Confucian Political Ethics - By Daniel A. Bell

Holding an Aristotelian Mirror to Confucian Ethics?

It is an honor to be part of this book symposium on YU Jiyuan’s splendid book. The best way of repaying the honor, I believe, is to engage actively and critically with the issues Yu has raised. However, in this essay I will only be able to discuss selected aspects of this extremely rich, ambitious, erudite, and inspiring book. I shall focus on three of its most impressive achievements. The book...

Dao, Harmony and Personhood: Towards a Confucian Ethics of Technology

A closer look at the theories and questions in philosophy of technology and ethics of technology shows the absence and marginality of non-Western philosophical traditions in the discussions. Although, increasingly, some philosophers have sought to introduce non-Western philosophical traditions into the debates, there are few systematic attempts to construct and articulate general accounts of et...

Personal Ethics and Political Ethics∗

The moral ambit understood in the generic sense, as that which is opposed to the amoral has an identical extension to that of the ambit of freedom. Private life as well as professional, economic, and political life are equally moral realities. Together with personal ethics there also exist professional ethics, economic ethics, social ethics, and political ethics. Here, we will not discuss the d...

Straight by Day, Swingers by Night: Re-reading Daniel Bell on Capitalism and its Culture

Daniel Bell’s landmark Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) remains, 30 years later, the entry point to the rich literature on America’s twentieth-century culture of selffulfillment. After reconstructing the book’s argument with reference to Max Weber’s account of modernity, this article challenges Bell’s claim that Modernist culture and certain tendencies in capitalism threaten the soc...

“Of What Use Are the Odes?― Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Early Confucian Ethics