fundamentally coercive nature of political authority. It has powerful explanations for the purpose of political authority and the mode of its exercise, with its emphasis on practical reason and perfectionist ends, but it does not clarify who should have political power – citizens, the elite, the law, or the state? – and how power should be distributed and/or organized – one/monarchy, few/aristocracy, or many/democracy?Footnote ⁵⁴ But if it is acknowledged that political power is coercive and that modern people’s moral interests are diverse and sometimes incommensurable, these fundamental political questions cannot just be brushed away, as if good practical reason alone matters regardless of who has political power and how it is organized. By making public reason integral to it, public reason perfectionism stipulates that given its coercive nature, political power is legitimate and authoritative only if it is wielded by all citizens, its co-subjects, either directly or, more preferably in our modern society, by means of electoral representation.

Public reason Confucianism is a particular mode of public reason perfectionism, specifically tailored for contemporary East Asian societies in which Confucianism has historically prevailed but now remains largely in forms of mores, habits, moral sentiments, and rituals, with which people today are still deeply saturated.Footnote ⁵⁵ In terms of content, it is these uniquely Confucian mores, habits, moral sentiments, and rituals that make public reason Confucianism distinct from other forms of public reason perfectionism, including public reason liberalism (or political liberalism), because they are the sources of a nonrationalist mode of public reasoning that defines Confucian public reasoning.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a political theory, though, public reason Confucianism is marked by all of the central features of public reason perfectionism discussed so far. I construct the theoretical outline of public reason Confucianism in Chapter 2 and offer its detailed philosophical substance with an explanation about how it can operate in practice in subsequent chapters. Here let me briefly introduce some core premises of public reason Confucianism, both normative and sociological.

First, as a species of Confucian democratic perfectionism, public reason Confucianism has two normative premises: (1) there is a valuable Confucian way of life that is distinct from (if not starkly opposed to) a liberal way of life and (2) it is permissible for a state, one that is democratically controlled by its citizens, to promote or discourage some activities, ideas, or ways of life, based on the grounds of a constellation of Confucian values such as, but not limited to, filial piety, respect for elders, ancestor worship, ritual propriety, harmony within the family, and social harmony. These normative premises are internally related to Confucian democratic perfectionism’s two guiding conditions: the continuity condition and the intelligibility condition. Underlying these premises is the normative conviction that democratization of East Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan (and a strong moral demand for China to democratize) is not tantamount to Western-liberal democratization because democracy in these countries of Confucian heritage can be realized differently than in Western liberal societies, through dialectical interactions between Confucian values and democratic-constitutional rights and institutions, and with the aim of Confucian democratic citizenship.

While public reason Confucianism’s normative premises speak for the theory’s motivational dimension, the following three sociological premises of public reason Confucianism inspire the theory’s philosophical substances, thereby making it a unique kind of public reason perfectionism: (1) a one-man monarchy that has undergirded the political institution of traditional Confucianism is completely obsolete in contemporary East Asia (the republican premise); (2) with the advent of the republican era, traditional Confucianism’s political ritualism, which divided people into different social classes and prescribed a set of proper social conduct for each class, has become equally obsolete, rendering everyone as equal as citizens (the political equality premise); (3) with the collapse of traditional Confucian monarchy and therewith the sage-king paradigm, there is no Confucian political ground on which political leaders, however selected, can justify the monistic value system and the lexical ordering of values, which subsequently enables people to subscribe to a diverse range of values (the value pluralism premise).

Public reason Confucianism’s normative and sociological premises combine to establish several key propositions, but from the philosophical standpoint, the most important is what I call the public equality proposition, which consists of three internally related postulates of popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. They together distinguish public reason Confucianism not only from traditional Confucianism, to which these values are foreign, but also from Confucian meritocratic perfectionism. The public equality proposition has a series of stipulations: (a) every human being has moral dignity; (b) every human being has both material and moral interests and the best way to respect one’s moral dignity is to protect his or her basic material and moral interests; (c) interests (especially moral interests) are plural and the plurality of interests gives rise to moral disagreement; (d) each citizen has moral (and material) interests and the foundational ideal of human dignity requires the state to protect the diverse moral interests of its citizens; (e) each citizen’s moral (and material) interests deserve equal public protection; (f) the state that can resolve moral disagreement authoritatively and make laws and policies without violating citizens’ (basic) moral and material interests is one that is democratically controlled by citizens themselves; and finally (g) citizens can control the state democratically and express their moral and material interests publicly without fear, only if they have the right to political participation. Whether or not these stipulations that undergird the three postulates of the public equality proposition can be justified from the perspective of Confucianism is perhaps the most daunting challenge in philosophical construction of public reason Confucianism. I turn to this issue in Chapter 6.

The importance of the public equality proposition does not lie solely in its innovative philosophical implications. In a sense, its cultural and political implications are more far-reaching because it proffers a strong moral correction to traditional Confucian sex discrimination and gender inequality, among the greatest obstacles to modernizing Confucianism. In reinventing traditional Confucianism into modern Confucianism, political theorists tend to focus too much on classical Confucianism’s philosophical potentials that would make it safe in the modern world, even when they consider the moral value and political utility of rituals (li 禮), but pay surprisingly little attention to how Confucianism was actually manifested in East Asia historically, especially in seriously oppressing women, by institutionalizing, among other things, the heavily patriarchal, patrilineal, and androcentric family structure,Footnote ⁵⁷ and how some relics of such oppression and discrimination still remain in the laws and social practices of contemporary East Asian societies.Footnote ⁵⁸

By integrating public equality, public reason Confucianism actively rectifies the gender discriminating elements in traditional Confucianism and upholds public equality between men and women as one of the core democratic-constitutional principles with which Confucian values, worth perfectionist protection and promotion, ought to be negotiated. The product of such complex processes of legal, political, and civic negotiations may look like liberalism because it is nested in the discourse of rights and other modern constitutional values, but the mode of public reasoning that enables the modern constitutional reinvention of Confucianism is characteristically Confucian – hence Confucian public reasoning. For instance, public reason Confucianism stipulates that the best way to attain public equality between men and women is not by top-down imposition of substantive liberal notions of gender equality but through the expansion of filial piety beyond gender barriers and the redefinition of ritual propriety to be suitable for democratic relationships in civil society.

Thus understood, the public equality proposition not only vindicates public reason Confucianism’s paramount interest in procedural justice and public justification, the aspect it shares with public reason liberalism, but it also shows its deepest moral commitment to the comprehensive democratic good of gender equality, justified with reference to Confucian public reason(ing). One of the central features of the constitutionalism that public reason Confucian gives rise to, what I call public reason Confucian constitutionalism, is its dual perfectionist commitments to, on the one hand, liberal constitutional principles, which most East Asian countries formally uphold, though in varying degrees, and Confucian values on the other. Public reason Confucian constitutionalism produces and sustains a coherent public identity of Confucian democratic citizenship by substantiating the moral content of formal, otherwise liberal, constitutional principles and rights with Confucian values on which citizens and public officials draw for their public reasoning, while taking full advantage of core institutional merits of liberal-democratic constitutionalism such as checks and balances and accountability-enhancing mechanisms.

Outline of the book

This book consists of three parts, each comprised of two chapters. In Part I, I engage in the philosophical construction of public reason Confucianism, first by defending Confucian democratic perfectionism as a mode of normative Confucianism that is most plausible in East Asia’s increasingly pluralist societal context, then by laying out the philosophical outline of public reason Confucianism as a specific kind of Confucian democratic perfectionism that weaves (partial) comprehensive Confucianism and perfectionism in mediation of public reason.

In Chapter 1, I construct and defend Confucian democratic perfectionism by critically engaging with Joseph Chan’s moderate political Confucian perfectionism. It should be recalled that Confucian meritocratic perfectionism, to which I present Confucian democratic perfectionism as a normative alternative, has two components – Confucian perfectionism and political meritocracy – and, roughly speaking, Confucian democratic perfectionism embraces the first component, in which Confucianism is generally understood as a comprehensive doctrine, while rejecting the second component because political meritocracy here, more like meritocratic elitism, is justified independently of democratic principles and procedures. Joseph Chan’s idea of moderate political Confucian perfectionism is thought-provoking, because it provides an important twist to the first component by decoupling the Confucianism in question from any version of comprehensive Confucianism. Convinced that no comprehensive doctrine is compatible with value pluralism while taking value pluralism seriously, Chan argues that only if Confucian perfectionism is political (i.e., noncomprehensive) can it be moderate, that is, compatible with value pluralism. I challenge Chan’s core assumption on the incompatibility between moderate perfectionism and comprehensive Confucianism and argue for moderate comprehensive Confucian perfectionism with special focus on the intelligibility condition. My central claim is that in order for (comprehensive) Confucian perfectionism to be moderate, it must embrace as noninstrumentally valuable core values of democracy such as popular sovereignty and political equality.

After articulating my overarching normative vision of Confucian perfectionism, in Chapter 2 I turn to a specific mode of Confucian democratic perfectionism that is most plausible in contemporary pluralist East Asia. I argue that the predicament Confucian perfectionism ineluctably faces with regard to value pluralism can be avoided by making a constellation of Confucian values and goods (i.e., partially comprehensive Confucian perfectionism) constitutive of public reason. First, I explore the political theory of public reason perfectionism as the most proper philosophical mode of democratic perfectionism by critically revisiting John Rawls’s political liberalism, one of the most dominant versions of public reason liberalism. Here I take full advantage of Rawls’s “inclusive view” of public reason and what he calls the proviso stipulated in “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” and derive public reason perfectionism from Rawls’s own insights. In this endeavor, I show that public reason perfectionism shares with public reason liberalism its grave concern with the coerciveness of political power and its strong emphasis on the duty of civility under the fact of pluralism, with the significant difference that public reason perfectionism permits the (democratic) state to promote a set of particular values generally cherished by self-governing citizens or prohibiting values unpalatable to the citizenry’s cultural–moral sentiments. Public reason Confucianism, then, is presented as a specific mode of public reason perfectionism most plausible in East Asian societies where citizens are still deeply soaked in Confucian mores, habits, rituals, and moral sentiments, which continue to influence their public reasoning. In addition to public reason Confucianism’s two normative premises, this chapter further offers its six propositions: the valuable Confucian way of life (P1), the Confucian habits of the heart in a pluralist society (P2), public equality (P3), democratic pluralism (P4), Confucian public reason (P5), and Confucian legitimacy (P6).

In Part II, I discuss the constitutional implications of public reason Confucianism (especially P3 and P4) with special focus on gender equality, the value that I argue tracks best the most important features of both public equality and democratic citizenship in a Confucian society. Though this part of the work continues to engage in philosophical construction of public reason Confucianism, it differs importantly from Part I in terms of mode of engagement, as the two chapters here aim to illuminate what public reason Confucian constitutionalism (or the constituted dimension of Confucian democratic citizenship) looks like in practice, by examining some landmark court decisions in postdemocratic South Korea.

In Chapter 3, I explore public reason Confucian constitutionalism by critically engaging with the Korean Constitutional Court’s decision to scrap the family-head (hoju) provision (and other related provisions) from the Korean Civil Code, which has publicly undergirded inequality between men and women, more accurately, between sons and daughters and between husbands and wives. The reason I pay attention to this case is twofold: first, the intense public debate surrounding the constitutionality of the family-head system was precisely about what it means to be a democratic citizen in contemporary Korea’s culturally Confucian and politically democratic societal context, and second, the long public reasoning process involved in this case (the Court’s jurisprudence in particular), in which traditional Confucian values and practices were ceaselessly negotiated with democratic-constitutional values of gender equality and human dignity, tracks remarkably well the course that public reason Confucianism should take. My central claim in this chapter is that unlike liberal constitutionalism, whose perfectionist aim is to achieve direct congruence between the principles of the constitution and the character of citizenship, public reason Confucian constitutionalism realizes the congruence indirectly by allowing various sorts of legal, political, and social negotiations between democratic-constitutional democratic principles, rights, and values that the polity formally upholds on the one hand, and Confucian values and goods, to which it is publicly, but not direct-constitutionally, committed, on the other. It is undoubtedly a daunting task to balance dual perfectionist ambitions in a principled way and thereby produce a coherent public identity of Confucian and democratic citizenship. I argue nevertheless that public reason Confucianism not only can provide an explanatory framework to make sense of ongoing social, legal, and political practices in East Asia that are neither Western-style liberal democratic nor traditionalist Confucian, but also can function as what Kant calls a “regulative ideal,” to which East Asian societies can normatively aspire and by which their current practices can be evaluated, justified, or criticized.

Chapter 3 demonstrates empirically the critical difference between public reason Confucianism and traditional Confucianism. Simply put, traditional Confucian institutions and practices that critically violate core democratic principles such as gender equality and individual dignity have no place in public reason Confucianism. However, this does not mean that public reason Confucianism is completely decoupled from traditional Confucianism or from the comprehensive moral dimension of Confucianism as a way of life. Chapter 4 illuminates this complex relationship between public reason Confucianism and traditional Confucianism from a philosophical perspective by drawing on Rawls’s important but often neglected distinction between full and partial comprehensive doctrines and attributing full and partial comprehensiveness to traditional and public reason Confucianism respectively. After establishing this important philosophical and conceptual distinction, the chapter then continues to articulate the essential features of public reason Confucianism by engaging with another Korean court case regarding unequal membership between men (sons) and women (daughters) within traditional Confucian clan organizations. This case not only vindicates partial comprehensiveness of public reason Confucianism, attained through discursive negotiations between two – direct-liberal and indirect-Confucian – perfectionist ambitions of a single constitutionalism (i.e., public reason Confucian constitutionalism as a form of democratic constitutionalism), but also articulates how public reason Confucianism at the same time protects the interests of those who persist in various forms of nondemocratic and/or nonliberal associational life (including the traditional Confucian way of life) through the constitutional right to freedom of association, as long as they do not critically encroach upon the constitutional principles and values endorsed by public reason Confucianism. Like the argument of the previous chapter, the argument of this chapter unfolds with special focus on gender equality.

In Part III, I revisit Chan’s moderate political Confucian perfectionism from the standpoint of public reason Confucian constitutionalism with special attention to civic virtue. In Chapter 5 I turn to the implications of public reason Confucianism’s perfectionist interest in democratic pluralism (P4) for civic virtue and challenge Chan’s virtue monism, according to which moral virtue is more effective than civic virtue in making democracy function well and therefore there should be a monistic overlap between moral and civic virtues, allowing no moral value to the latter independent of the former. At the heart of Chan’s virtue monism, which stipulates that a good person is naturally a good citizen, are the assumptions that there is a universal moral standard by which to determine the goodness of a person and that there is an equally universal (and simultaneously Confucian) ethical system of moral self-cultivation. The difficulty is how Chan’s Confucian virtue monism, which closely tracks traditional Confucian virtue monism, can be compatible with his outright rejection of comprehensive Confucianism. A deeper challenge is how plausible this monistic view of virtue is in a modern constitutional democracy whose society is increasingly pluralist and where citizens have different ideas of a good person. In this chapter, I argue that civic virtue as a set of traits and/or dispositions that people possess qua citizens is qualitatively, but not conceptually, different from moral virtue that concerns a person qua human being, and it is this sort of virtue that is required in sustaining the Confucian constitutional order as well as developing a Confucian democratic citizenship. Central to my argument is that in a Confucian constitutional polity envisioned from the perspective of public reason Confucianism, there is an important practical distinction between the Confucian virtues (X, Y, Z) that are cherished within traditionalist Confucian associations and moral communities and the conceptually same set of Confucian virtues (x, y, z) that are widely shared and practiced by citizens in general regardless of their associational membership, the virtues that are publicly valuable in the Confucian constitutional polity. Though hardly distinguishable conceptually, the former set of virtues (i.e., moral virtues) is concerned directly with the moral well-being of the members of a particular association and thus subject to differing sectarian conceptualizations, whereas the latter set of virtues (i.e., civic virtues) functions as bridging capital among those who otherwise belong to different moral communities or associations as private individuals and thus is open for public contestation and discursive negotiations. This practical distinction in virtue corresponds with both the philosophical distinction between the traditional fully comprehensive Confucianism and public reason Confucianism that is only partially comprehensive, as well as the institutional distinction between associational membership and Confucian democratic citizenship.

Chapter 6, then, draws attention to one particular civic virtue, namely political participation, and establishes the right to political participation as an indispensable component of public reason Confucianism. I begin with the public equality proposition (P3), the normative foundation of public reason Confucianism, and discuss how its two postulates – political equality and popular sovereignty – combine to justify the right to political participation, making this another crucial postulate of the proposition, without which the constituting dimension of Confucian democratic citizenship can hardly be satisfied. One of the central tasks of this chapter is to justify this right, along with the two other postulates of P3, from a Confucian perspective and my justification proceeds in steps: first by reinterpreting Mencian Confucianism with special focus on Mencius’s philosophical commitment to moral equality and human dignity and second by reconstructing Mencian political theory in such a way to be unencumbered by the historical Mencius’s lingering allegiance to old aristocratic political ritualism, and thus directly corresponds to his moral philosophy. After deriving the seminal right to political participation from this reconstructed, thus only partially comprehensive, Mencian Confucianism, I then argue that under the circumstances of modern Confucian politics marked by public reason Confucianism’s three sociological premises (the republican premise, the political equality premise, and, especially, the value pluralism premise), this right, which has only partial moral justification even in our reconstructed Mencian Confucianism, is fully justified as the best institutional means by which to protect one’s moral (and material) interests and address the moral conflict in the process of citizens’ collective exercise of coercive political power over themselves. Finally, I highlight the pivotal importance of the right to political participation in carrying out the democratic aspiration of public reason Confucianism, namely the simultaneous satisfaction of the democratic trinity of rule of, by, and for the people.

I conclude this book by anticipating and responding to two critical questions – first, whether public reason Confucianism is too diluted or deracinated a version of Confucianism to be recognizable to self-identified Confucians, and second, whether public reason Confucianism can remain socially relevant even if the public moral consensus, on which it is premised, has become more Western liberal.