The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics - Philosophy ...

The Self-Centeredness Objection to Virtue Ethics: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Response Huang Yong

Abstract. As virtue ethics has developed into maturity, it has also met with a number of objections. This essay focuses on the self-centeredness objection: since virtue ethics recommends that we be concerned with our own virtues or virtuous characters, it is self-centered. In response, I first argue that, for Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism, the character that a virtuous person is concerned with consists largely in precisely those virtues that incline him or her to be concerned with the good of others. While such an answer is also available to the Aristotelian virtue ethics, I argue that Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can better respond to the objection on two deeper levels: (1) a virtuous person is not only concerned with others’ external well-being but also their virtuous characters, and (2) a virtuous person’s concern with others’ wellbeing, both internal and external, is neither self-indulgent nor self-effacing.

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ntroduction. While there has been an impressive revival of virtue ethics in the last few decades as an alternative to consequentialism in general and utilitarianism in particular on the one hand and deontology in general and Kant’s ethics of duty in particular on the other, there have also been some serious objections to it. Some of them, for example, the one about uncodifiability (the inability of virtue ethics to provide people with practical action guides), have been persuasively responded to by leading virtue ethicists.1 However, one of the central objections to virtue ethics, the so-called self-centeredness objection, particularly on its deep levels, has not been adequately responded to and, it seems to me, can hardly be responded to adequately if we are limited to drawing on resources available in the Western philosophical traditions. In contrast, I shall argue, a philosophically significant response to this objection can be found in the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the greatest synthesizer of neoConfucianism, whose place in Confucian tradition is often compared to that See Rosalind Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–44.

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of Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition. In Section II, I shall argue that Zhu Xi responds to this objection, on the first level, by showing that the self that a virtuous person is centered on is that constituted by his or her virtues, which require him or her to be concerned with the interests of others, as all the four cardinal Confucian virtues—humanity, rightness, propriety, and (moral) wisdom (as well as the fifth one added to the list later, trustworthiness)—are other-regarding ones. While this response is also available to Aristotelians, I shall argue, in Sections III and IV, that Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can provide a better response than Aristotelians to this self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on a deeper level, namely: while a virtuous person may be concerned with the good of others in terms of less important external and material interests, when it comes to greater goods (internal traits of character), she is concerned only with her own. Section V deals with the self-centeredness objection on a foundational level: the virtuous person is concerned with others’ well-being, whether external or internal, ultimately because the person wants to develop his or her own virtue. I shall conclude this essay with a brief summary in Section VI.

II. The Self-Centeredness Objection on the First Level. The self-centeredness objection, as summarized by David Solomon, alleges that an EV [ethics of virtue] tends to focus too much attention on the agent. . . . Such theories demand a focus on the character of the individual agent. What gives the point to the task of acquiring the virtues is that one supposes that one should become a person of a particular kind. . . . This view demands that the moral agent keep his or her own character at the center of his or her practical attention . . . [while] the point of moral reflection essentially involves a concern for others.2

Solomon himself does not specify who raises this self-centeredness objection, except for saying that this objection, or at least its spirit, can be found largely in Kant and contemporary Kantian philosophers. Indeed, Solomon is not attacking a straw man, as we do find Kant stating that “all material principles, which place the determining ground of choice in the pleasure or displeasure to be received from the reality of any object whatsoever, are entirely of one kind. Without exception they belong under the principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.”3 In another place, Kant states that all eudaemonists are egoists: 2 David Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” in Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, ed. Daniel Statman (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1997), 169. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 22 (cited according to the inserted standard pagination of the Prussian Academy

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The moral egoist limits all purposes to himself; as a eudaemonist, he concentrates the highest motives of his will merely on profit and his own happiness, but not on the concept of duty. Because every other person has a different concept of what he counts as happiness, it is exactly egoism which causes him to have no touchstone of a genuine concept of duty which truly must be a universally valid principle. All eudaemonists are consequently practical egoists.4

Kant here does not direct his attack specifically to the Aristotelian ethics but talks about ancient Greek schools of ethics generally.5 This is because, in Kant’s view, all these schools are eudaemonist, sharing the view that happiness is identical with morality. The only distinction between them is that, while some (Aristotelians and Stoics) take morality as happiness, others (Epicureans) take happiness as morality, but they all think that to be moral is to be happy;6 such a morality is, therefore, self-centered, since it takes one’s own happiness as the motivation to be moral. This criticism, in appearance, is also applicable to Confucianism in general and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism in particular. Confucius claims that “the learners of the ancient are for the sake of themselves [weiji 為己], while the learners of today are for the sake of others [weiren 為人].”7 As an admirer of the golden age in the past, Confucius is here praising ancient learners, who are for the sake edition). 4 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 130. 5 Indeed, as Allen W. Wood points out, “Kant’s knowledge of Aristotle’s ethical writings may have been largely indirect and was in any case not deep. To him, Aristotle was . . . one of the many eudaemonists of antiquity whose views were to be rejected” (Allen W. Wood, “Self-love, Self-Benevolence, and Self-Conceit,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 141). For a detailed examination of Kant’s criticism of the ancient eudaemonist ethics in general, see T. H. Irwin, “Kant’s Criticism of Eudaemonism,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 Thus, Kant states, “[O]f the ancient Greek schools, there were only two opposing each other on this issue. But so far as the definition of the concept of the highest good is concerned, they followed one and the same method, since neither held virtue and happiness to be two different elements of the highest good, but seeking the unity of principle under the rule of identity. But again they differed in that each selected a different principle as the fundamental one. The Epicurean said: To be conscious of one’s maxims as leading to happiness is virtue. The Stoic said: To be conscious of one’s virtue is happiness. To the former, prudence amounted to morality; to the latter, who chose a higher term for virtue, morality alone was true wisdom” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 111). 7 Analects, in Translation and Annotations of the Analects 論語譯注, annotated and trans. Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 1980), 14.24.

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of themselves, and looking down upon learners of his time, who are for the sake of others. Zhu Xi himself also puts a great emphasis on learning for the sake of oneself. For example, he claims that “a learner has to be for the sake of oneself,”8 and “the learning for the sake of one’s self has nothing to do with others at all.”9 In this sense, Confucianism might indeed be regarded as self-centered. However, we need to understand in what sense Confucius advocates such an apparently self-centered ideal. In Zhu Xi’s view, Confucius’s contrast between for the sake of oneself and for the sake of others can be understood in three different senses. First, Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s (one of the founders of the neo-Confucian movement in the Song dynasty) interpretation of “for the sake of oneself ” as acquiring virtues for oneself and of “for the sake of others” as showing off what one has learned. Thus, immediately after saying that “the learner has to be for oneself,” Zhu Xi claims that “all teachings of sages are crystallized in the first sentence of the Great Learning: ‘Brighten your [originally] bright [and currently obscured] virtue’. . . . To brighten one’s bright virtues is an effort to learn for the sake of oneself.”10 Similarly, right after claiming that “learning for the sake of oneself has nothing to do with others,” Zhu Xi states that “sages teach us so many things, but the key is to let us return to and restore our original human nature.”11 The original human nature that sages ask us to restore and virtues that sages ask us to brighten, for Zhu Xi, is nothing but humanity, rightness, propriety, and wisdom, the four cardinal Confucian virtues. As all these Confucian virtues, unlike some Aristotelian virtues that are self-regarding, are essentially other regarding, to be a virtuous person in this Confucian sense, one cannot not be concerned with others’ welfare. So when Confucius says, and when Zhu Xi affirms, that true learners are not for the sake of others, they mean that such learners aim at cultivating their own virtues and not showing others how much scholarly knowledge they have about such virtues. Thus Zhu Xi compares a learner with someone who eats food: “when you eat, do you prefer to eat slowly until you are full or to put food outside, telling people how much food you have?”12 He also compares it with mourning: “Suppose you go to a funeral. If you think of all the good things the deceased did for you in the past and really feel sad about the person’s death, so much so that you cannot help crying, this is natural [for the sake of oneself ]. However, if you want to show to the survivors of the deceased that you feel sad for the deceased and then start to cry, this Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings of Master Zhu 朱子語類 (Changsha 長沙: Yuelu Shuyuan 岳麓

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Ibid., 121. Ibid., 232. 11 Ibid., 121. 12 Ibid., 126. 9

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is not natural and is for the sake of others.”13 In other words, a good learner, the ancient one, is to learn how to develop one’s own virtues and to become a virtuous person, paying no attention to whether other people know that he or she is a virtuous person or not. On the contrary, a bad learner, the learner of today, is not interested in making oneself virtuous but in showing off the scholarly knowledge one has about virtues. For this reason, Zhu Xi complains that “learners of today” do not work on rightness and principle within but are taking delight in talking about inessential things. Second, while a virtuous person thus cannot but be concerned with the welfare of others, such a person can still be regarded as being for the sake of oneself, in the sense that a virtuous person regards the concern with others as part of one’s concern with oneself. Thus, he approvingly agrees with what one of his students says in the following, Great people measure their own things with the standard of the world. Even if there is one person under heaven who is not touched by their goodness, they feel somewhat uneasy in their heart/mind; and they realize that they still have something within themselves that has not been fully realized, and so they cannot brighten the [originally] bright [but currently darkened] virtue of all people under heaven. For this reason, although what they do seems to be for the sake of others, as a matter of fact, they are for themselves.14

In other words, a person who is truly for the sake of oneself is not someone who does not care about others. As a matter of fact, such a person cares about others more than anyone else does. However, when the person cares about the welfare of others, the person regards the welfare of others as one’s own welfare. On the contrary, if one takes care of others’ welfare but regards it as something additional to one’s own welfare, then one’s care of others is for the sake of others.15 Third, closely related to the above point, a person can regard one’s care for others as one’s care of oneself only if one can take delight in it, and a person who regards one’s care of others as something additional is one who cannot take delight in it. Thus, Zhu Xi claims that to be for the sake of oneself is to take delight in doing virtuous things, while to be for the sake of others is to force oneself to do virtuous things just to show that one has the virtue. In Zhu Xi’s view, it is important to see whether a person can take delight in doing virtuous things or not. One of his students reports what he learns from Zhu Xi: “if one is happy in being virtuous, one will never feel any slight degree of tiredness, Ibid., 344. Ibid., 280. 15 See ibid., 344. 13 14

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and therefore one can make daily progresses. If one’s happiness does not lie in being moral, then one can be moral only intermittently and, therefore, cannot not have some artificiality in being moral.”16 Zhu Xi agrees, saying that a person who does virtuous things for the sake of oneself can love doing good things as one loves a beautiful color and hate doing immoral things as one hates a bad odor, as stated in the Great Learning.17 When one does virtuous things and avoids vicious things, just as one loves a beautiful color and hates a bad odor, one does it naturally: there is no need for any external motivation.18 Here the two elements, realizing a color is beautiful (recognizing an odor as bad) and loving the color (hating the odor), become unified: one cannot love a color (hate an odor) without recognizing the color as beautiful (the odor as bad) at the same time, just as one cannot recognize a color as beautiful (an odor as bad) without loving the color (hating the odor) simultaneously. A virtuous person who loves virtuous things and avoids vicious things, just as one who loves the beautiful color and hates the bad odor, is entirely for the sake of oneself, as no one loves a beautiful color in order to show others that one loves it or hates a bad odor in order to show others that one hates it. From the above, it is clear that the Confucian idea of learning for the sake of self, despite its appearance, is not self-centered in the common sense. The ancient learner’s “for the sake of oneself ” is precisely for the sake of others in a genuine sense, while the present learner’s “for the sake of others” in this Confucian sense is precisely for the sake of oneself in the common sense. To cultivate one’s virtue (to be for the sake of oneself ) means to develop one’s inborn tendencies to be concerned with others’ interests. Therefore, the more one is for the sake of oneself, the more one is for the sake of others. But to be for the sake of others (to show off one’s scholarship in front of others) is to be concerned with one’s own interest (in fame). So the more one is for the sake of others in this sense, the more one is for the sake of oneself. Cheng Yi makes an interesting claim: “‘The ancient learner is for the sake of oneself,’ and the result is the fulfillment of others; ‘the present learner is for the sake of others,’ and the result is the loss of one’s self.”19 When a student asks about this, Zhu Xi explains that here two Ibid., 515. Ibid. 18 Ibid., 344. 19 Cheng Hao 程顥 and Cheng Yi 程頤, Completed Works of the Two Chengs 二程集, 2nd ed. (Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 2004), 325; see also 1197. When discussing the Confucian idea of “for the sake of the self,” Tu Wei-ming points out that “the Confucian insistence on learning for the sake of the self is predicated on the conviction that self-cultivation is an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Those who are committed to the cultivation of their personal life for its own sake can create inner resources for self-realization unimaginable to those who view self-cultivation merely as a tool for external goals such as social advancement and political success” (Tu Wei-ming, “Happiness in the Confucian Way,” in In Pursuit of Happiness, 16 17


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different senses of “for the sake of others” are used. The present learner’s for the sake of others is to show off one’s learning to others, while the ancient learner’s fulfillment of others is to help others establish themselves. On the one hand, because the present learner aims at showing off one’s scholarly learning and neglects the cultivation of his or her own virtues, which is his or her true self, the learner ends up losing his or her self. On the other hand, because the ancient learner is for the sake of his or her self and therefore pays attention to the cultivation of his or her virtues, this learner will end up being for the sake of others, as his or her virtues naturally incline him or her to do good to other people. From this we can see that, since for Zhu Xi virtuous agents are for the sake of themselves, we may characterize them as self-centered. However, there are two things distinctive about such self-centeredness, which make the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics, at least its Confucian version, implausible. First, while this Confucian version also says that it is to one’s self-interest to be moral, this self-interest is not something extraneous to one’s moral action as the term “self-interest” is commonly understood. LaRue Tone Hosmer, for example, discussing business ethics, asks, “what shall we say to a modern Gyges active in management?”20 referring to the mystic ring in Plato’s Republic, which can make one invisible when doing immoral things. Hosmer’s answer is that “acting in ways that can be considered to be ‘right’ and ‘just’ and ‘fair’ is absolutely essential to the long-term competitive success of the firm.”21 Here disregarding some criticisms of such an approach as ineffective,22 we can see that the reason that it pays to be moral is that such a moral action will, sooner or later, bring material benefits to the business person. In such situations, the business person does not find it a joy to be moral. As a matter of fact, the person is perhaps pained by being moral. He or she chooses to be moral nevertheless only to seek ed. Leroy S. Rouner [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 105). In Tu’s view, if Confucians “don’t subscribe to the thesis that learning is primarily for self-improvement, the demand for social service will undermine the integrity of self-cultivation as a noble end in itself ” (ibid., 106). While I think Tu is correct in explaining this Confucian idea of “for the sake of the self,” he does not pay enough attention to the close relationship and even identity between “for the sake of oneself ” (moral cultivation of self ) and “for the sake of others” (virtuous actions affecting others). 20 LaRue Tone Hosmer, “Why Be Moral: A Different Rational for Managers,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (1994): 191–204, at 191. 21 Ibid., 192. 22 For example, Bill Shaw and John Corvino argue that Hosmer here does not take into serious consideration Gyges’s ring in Plato: “we cannot tell whether true morality will fare better than the mere appearance of morality in generating corporate success. Furthermore, we see no way at all to test whether true morality will fare better. . . . [H]ow can we expect them [managers] to behave morally when they believe that they can hedge their bets and achieve as much or more success by vice than by virtue?” (Bill Shaw and John Corvino, “Hosmer and the ‘Why Be Moral?’ Question,” Business Ethics 6 [1996]: 373–83, at 378).

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more benefits that will come with his or her “moral” actions. In other words, one performs moral actions not for the sake of moral actions but for the sake of benefits accompanying such actions. One performs moral actions only for some prudential reasons. Similarly, in contemporary virtue ethics, Rosalind Hursthouse, at least as part of her argument, claims that virtue benefits its possessor in a similar sense. Hursthouse acknowledges that virtue does not always benefit the agent and does not enable her to flourish: Here is an occasion where, say, if I speak out as I should, I am going to be shut in an asylum and subjected to enforced drugging; here is another where doing what is courageous maims me for life; here is another where if I do what is charitable I shall probably die. The answer to the particular question, on these occasions, just cannot be “if you want to be happy, lead a successful, flourishing life, you should do what is honest or courageous or charitable here—you will find that it pays off.”23

So she agrees that virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for the flourishing of the agent: “it is not necessary, since it is generally acknowledged that the wicked may flourish like the green bay tree. And it is not sufficient because of those nasty cases that came up in consideration of the particular question.”24 Even so, Hursthouse still claims that by and large virtue benefits its possessor. She makes an analogy. Following medical advice is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for being healthy. Still, following it is one’s best bet for being healthy. Similarly, although being virtuous is neither necessary nor sufficient for one’s flourishing, it is one’s best bet for flourishing.25 If Zhu Xi means the same thing in his interpretation of the Confucian idea of “for the sake of oneself ” as Hosmer’s belief that “it pays to be moral” or Hursthouse’s claim that “virtue benefits its possessor,” then Zhu Xi’s neoConfucian virtue ethics can indeed be justly regarded as self-centered. However, as we have seen, for Zhu Xi, the self-interest one seeks by performing moral actions is inherent in these actions: one feels joy in being moral not because Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 171. Ibid., 172. 25 Ibid., 173. David Copp and David Sobel disagree: “Perhaps it is true, despite our objections, that, ‘for the most part, by and large,’ being honest and generous and kind and caring benefits a person. But for all we have seen, it might also be true that, ‘for the most part, by and large,’ being selfish, detached, and cautious benefits a person” (David Copp and David Sobel, “Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics,” Ethics 114 [2004]: 514–54, at 531). They do recognize, however, that “one of the advantages of Hursthouse’s proposal . . . is that it does not depend on a moralized conception of flourishing. She admits, for example, that sacrifices required by virtue can count as losses in eudaimonia” (ibid., 531). 23 24


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being moral can serve one’s interest in gaining fame or health or wealth, etc., that may or may not be brought to him or her by his or her being moral; rather it is because one realizes one’s self-nature—as a moral being—by performing moral actions. Moreover, in order to be for the sake of oneself in this sense, one often needs to make some sacrifice of one’s self in the common sense: one’s fame, health, wealth, and even life. Thus, Zhu Xi claims that a learner should “regard rightness as more important than one’s life and death.”26 Second, while the familiar version of self-interest by itself is in conflict with morality (although in some situations one’s self-interest may motivate one to be moral and one’s being moral may be conducive to one’s self-interest), in Confucianism, there is no such conflict. Although Zhu Xi claims that one should be moral because it is a joyful thing to do, he does not mean that one should do whatever things bring one joy. In other words, while one should be moral because it is in one’s own interest, one should not do whatever is in one’s self-interest. Here one must first be clear about what is one’s genuine interest: to find the uniquely human joy which is precisely to do virtuous things. Thus the conflict between self-interest and morality disappears, since one’s proper self-interest is precisely to be concerned with others’ interests. In this sense, the better one serves one’s self-interest, the more moral the person is. As Richard Kraut states, virtue ethics “first proposes a concrete conception of the good, and then urges each of us to maximize our own good, so conceived. . . . It does not claim that one should seek one’s own good, come what may for others; rather, by arguing that acting virtuously and acting well coincide, it seeks to undermine the common assumption that at bottom the self must come into conflict with others.”27 The essence of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian response to the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics is summarized by Solomon, who takes account of an important distinction between two features of an EV. There is, first, the feature that the objector notices: the central place that one’s own character plays in the practical thinking associated with an EV. But there is also within an EV the set of virtues that each agent aims to embody in his character. While the first feature of an EV may appear to render it excessively self-centered, the second feature is surely able to counteract that danger. The particular virtues characteristic of an EV may be as other-regarding as one might wish. While each agent may be expected to devote primary practical attention to the development of his or her own

Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 215. Richard Kraut, “Egoism and Altruism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), §4. 26 27

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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly character, the attention may be required to turn the agent into a person fundamentally concerned with the wellbeing of others.28

In other words, while the virtue ethical reason that Zhu Xi provides to the question of why be moral is self-regarding (to cultivate your own virtues), the very virtues you need to cultivate are other-regarding (to be concerned with others’ welfare). One indeed cannot cultivate one’s virtue without taking care of others’ interests. The virtuous person, as stated by Bernard Williams, “desires, quite often, to do various virtuous things,” and one may claim that “anything motivated by desires is directed toward pleasure, and the pursuit of the pleasure is egoistic.”29 However, as Williams also points out, it is important to see that “some of my desires aim at states of affairs that do not involve me at all. . . . There are self-transcending desires.”30 In other words, we cannot claim that a virtuous person is self-centered simply because the person always tries to satisfy his or her own desires. We need to see what desire this person wants to satisfy. As a virtuous person, the desires the person typically wants to satisfy are desires of helping others. In this sense, the virtuous person is not self-centered at all.31 In this respect, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian response is quite compatible with the Aristotelian view. We have seen that Hursthouse makes a controversial argument that virtue benefits its possessor, which may well be subject to the self-centeredness objection. However, she emphasizes that this argument is only part of her broader argument and so has to be understood in combination with the other part of her argument: virtue makes its possessor a good human being. In this argument, virtuous persons perform virtuous actions not because they believe that this is the best bet for their getting more material and external benefits. In contrast, when they perform virtuous actions for others, they do so for the sake of others. For this reason, they often sacrifice their own material interests and even their own life. A virtuous person’s self-interest is served by serving the interest of others, as they take delight in their actions of making others happy. This is made most clear by Aristotle’s own idea of the true self-lover. In Aristotle’s view, true lovers of self are not those “who assign to themselves Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 171–2. Bernard Williams, Ethics and Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 49. 30 Ibid., 50. 31 In this connection, Hursthouse also makes an interesting observation: “the fully virtuous character is the one who, typically, knowing what she should do, does it, desiring to do it. Her desires are in ‘complete harmony’ with her reason; hence, when she does what she should, she does what she desires to do, and reaps the reward of satisfied desire. Hence, ‘virtuous conduct gives pleasures to the lover of virtue’ (1099a12); the fully virtuous do what they (characteristically) do, gladly” (Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 92). 28 29


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the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures,”32 but those who are always anxious that they “should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with any other of the virtues,” and in general always “try to secure for themselves the honourable course.”33 The reason is that a person of the latter type “assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best, and gratifies the most authoritative element in himself . . . and therefore the man who loves this and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self.”34 Then he reaches exactly the same conclusion as Zhu Xi: “therefore the good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbours, following as he does evil passions.”35

III. The Self-Centeredness Objection on the Second Level: Problem with the Aristotelian Response. In the above, we have seen that a virtuous person, while concerned with his or her self, is also concerned with having a virtuous character; and, having a virtuous character, particularly since other-regarding virtues are prominent in Confucian virtue ethics, makes the virtuous person concerned with the interests of others. In this sense, virtue ethics is not self-centered in the morally-condemnable sense. However, this response to the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics, as David Solomon points out, may be the grounds for restatement of the objection at a deeper level: [T]he objection points to an asymmetry that arises between an agent’s regard for his own character and his regard for the character of others. The question raised here has this form: Since an EV [ethics of virtue] requires me to pay primary attention to the state of my own character, doesn’t this suggest that I must regard my own character as the ethically most important feature of myself? But, if so, and if I am suitably concerned about others, shouldn’t my concern for them extend beyond a mere 32 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1168b15–16. 33 Ibid., 1168b26–28. 34 Ibid., 1168b29–33. 35 Ibid., 1169a12–15. However, on the issue of why a true self-lover should be virtuous, while there are serious doubts about whether Aristotle’s conception of human nature as rational and social can lead to the conception of virtue (see, for example, Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics [New York: Harper, 1971], 73–4; and John McDowell, Mind, Value, & Reality [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 12–3, 35–6, and 171–3), Zhu Xi avoids this problem by arguing that human nature is virtuous (for a detailed examination of this issue, see Yong Huang, “Two Dilemmas of Virtue Ethics and How Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism Avoids Them,” Journal of Philosophical Research 36 [2011]).

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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly concern that their wants, needs and desires be satisfied, and encompass a concern for their character? Shouldn’t I indeed have the same concern for the character of my neighbour as I have for my own?36

Solomon uses the example of a Christian’s view of love or charity as a person’s primary virtue. This person will then make it his or her task to become a person who exhibits this virtue toward others, but this virtue does not require the person to bring it about that others around him or her also exhibit this virtue: “Christian love requires me to attend to the wants, needs and desires of others. But doesn’t this suggest that I regard others as less morally important than myself? Satisfying their needs is good enough for them, but I require of myself that I become a loving person.”37 As this objection may sound somewhat strange, one may wonder who would raise such an objection. Solomon himself does not state it clearly except, again, to say that it is also traceable to some versions of Kantianism. For example, A. C. Ewing, a Kantian, when defining egoism as the view that “the ultimate aim is one’s own pleasure,” emphasizes that “the ‘pleasure’ is intended to cover all satisfactions, not only the mundane pleasures of dinners and amusements, but the joy of the most selfless and spiritualized love, the unselfish satisfaction of the righteous in furthering the general good, and the delight of the religious mystic in communion with God.”38 Those who take the latter types of pleasure as the true pleasure Ewing calls a higher form of egoists, and he particularly has Plato and Aristotle in mind, for whom, “I ought always to pursue my own greatest good, for my greatest good is to act virtuously . . . . [and] part of virtue just consists in seeking the good of others disinterestedly.”39 Such a higher form of egoism, for Ewing, is equally objectionable: “Is it not priggish, and indeed selfish in a bad sense, to make other man a mere means to our own good, even if that good be conceived in its highest and widest sense as the development of our character? Would not a man be prig rather than a saint if he decided all actions by reference only to their effects on his own character?”40 However, Bernard Williams, hardly a Kantian, directs this objection more clearly to Aristotelian virtue ethics. As we have seen, Williams argues against the view of virtue ethics as egoistic in the sense that virtuous persons desire pleasure Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 172. Ibid. 38 A. C. Ewing, Ethics (New York: The Free Press, 1953), 22. 39 Ibid., 31. 40 Ibid., 32. D. J. Allan makes a similar criticism: “every point confirms the impression that Aristotle does not think it psychologically possible for a man to choose otherwise than in his own interest, and is seeking, in one way or another, to say what really happens when men appear to subordinate their interest to that of another” (D. J. Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle [London: Oxford University Press, 1952], 138). 36 37


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in performing virtuous actions, as the actions they perform are other-regarding. However, he argues that even after we get rid of this misconception, “there may still seem to be something left to the charge of egoism,” which “involves the agent’s thinking about these dispositions themselves and relating them to a life of well-being. Even if the dispositions are not themselves directed toward the self, it is still his own well-being that the agent in Socratic reflection will be considering. Egoism seems to be back again.”41 The type of egoism that Williams has in mind is clearly related to the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on the deep level: the virtuous person is concerned with the external well-being of others but is primarily concerned with the internal well-being of his or her self, when the person clearly realizes that internal well-being is more important and more constitutive of human well-being than the external well-being. This becomes most clear when Williams tries to expose the problem of Socrates’ view that “the good man cannot be harmed” (one can harm his body but not his soul, which is his true self ): “in describing moral motivations, it takes a very spiritual view of one’s own interests, but the subject matter of ethics requires it to give a less spiritual view of other people’s interests. If bodily hurt is no real harm, why does virtue require us so strongly not to hurt other people’s bodies?”;42 and we may add: if bodily pleasure is not a real pleasure, why does virtue require us so strongly to bring such pleasures to others? Aristotle does not think that bodily harm and pleasure are not real harm and pleasure, but he regards them as less important than the harm and pleasure of the soul. Yet, precisely with regard to the harm and pleasure of the soul, Aristotle’s virtuous person is only concerned with himself. Moreover, he acquires the pleasure and avoids the harm of his own soul precisely by providing others with bodily pleasure and eliminating or decreasing their bodily harm. Thus, Williams points out that, “when Aristotle seems most removed from modern ethical perceptions, it is often because the admired agent is disquietingly concerned with himself.”43 What Williams has in mind is Aristotle’s view of a virtuous person as a true self-lover. Aristotle makes a contrast between such true self-lovers and selflovers in the common sense. The latter are “people who assign to themselves the greater share of wealth, honours, and bodily pleasures.”44 Such self-lovers are to be reproached. However, a true self-lover is the one who is “always anxious that he himself, above all things, should act justly, temperately, or in accordance with any other of the virtues”; such a person is a true self-lover because “at all events he assigns to himself the most authoritative element in himself and in all things obeys this.”45 Such a true self-lover is obviously not self-centered in Williams, Ethics and Limits of Philosophy, 50. Ibid., 34. 43 Ibid., 35. 44 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1168b15–17. 45 Ibid., 1168b25–30. 41 42

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the common sense: when he performs virtuous acts and therefore benefits his fellows, he does so “for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them.”46 However, the Aristotelian self-lover is clearly self-centered in Solomon’s deep sense. Although the person’s virtuous acts will benefit the agent (internally) and the patient (externally) at the same time, there is an asymmetry between these two kinds of benefit: the benefit patients get from the agent’s virtuous actions is wealth, honor, and/or bodily pleasures, while the benefit the agent gets from his own virtuous actions is nobility. And Aristotle makes it clear that nobility is much more important than wealth, honor, and bodily pleasure: the true self-lover “will throw away both wealth and honors and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility.”47 Here the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics is precisely this: while the Aristotelian virtuous agent does care for others for their own sake, he only cares about their external goods and not their more important internal goods (virtue or nobility); while he does sacrifice his own external goods, he does so, at least partially, in order to acquire his own internal goods. Solomon, himself an advocate of virtue ethics, acknowledges that the selfcenteredness objection at this deep level is ineliminable within virtue ethics. In his view, the only reasonable response to such an objection is to find partners in crime (if it is indeed a crime, he adds), i.e., to indicate that the major rivals to virtue ethics that raise this objection, deontology and utilitarianism, commit the same crime themselves. This is what he does. For example, Kantian ethics requires an agent to act from the sense of duty but does not require the agent to try to bring it about that others also act from the sense of duty. Kant thinks that we have an imperfect duty to promote our own moral perfection and to advance others’ happiness, but we do not have the corresponding imperfect duty to promote our own happiness and others’ moral perfection: the former, because we do not have any duty to do what we always automatically wish to do; and the latter, because “the perfection of another man, as a person, consists precisely in his own power to adopt his end in accordance with his own concept of duty; and it is self-contradictory to demand that I do (make it my duty to do) what only the other person himself can do.”48 So, in Solomon’s view, “The Kantian slogan here might be, ‘rightness for me, happiness for you.’”49 The case Ibid., 1169a19–20. Ibid., 1169b20–21. 48 Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue, ed. M. Gregor (New York: Harper, 1964), 44. 49 Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 172. Michael Slote, whose version of virtue ethics gets its inspiration more from the British sentimentalism than Aristotelianism, emphasizing the symmetry between agent and patient, sets it as his task to avoid this Kantian asymmetry: “in common-sense terms we admire both what a person is able to do to advance his own or other people’s happiness and what a person is able to do to advance the admirability either of himself 46 47


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of utilitarianism is slightly more complicated, as Solomon acknowledges that classical utilitarianism requires that an agent ought not only to make himself or herself benevolent but also to attempt to make others benevolent. However, the asymmetry is still there: while the agent’s concern for others’ benevolence is only of instrumental concern (to maximize human happiness), the agent’s concern for his or her own benevolence is not merely of instrumental concern. The benevolence of the agent “is, as it were, the perspective from which the benevolence of others attains a kind of (instrumental) moral significance, but his [the agent’s] own benevolence cannot, itself, attain moral significance from this perspective, because it is the perspective. It is in this way that even for a utilitarian one’s own character has a special status that is denied to others.”50 I shall argue that Solomon is wrong in claiming that the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics is ineliminable and that the only appropriate response to it is a partners in “crime” argument, particularly in the context of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism. However, in the remainder of this section, I shall examine the Aristotelian response to this objection and explain why it is not convincing, at least to those who raise the self-centeredness objection. Many Aristotle scholars try to show that Aristotle’s eudaimonism can avoid the self-centeredness objection on this deep level.51 The strongest evidence for them is a passage in which Aristotle discusses what they regard as moral competitions: “those, then, who busy themselves in an exceptional degree with noble actions all men approve and praise; and if all were to strive towards what is noble and strain every nerve to do the noblest deeds, everything would be as it should be for the common weal, and everyone would secure for himself the goods that are greatest, since virtue is the greatest of goods.”52 Richard Kraut, for example, argues that Aristotle here is talking about a moral competition among virtuous agents. Such competition “differs from other forms of competition in precisely this respect: normally, when or others. We commonly admire people for their possession of self-regarding and other-regarding virtues . . . and we also admire people who help others to develop admirable or virtuous traits of character. . . . And so I think it is part of common-sense virtue ethics to assume that people should be concerned with the happiness and virtue . . . both of others and of themselves” (Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 111). 50 Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” 173. 51 McKerlie distinguishes between egoist eudaimonism and altruistic eudaimonism: “One answer says that Aristotle gives to each agent the single fundamental goal of making his or her own life realize eudaimonia. I will call this view the ‘egoistic eudaimonist’ interpretation. The alternative interpretation takes Aristotle to be an altruistic eudaimonist. He thinks that as well as aiming at eudaimonia in our own lives we should also have as a fundamental aim that at least some other people realize eudaimonia” (Dennis McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy 11 [1991]: 85–101, at 85). As we shall see, McKerlie himself supports the second interpretation. 52 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169a6–12.

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people try to outdo one another, one person’s gain is another’s loss; but when virtuous individuals ‘compete for the fine’ then everyone benefits in some way or other.”53 To illustrate this, Kraut uses the analogy of a competition among solo musicians: “The better each plays, the more likely he is to win, but at the same time, everyone else benefits by the fact that each is striving to do his best.”54 The idea is that my playing to my best will cause others to play to their best, as we all want to win the competition. So in this moral competition among virtuous persons, the more I try to develop my own virtuous character, the more I do to develop the virtuous characters of others. Julia Annas makes a similar point. In her view, since Aristotle has redefined self-love as love of one’s virtuous character, it is not surprising that the competition between true self-lovers is also redefined, and turns out to be wholly different from the common understanding of competition. Normally competition is for a limited good, and hence is at others’ expense; if I get more you will get less. But when people “compete to be virtuous” what they do is not at the others’ expense, for Aristotle insists that each person gets the greatest good, since “virtue is that kind of thing.” Virtue is an inexhaustible good; if I have more this does not leave less for you.55

So although neither Kraut nor Annas clearly states it, the significant difference between moral competition and other forms of competition is that, while in the latter there is normally only one winner, in the former everyone can be a winner, for the referee of the competition has a different criterion from the one used in other forms of competition. In a normal race, for example, the winner is the fastest runner. However, in the Aristotelian moral competition, the winner is the one who does his or her best. Thus, while it is possible that the winner runs slower than others (as those who run faster than the winner may have not done their best), it is also possible that everyone is a winner (if everyone does his or her best). It is perhaps in this sense that Kraut claims that “when Aristotelian agents compete with one another to be the best, each places far more emphasis on doing as well as he can than on doing better than others.”56 This is indeed an interesting interpretation. However, as a response to the self-centeredness objection, it is not entirely convincing. First, to what degree can we make sense of moral competition among virtuous persons? To illustrate, let us look at two examples used by Aristotelian scholars to explain the followRichard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 117. 54 Ibid. 55 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 297. 56 Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 119. 53


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ing passage of Aristotle in the context of moral competition: the true self lover, among other things, “may even give up actions to his friend; it may be nobler to become the cause of his friend’s acting than to act himself. In all the actions, therefore, that men are praised for, the good man is seen to assign the greater share in what is noble.”57 Christopher Toner explains this self-lover’s self-sacrifice of virtuous action by such a hypothetical scenario: two of us are friends and fellow members of a platoon engaged in a dangerous reconnaissance. One volunteer is needed to be the first to cross an open area. I am moved to volunteer, but I recall that you have unfairly acquired a reputation for cowardice and wanted to clear this reputation. So I remain silent so that you can be the first.58 Richard Kraut provides a similar illustration: Suppose I think my friend is capable of supervising major civic projects, but he has had too few opportunities to show his worth. So I persuade public officials who oversee such projects to secure the opportunity for him.59 In both examples, the virtuous person sacrifices his or her virtuous actions so that his or her friend can perform them. In this case, the virtuous person awards himself or herself what is fine, while his or her friend has the chance to perform the virtuous actions. However, there is something wrong here. In both cases, the virtuous person’s friend must be already virtuous, at least to some extent. In Toner’s example, the courageous person’s friend merely has a bad reputation of being a coward, and the virtuous person’s sacrifice of the courageous action helps his or her friend to restore his honor. However, this does not make his friend more virtuous (courageous), as for Aristotle, honor belongs to the same category as money and wealth, things that the self-lovers in the vulgar sense love. A truly virtuous person is more concerned with being virtuous, not with being known for being virtuous.60 In Kraut’s example, the virtuous person sacrifices his or her virtuous action for his or her friend so that the friend can have an opportunity to show his worth. This assumes that a person who has more opportunities to perform virtuous actions is more virtuous than a person who has fewer opportunities to do so. This assumption, however, is wrong. It focuses too much on action. A virtuous person just performs virtuous actions whenever such circumstances occur. Moreover, as Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169a33–36. Christopher Toner, “The Self-Centredness Objection to Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy 81 (2006): 595–617, at 611. 59 Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 126. 60 Along these lines, Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic says of the perfectly virtuous (just) person, “though doing no wrong, he must have the repute of the greatest injustice, so that he may be put to the test as regards justice through not softening because of ill repute and the consequences thereof. But let him hold on his course unchangeable even unto death, seeming all his life to be unjust though being just” (Plato, The Republic, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 361c). 57 58

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Hurka has pointed out, “though a person can certainly act virtuously, she can also have virtuous desires and feelings that never issue in action—for example, compassion for someone whose pain she is unable to relieve.”61 After all, Aristotle himself also claims that virtue is related to both action and feeling. Second, as shown in both Toner’s and Kraut’s examples, those who are in the moral competition are already somehow virtuous persons or true self-lovers. Only virtuous persons are willing to join the moral competition, and virtuous persons compete with only virtuous persons. This causes an immediate problem for the self-centeredness objectors. The self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics is precisely about the virtuous agent’s lack of interest in making others virtuous. While there is no need for a virtuous person to be concerned about the character of another virtuous person, we need to know whether a virtuous person in the Aristotelian sense is also concerned or able to make a non-virtuous person virtuous. It does not seem to be the case. On the one hand, in his discussion of friendship, Aristotle makes it clear that true friendship is based on the likeness of virtues, in contrast to friendship based on utility or pleasantness. In other words, it is a friendship among virtuous people.62 Moreover, as noticed by Kraut himself, for Aristotle, if a virtuous friend turns out to be bad, the virtuous person who breaks off such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing strange.63 After all, for Aristotle, a virtuous person makes friends with others not in order to make his friends virtuous; otherwise he would choose to make friends with non-virtuous persons instead of people who are already virtuous and remain virtuous. For the self-centeredness objectors, this shows that the Aristotelian virtuous person, at least in the context of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, is not concerned with making non-virtuous persons virtuous. On the other hand, the Aristotelian virtuous person’s refraining from performing virtuous actions for the sake of others as discussed by Toner and Kraut, by itself, cannot make a non-virtuous person virtuous. Suppose that the person to whom the virtuous person in Toner’s example sacrifices his action is indeed a coward. Will the virtuous person’s sacrificing his action in this particular situation make his friend courageous? Obviously not. A coward is a coward not because he or she has never encountered any dangerous situations or opportunities to perform courageous actions, but because every time the coward encounters a dangerous situation, he or she backs off. So, if anything, the virtuous person’s refraining from performing the courageous action, even with the intention to give an opThomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8. As Julia Annas points out, “the best or perfect kind of friendship is one in which each person is friends with the other because of that person’s goodness, specifically his good character— indeed this kind of friendship is often called friendship of character” (Annas, The Morality of Happiness, 249–50). 63 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1165b20–23; see Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 111. 61 62


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portunity for the coward to be courageous, would only make the coward feel less uneasy for being a coward, as he would see no one doing anything differently from what he does: those who are cowards just like him, as cowards, will not move forward, and those who, unlike him, have the virtue of courage would decide to sacrifice their courageous actions to those cowards. Third, while it is not clear whether Aristotle indeed has moral competition in mind, let us assume that Kraut is right about this; and to make it more plausible, given the context in which Aristotle is supposed to express this idea, the context of his discussion of genuine friendship, let us assume that this is a competition among somehow already but not fully virtuous persons. In such a competition, one’s effort to develop one’s own virtues as fully as possible may indeed cause his or her competitors to make a similar effort to develop their own virtues as fully as possible. However, at least to the self-centeredness objectors, this makes it look like Adam Smith’s invisible hand justification of individual greediness in competition in a well-ordered market economy: the more one strives to one’s own interest, the more the person contributes to others’ welfare. In such competitions, it is true that everyone’s self-centered actions benefit others in the competition as a consequence, but one joins the competition for one’s self-interest, not for the benefit of others. Kraut of course disagrees. In his view, in such a competition, a virtuous person not only makes others virtuous as a consequence of their being virtuous but also intends to do so. For example, Kraut argues that virtuous “friends help each other develop in character and correct each other.”64 However, the two passages he cites from Aristotle do not explicitly support his claim: “a certain training in virtue arises also from the company of the good”;65 “the friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship; and they are thought to become better too by their activities and by improving each other; for from each other they take the mould of the characteristics they approve.”66 In neither of these two passages does Aristotle say explicitly that a virtuous person joins “moral competition” in order to make others virtuous, even though it is clear that such a competition may indeed improve the virtuous qualities of all competitors. So at least there is an ambiguity here regarding whether the improvement of others’ virtues is the virtuous person’s intention or merely a consequence of his action. Given Aristotle’s claim that a virtuous person, a true self-lover, at all events assigns to himself the things that are noblest and best, the weight of the evidence may even lean toward the self-centeredness objectors. Defenders of Aristotle’s virtue ethics against the charge of self-centeredness often cite a number of passages that seem to be on their side. For example, Aristotle Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 121. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1170a11–12. 66 Ibid., 1172a12. 64 65

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says that “(1) we define a friend as one who wishes and does what is good, or seems so, for the sake of his friend, or (2) as one who wishes his friend to exist and live, for his sake; which mothers do to their children, and friends do who have come into conflict. And (3) others define him as one who lives with and (4) has the same tastes as another, or (5) one who grieves and rejoices with his friend”;67 “to a friend we say we ought to wish what is good for his sake”;68 and “a man seems to us a friend, who wishes the good or what he thinks to be such to some one, not on his own account but for the sake of that other; or, in another way, if he wishes for another man existence—even if he is not bestowing goods, still less existence—on that other’s account and not on his own, he would seem most of all to be a friend to him.”69 In all these passages, Aristotle makes it clear that a virtuous person or a true self-lover wishes the good to his friend for his friend’s sake. From these and other similar passages, defenders claim that Aristotle’s virtuous person does care about others’ virtue. Dennis McKerlie, for example, claims that Aristotle’s eudaimonism is altruistic rather than egoistic, in the sense that a virtuous person is not merely concerned about one’s own well-being but also that of others: [I]n this kind of friendship we should feel a concern for another person that does not differ importantly in its nature from the concern we feel for ourselves. . . . [W]e should care about the friend’s realizing eudaimonia in much the same way that we care about realizing it ourselves. So the friend’s eudaimonia should be almost as fundamental a goal as our own eudaimonia.70

Moreover, in a few passages, Aristotle claims a virtuous person is related to his friend as to himself.71 From this McKerlie infers that the good man values the friend’s existence to almost the same extent that he values his own existence, or that he values the friend’s existence in almost the same way or manner in which he values his own existence. . . . the key to the argument is the thought that the friend is another self. . . . I should care about the friend’s eudaimonia in the way that I care about my own eudaimonia.”72 Ibid., 1166a1–8. Ibid., 1155b31. 69 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia, trans. J. Solomon, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1240a23–26. 70 McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 88. 71 See Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1166a30–32, 1170b7–8. 72 McKerlie, “Friendship, Self-Love, and Concern for Others in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 96–97. John Cooper also argues that Aristotle’s virtuous person is altruistic, but he qualifies his view immediately, saying that this does not mean that the virtuous agent does not also have a self-interested 67 68


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A natural response to such a defense from the self-centeredness objectors will perhaps run like this. First, all such passages are found in the section in which Aristotle talks about friendship of virtue, whose goal is not whether or how a virtuous person can make non-virtuous persons virtuous, since friends that a virtuous person makes are already virtuous. So a virtuous person naturally wishes his friends well, as when they become bad, they cannot be his friends. This seems to be what Aristotle has in mind when he says that “if we were right in saying that friend wishes good to friend for his sake, his friend must remain the sort of being he is, whatever that may be; therefore it is for him only so long as he remains a man that he will wish the greatest goods.”73 Second, this can also explain why Aristotle says that a virtuous person is related to his friend as to himself, because a person can become a friend of the virtuous person precisely because he is like the virtuous person in being a virtuous person himself. A virtuous person loves his friend because he loves himself and because his friend is like him. Thus, when the friend ceases to be like him, the virtuous person will not be related to his friend as to himself. As a matter of fact, he will abandon the person as a friend. Third, it is true that Aristotle makes distinction between mere well-wishing and friendship, as friendship shows itself also in doing what one wishes.74 However, while Aristotle does tell us how a virtuous person can award others external goods, he is silent about how a virtuous person awards others internal goods, i.e., virtues. As a matter of fact, in the second passage quoted in the last paragraph, when Aristotle says a virtuous person wishes his friends well, he adds the clause “even if he is not bestowing goods.” Thus, while an already good person does not need a virtuous person to bestow good, it is also a question whether, for Aristotle, a virtuous person can bestow good to those who lack it, those who are not virtuous yet and therefore cannot be friends of the virtuous person, even if the virtuous person wants to bestow such goods to them, a question I shall return later. In any case, it is hard to convince the selfcenteredness objectors, given, on the one hand, the ambiguity of the passages that defenders use to show that Aristotle’s virtuous person is also interested in making non-virtuous persons virtuous and, on the other hand, the crystal clarity of contrasting passages, in which Aristotle states that a virtuous person is concerned with one’s own virtue but only with others’ external well-being. In this relation, in addition to the passage we quoted earlier, in which Aristotle contrasts the self-lover in the true sense and the self-lover in the vulgar sense, reason for acting, nor that “the agent’s concern, in the given action, for the other person’s good is stronger than his concern for his own” (John Cooper 1977, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” Review of Metaphysics 30 [1977]: 621 n. 7). 73 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1159a8–13. 74 Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. St. George Stock, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1241a10–13.

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the main target of the self-centeredness objection, Aristotle also says, when he answers whether the good man loves himself most of all or not: since we say that the good man will resign goods in the way of utility to his friend, he will be loving his friend more than himself. Yes, but his resignation of such goods implies that he is compassing the noble for himself in resigning these to his friend. In a way, therefore, he is loving his friend more than himself, and in a way he is loving himself most. In respect of the useful he is loving his friend, but in respect of the noble and the good he is loving himself most.”75

We can understand this issue better if we look at Aristotle’s discussion about whether a supremely happy and self-sufficient person still needs friends. It seems that, if Aristotle’s virtuous man joins moral competitions with his virtuous friends primarily to make oneself more virtuous, as the self-centeredness objection claims, then such a supremely happy and self-sufficient person would no longer need friends, as he, as a completely virtuous person, no longer need benefit from others. Yet, Aristotle states clearly that such a person still needs friends, which seems to show that the self-centeredness objection is after all inapplicable to Aristotle. This would be the case only if Aristotle thinks that such a completely virtuous person still needs friends in order to make these friends more virtuous. However, although Aristotle discusses this issue in all the three books on ethics, in none of them does he make this point. Magna Moralia presents the famous analogy of friends as mirrors. Aristotle argues that a self-sufficing man does not need any good, as he has already had all the goods,76 except self-knowledge, acquisition of which is pleasant. However, since “we are not able to see what we are from ourselves . . . as then when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is . . . a second self.”77 So the self-sufficient person needs friends in order to have self-knowledge. Clearly, for such a purpose, it is best for the self-sufficing man to have friends who are equally self-sufficing, for friends who lack the goods the self-sufficing man has will not help the self-sufficing man to know himself in such respects.78 In Nichomachean Ibid., 1212b12–17. Ibid., 1212b29. 77 Ibid., 1213a15–23. 78 Admittedly, in this chapter, Aristotle asks, twice, if the self-sufficing man does not need friends, “to whom will he do good? Or with whom will he live?” (ibid., 1212b30 and 1213a28). Unfortunately, while he does go on to elaborate on the second question, which is not so puzzling, he does not tell us anything about what he means by doing good to friends. We might want to assume that this also includes internal good, but we cannot convince the self-centeredness objectors on this, as on the one hand at least Aristotle does not clearly say it, and on the other hand, 75 76


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Ethics, in addition to this, Aristotle mentions a few other reasons that such a happy person still needs friends. First, friends are the best external goods, and so “it seems strange, when one assigns all good things to the happy man, not to assign friends, who are thought of as the greatest of external goods.”79 Second, a happy person needs friends to confer benefits.80 Third, a happy person would be solitary without friends, “for no one would choose the whole world on condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others. Therefore even happy man lives with others.”81 To say that Aristotle’s virtuous person is not concerned with making others virtuous may seem surprising. Jennifer Whiting’s Kantian interpretation of the passage, in which Kraut claims Aristotle develops the idea of moral competition, attempts to provide an explanation for this. According to Whiting, when Aristotle claims that the true self-lover awards himself the greater good, he is making a comparison not with the good the true self-lover awards others but with good he would award himself had he chosen the external good. By this, Whiting does not mean to claim, as some defenders we have examined above do, that the true self-lover also awards others the greater good. To claim this, one must assume that an agent can make a choice between awarding the greater good to oneself and awarding it to others or between awarding others the greater good and awarding them the lesser good, but Whiting claims that such an assumption is not available. This is because “the kalon [what is fine]—insofar as it consists in virtue and virtuous action—is not generally the sort of thing one can secure for one’s friends . . . but virtuous action is—and this is a logical point— something one can secure only for oneself.”82 Immediately after this she adds a footnote stating that this is a similar position to Kant’s, as cited earlier in this essay, when Kant excludes others’ perfection from an agent’s imperfect duty for the same reason. So Whiting concludes that Aristotle’s “proper self-love may yet prove more Kantian than it appears at first glance.”83 In other words, instead of

if the self-sufficing man still need do good, internally, to his friends, then his friends, instead of also being self-sufficing, must still lack some internal good and so are not ideal mirror for the self-sufficing man to see himself in. And this complaint seems to have some support from Ethica Eudemia: “for friends who are self-dependent neither teaching nor learning is possible, for if one learns, he is not as he should be [and so not self-independent]; and if he teaches, his friend is not, and likeness is friendship” (Aristotle, Ethics Eudemia: 1245a16–18). 79 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1169b8–10. 80 Ibid., 1169b10–12. 81 1169b17–19. 82 Jennifer Whiting, “Self-Love and Authoritative Virtue: Prolegomenon to a Kantian Reading of Eudemian Ethics viii 3,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175. 83 Ibid., 173.

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the virtuous person being unwilling to make others virtuous, a virtuous person cannot make others virtuous.84 While it is not clear whether Aristotle indeed agrees with Kant that one cannot make others virtuous and people have to become virtuous by themselves, Aristotle does seem to think that it is at least not a virtuous person’s job to make others virtuous, as can be seen from his discussion of the transition from ethics to politics toward the very end of Nichomachean Ethics, Book 10, Chapter 9. There, with his account of virtue fully presented, Aristotle points out that, “with regard to virtue, then, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it, or try any other way there may be of becoming good.”85 The question then is whose job it is to make people virtuous. Aristotle makes it clear that it is not a parent or friend, however virtuous the person himself is, and however many particular details he knows about his child or friend whom he wants to make virtuous. It is rather the legislator, even though he does not have such intimate knowledge of citizens and is not necessarily more virtuous than a parent or friend. There are two reasons Aristotle holds this view. First, a virtuous parent or friend does not have the necessary expertise. Aristotle uses an analogy. A person without medical training, however healthy he is himself, and to whatever degree he can be his own doctor (by learning from his past experiences in different cases), cannot be a doctor, or at least as good a doctor, of another—including his child and friend, whose particular details he knows—as a professional doctor. Even though this professional doctor does not know as much about his patient as a parent knows of his child or a friend knows of his friend (indeed, as a matter of fact, the doctor himself may be not as healthy as his patient’s parent or friend), however he can provide better care of the patient than the patient’s untrained parent or friend, because he “has the general knowledge of what is good for everyone or for people of a certain kind (for the sciences both are said to be, and are concerned with what is universal).”86 For the same reason, a parent or friend, even a virtuous one, cannot be a good teacher of virtues, or at least as good a teacher of virtues for his child or friend as a public legislator for his citizens. The legislator may not know as much particular detail of his citizens as a parent knows of his child or a friend of his friend (indeed, the legislator himself may be not as virtuous as a parent or friend 84 Nancy Sherman seems to agree with Whiting when she claims that there is “a certain limitation on what a character friend can give another. How one can help is limited, among other things, by an acknowledgment of the rational agency of each. In so far as a friend is another self, in helping a friend, an individual cannot pre-empt that friend’s rational agency, or desire to make choices for himself with regard to virtuous living” (Nancy Sherman, “Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 [1987]: 589–613, at 608). 85 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 1179b1–3. 86 Ibid., 1180b14–16.


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in question), but he has the general knowledge of different types of people and the expertise to make them virtuous. Second, a private person (parent or friend), though virtuous, does not have the needed authority. After dismissing nature, argument, and teaching as inefficient means in making people virtuous, Aristotle states that a person must be cultivated by means of habits. However, “it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law.”87 Thus, to make people virtuous is not the job of a private virtuous person, for “the paternal command indeed has not the required force or compulsive power (nor in general has the command of one man, unless he be a king or something similar).”88 It is rather the job of legislators, for most people “do not by nature obey the sense of shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment.”89 Aristotle does say that, if there is a lack of the public care for this matter, “it would seem right for each man to help his children and friends towards virtue,” but he immediately adds that “it would seem that he can do this better if he makes himself capable of legislating.”90 It is in this sense that, for Aristotle, while to provide an account of virtue is the job of ethics, to provide an account of how to make people virtuous is a task of politics. Our examination above shows that self-centeredness objectors are perhaps at least not entirely groundless in their claiming that Aristotle’s virtuous person is not characterized as to make non-virtuous persons virtuous. And it seems that the best response that Aristotle could give to such objectors is that it is not the job of a virtuous person to make others virtuous. Clearly, such a response cannot be satisfactory to the self-centeredness objectors, and it seems difficult to develop a satisfactory response from the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics to adequately respond to the self-centeredness objection on this deeper level. Thomas Aquinas is normally considered as belonging to the Aristotelian tradition, and it is true that he makes it clear that a virtuous person is concerned not only with others’ external well-being but also with their internal well-being, particularly in his conception of fraternal correction. Fraternal correction, properly so called, is “to apply a remedy to the sin considered as an evil of the sinner himself,” which is “the same as to procure his good, and to procure a person’s good is an act of charity, by which we do our friend well.”91 More importantly, Aquinas thinks Ibid., 1179b31–35. Ibid., 1180a19–20. 89 Ibid., 1179b11–13. 90 Ibid., 1180a30–33. 91 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, in Great Books of the Western World, vols. 19–20 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 1952), II-II, qu. 33, art. 1. 87 88

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that fraternal correction is a kind of spiritual almsdeed, which is more excellent than the corporeal one.92 Clearly Aquinas’s virtue ethics can thus well avoid the self-centeredness objection.93 However, at least two things deserve our attention. First, Aquinas regards fraternal correction as an aspect of the virtue of charity, which belongs to the third category of virtue, theological ones, an entirely new one to Aristotle, who has a twofold classification of virtues: intellectual and moral. In Aquinas’s view, theological virtues consist in attaining God, while “moral and intellectual virtues consist in attaining human reason.”94 For this reason, “charity can be in us neither naturally, nor through acquisition by the natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Spirit.”95 If this is the case, since for Aristotle there is no theological virtue, we may doubt whether fraternal correction can be developed as an Aristotelian virtue. For this reason, Christopher Cordner argues that the Christian moral tradition to which Aquinas belongs is radically different from the Aristotelian one, where “we find no mention of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, apology, repentance, remorse, humility, or of the ‘theological virtues’ of faith, hope and charity.”96 Second, even though Aquinas does think a virtuous person, out of charity, “should be concerned about others’ virtues,” he still thinks that “a man ought, out of charity, to love himself more than he loves any other person,” and “a man ought not to give way to any evil of sin which counteracts his share of happiness, not even that he may free his neighbor from sin.”97

IV. The Self-Centeredness Objection on the Second Level: Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Response. If Thomas Aquinas can help the Aristotelian virtue ethics to respond to the self-centeredness objection only by adding a theological virtue alien to it, we may wonder whether there is any alternative response that is more congenial to the Aristotelian virtue ethics. It is for this reason that I suggest that we turn to Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian virtue ethics, which is as humanistic as Aristotle’s but is clearly not self-centered in this deeper sense. In Zhu Xi’s view, a superior or virtuous person (junzi 君子) is a virtuous person not simply because he or she has the disposition to provide material and external comforts to people in need as they do, but also because they want to make others virtuous. This is Ibid., II-II, qu. 32, art. 4. I would like to thank the editorial staff for alerting me to this. 94 Ibid., II-II, Ibid., qu. 23, art. 7. 95 Ibid., II-II, qu. 24, art. 2. 96 Christopher Cordner, “Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations,” Philosophy 69 (1994): 291–316, at 293. 97 Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, II-II, qu. 26, art. 5. 92 93


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most clear in his interpretation of the beginning sentences of the Great Learning, one of the Confucian canon of Four Books: “the way of great learning is to ming ming de [明明德], xin min [新民], and zhi shan [至善].” According to the common interpretation, ming ming de and xin min are two different items: the former is related to oneself: to brighten one’s own originally bright but currently obscured virtues, and the latter is related to others: to love (here xin 新 is interpreted as qin 親) people. Thus understood, it may also be subject to the deep level of the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics, particularly if we understand loving people in the normal sense of providing people with material and external goods. However, in Zhu Xi’s interpretation, really there is only one item, which is to brighten one’s originally bright virtues. As we have seen, Zhu Xi claims that all teachings by sages are crystallized in this three character phrase, ming ming de, which includes everything involved in Confucian moral cultivation. Thus, for Zhu Xi, “if one fully understands it, the single phrase ‘to brighten one’s [originally] bright virtue’ is enough, and there is no need for the rest. Sages know that it is difficult for learners to fully understand it, and so they listed many steps. Let us take for example ming ming de and xin min, which mutually illustrate each other. Those who have brightened their own nature are self-renewals; those who renew others are ones who make others to brighten their own bright virtues.”98 For this reason, when a student asks “whether renewing others must be originated from one’s self-renewal,” Zhu Xi replies affirmatively.99 In Zhu Xi’s view, although it is the case that “to brighten one’s bright virtues is to be without any selfish desires, while to renew people is to desire that other people can always do the right thing,”100 they are really not two separate things. Thus, one should realize that “if other people are not renewed to the utmost, it is also due to the fact one has not fully brightened one’s own bright virtue.”101 So one cannot claim that one’s own virtue is brightened if one is not concerned with other people’s originally bright but currently obscured virtues. Zhu Xi makes this point repeatedly: As soon as one’s virtue is brightened, one will naturally renew people. . . . Everyone has this dao-principle. It is not something that only I myself have. Since one has understood it, one ought to extend it to others, so that they can also brighten their own virtues. How can one be contented with one’s own being able to have it without letting others have it as well!102 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 275. Ibid., 284. 100 Ibid., 339. 101 Ibid., 242. 102 Ibid., 339. 98 99

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American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Since I have already brightened my originally bright virtues, seeing that others are obscured by the cloudy vital force and material desires, how can one not immediately desire to renew them, having them clean and brush [their originally bright virtues] as I did mine, so that they can be awakened from the muddy vital force and material desires and restore what they were naturally endowed with. This is what is meant by renewing people.103 One has to teach others to care for the elders, respect older siblings, and be nice to the young. One cannot care for one’s parents and yet teach others not to care for their parents, respect older siblings and yet teach others not to respect their older siblings, and be nice to one’s children and yet teach others not to be nice to their children.104

All these show that, for Zhu Xi, one’s brightening one’s own bright virtues includes renewing others (helping others brighten their bright virtues). In other words, a person cannot be regarded as virtuous if the person is contented with one’s own being “virtuous” without being interested in others’ virtues, since a “virtuous” person who shows no interest in others being virtuous, by this very fact, shows that this person lacks virtues and so is not really virtuous. Thus, when a student asks whether “a person who has brightened one’s own bright virtue and yet does not want to renew people with this brightened virtue is selfish,” Zhu Xi responds affirmatively.105 In his view, “normally, when a selfish person gets some ideas, he or she is unwilling to share them with others, thinking that he or she would then be unable to claim to be better than others. Superior persons have a broader mind. If they get something, they can extend it to others. If they are able to do something, they will teach it to others. What a pity it would be if others are unable to do things that one is able to do!”106 Thus, a person cannot be considered as a generous person, a person with the virtue of generosity, without being interested in making others generous. We normally think that one can be generous without making others generous, because we have in mind only generosity of material and external goods: one is willing to share such goods with others without making them then share these goods with (their) others. However, Zhu Xi, with a much broader conception of the virtue of generosity and its corresponding vice of miserliness, argues that such a person generous in the common sense is not only not generous but actually has the vice of miserliness (lin 吝), which is always associated with another vice, vanity Ibid., 241–2. Ibid., 332. 105 Ibid., 339. 106 Ibid., 404. 103 104


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(jiao 驕): “All people who have vanity must be miserly, and all people who are miserly must have vanity.”107 To show the relationship between these two vices, Zhu Xi first uses the example of miserliness with respect to one’s material possessions: “the reason a person is a miser about such material possessions is that, if the person shares it with others, others will be as rich as he or she is, and so the person will have nothing to brag about.”108 However, Zhu Xi emphasizes that “a person can be a miser not only in material possessions but also in skills of doing things and willingness to be good.”109 To illustrate miserliness about skills of doing things, Zhu Xi recounts that he once saw two persons unwilling to tell each other about things they could do respectively, even though these were insignificant things, as they were afraid that if they did, they would have nothing to brag about themselves. Now, in Zhu Xi’s view, this is exactly the same case with virtues. A person who has a “virtue” and yet is not interested in making others virtuous is also a miser, as the person thinks that if others also have his or her virtue, he or she will have nothing to brag about. Moreover, unlike a miser about material possessions and skills of doing things, who can keep such possessions and skills without sharing them with others, a miser of virtue cannot keep the virtue without sharing it with others, for if the person does not share his or her virtue with others, the person loses the virtue. In addition, unlike one’s material possessions, which will be decreased when shared with others, one’s virtue, when shared with others, will not be decreased but will become even brighter. This last point of Zhu Xi’s about a miser in virtue becomes clearer in his interpretation of the Confucian golden rule: “One who wants to establish oneself will establish others; and one who wants to prosper oneself will help others prosper.”110 Commenting on this, Zhu Xi states that “the two things [establishing and prospering] include both internal and external.”111 What he means by external is such things as happiness, long life, health, and peace that everyone desires.112 This is our common understanding of the golden rule: since I want to be happy, live long, be healthy, and have peace, I should also help others to be happy, live long, be healthy, and have peace. What is unique about Zhu Xi’s interpretation of the Confucian golden rule is, however, his emphasis on its internal aspect, which is made clear by the sentence immediately after he talks about the internal external aspects of the golden rule: “Take for the example the cultivation of virtue. One wants to establish one’s own virtue,” and so, by Ibid., 841. Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Analects 6.30. 111 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 758. 112 Ibid., 928. 107 108

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implication, one should help others to establish their virtues.113 Thus the deeper meaning of the golden rule for Zhu Xi is that, if one wants to develop one’s own virtue, one should develop the virtue of others; and if one wants to prosper in one’s virtues, one should make others prosper in their virtues. This point is made more explicit in another place, where Zhu Xi claims that “what my heart/mind desires is also what the heart/mind of others desire. I want to respect my parents, love my brothers, and be kind [to my children], and so I must also want others to respect their parents, love their brothers, and be kind [to their children] as I do to mine. . . . If only I myself can do these, while others cannot do this, I feel uneasy.”114 The following statement, made by one of his students in a conversation with Zhu Xi, expresses this internal aspect of the Confucian golden rule well: “If one wants to be a superior person, then one also wants all others to be superior persons; if one does not want to be an inferior person, then one also does not want others to be inferior persons.”115 In this relation, it is interesting to see how Zhu Xi interprets Analects 4.15, as this is often also regarded as a version of the Confucian golden rule. In this passage, Confucius said that there is one thread going through all his teachings. After he left, students tried to figure out what this one thread is, and one of his students, Zengzi, said that it is zhong [忠] and shu [恕]. This has been puzzling for many commentators in history, as Confucius says that there is only one thread going through his teachings, but Zengzi mentions two instead of one. So what is crucial is to see what zhong and shu mean. Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s interpretation of zhong as to fully realize oneself and shu as to include the realization of others in one’s full realization.116 In Zhu Xi’s view, therefore “Zhong and 113 Ibid., 758. In a similar spirit, Qing scholar Mao Qiling 毛奇齡, in his Corrections of the Four Books 四書改錯, interprets this rule to mean that one cannot establish oneself without establishing others and one cannot make oneself noble without letting others be noble. In other words, to establish others is the intrinsic content of establishing oneself, and to let others be noble is the intrinsic content of making oneself noble. For this reason, Mao Qiling relates this passage not only to the idea of “realizing oneself [cheng ji 成己]” and “realizing others [cheng wu 成物]” in the Doctrine of the Mean, but also to “manifesting one’s clear character [ming mingde 明明德]” and “loving people [qin min 親民]” at the very beginning of the Great Learning, to “making oneself alone perfect [du shan qi shen 獨善其身]” and “making the whole Empire perfect [jian shan tian xia 兼善天下]” in the Mencius (7a9), and to “cultivating oneself [xiu ji 修己]” and “bringing security to people [an ren 安人]” in Analects 14.42 (see Cheng Shude 程樹德, Collected Commentaries on the Analects 論語集釋 [Beijing 北京: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 1990], 429). In this understanding, the two items in each of these pairs are inseparable: one cannot realize oneself without realizing others, manifest one’s clear character without loving people, make oneself perfect without making the world perfect, and cultivate oneself without bringing peace to people, and vice versa. 114 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 322. 115 Ibid., 958. 116 Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, Collected Works of the Two Chengs, 306.


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shu are one thing and cannot be seen as two,”117 because zhong, to fully realize one’s self, implies shu, to help others fully realize their selves. On the one hand, since a person who fully realizes one’s self is not tolerant with one’s own moral faults, he or she should also not be negligent about the moral faults of others. Thus, when a student asks whether a person of shu does not care about other people’s moral faults, as one of the literal meanings of shu is to forgive, Zhu Xi says that “this is a strange idea. None of the Six Classics ever says that shu is to be tolerant of others’ moral faults. . . . It is not right to take care of oneself only and let other people become bad.”118 On the other hand, since a person who fully realizes one’s self is one who always does good things, the person should also help others do good things. Thus, Zhu Xi advises: “when someone comes to ask for your advice about things to do, you should be very careful. Tell them to do what is good and do not tell them to do what is not good. Only thus can you be seen as fully realizing your own self.”119 It is clear here that Zhu Xi regards shu, to help others to be good, as part of zhong, to fully realize one’s own self, because “only one who completes himself or herself can complete others, and to complete oneself includes completing others.”120 So in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian virtue ethics, a truly virtuous person is a person who not only cares about others’ external and material welfare but also cares about their virtues. However, to care about others’ virtues is a much more difficult thing to do than to care about their external and material welfare. For the latter, one can simply give them what one has and they need; for the former, however, one cannot, and indeed does not need to, give one’s virtue to others, as others have all their virtues within; only these virtues are obscured by their selfish desires. So to be virtuous, they only need to realize their virtues within, which, however, is something essentially only they can do for themselves. Thus, Zhu Xi states: “virtue [de 德] is to get [de 得], which is to get by oneself. It is not something that one can just learn about. If one just learns about it and does not get it by oneself, it is as if one heard it said by others, which has nothing to do with oneself.”121 It is in this sense that Zhu Xi accepts Cheng Yi’s unique interpretation of a controversial passage in the Analects: “people can be made to follow it [dao] but cannot be made to know it.”122 A common interpretation of this passage is that Confucius must either think that people are too stupid to understand dao or that it is better to keep people ignorant about dao. However, Cheng Yi argues that people cannot be made to know dao because dao, Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 602. Ibid., 629. 119 Ibid., 435. 120 Ibid., 120. 121 Ibid., 779. 122 Analects 8.9. 117 118

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by its very nature, has to be known by oneself.123 Zhu Xi agrees on Cheng Yi’s interpretation: “[P]eople can be made to do things. As regards knowledge, one has to get it by oneself, and it is not something others can force on people. To make them to do things without making them know them does not affect their following the principle. By the time they realize the principle by themselves, they will naturally do things.”124 However, Zhu Xi does not therefore follow Kant or Whiting’s Aristotle to claim that virtues therefore cannot be taught, and people should be left alone to figure out how to become virtuous by themselves. Although he often follows Mencius, comparing a person who is not virtuous yet to a person who is asleep, he does not want to push the analogy too far, since a person who is asleep can sooner or later become awake by himself, while a person not virtuous yet has to be awakened by others: a person who is [morally] stupid does not know that he or she has a heartmind, just as a person asleep is unaware of his or her body. Although asleep, when awakened [by others], the person becomes aware of his or her body. The case with one’s heart-mind is similar. Although morally stupid, when alerted [by others], the person can know the presence of the heart-mind.125

Here Zhu Xi emphasizes the importance of waking up the person who is asleep. When a student asks whether a person who becomes licentious can wake up himself or herself by resuming self-control, Zhu Xi makes it clear that it is impossible: “a person becomes licentious because the person is stupid. If the person can wake up himself-herself, the person is not stupid, and if the person is not stupid, he or she will not be licentious.”126 The question is then how a virtuous person can teach others to be virtuous, when one can be virtuous ultimately only by oneself. In Zhu Xi’s view, the most effective way to teach others to be virtuous is to set a personal example. Zhu Xi believes that everyone has the virtues within, which are merely obscured by selfish desires in those who are not virtuous yet. So “if one cultivates one’s own virtues, others will naturally be moved [ganhua 感化].”127 For this reason, “one For a detailed discussion of Cheng’s interpretation, see Yong Huang, “Neo-Confucian Hermeneutics at Work: Cheng Yi’s Philosophical Interpretation of Analects 8.9 and 17.3,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 169–201. 124 Zhu Xi , Collected Writings of Zhu Xi 朱熹集 (Chengdu 成都: Sichuan Jiaoyu Chubanshe 四川教育出版社, 1996), 1806. 125 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 179. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid., 480. In appearance, there is some tension between this view of teaching others by personal examples and the view that we discussed earlier: a learner for the sake of oneself cares 123


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can teach others to love their parents only if one loves his or her parents first; one can teach others to love their siblings only if one loves his or her siblings first. Other things are all the same”;128 “only when one has virtues and is without vice can one ask others to have virtues and blame others for having vice”;129 and “people must first have this goodness and then they can extend it to others; without this goodness oneself, how can one extend it to others?”130 It is in this sense that Zhu Xi comments on Cheng Yi’s unique interpretation of one of the opening sentences of the Analects: “How happy one is to receive friends coming from afar.”131 In Cheng Yi’s view, the reason one is happy is that one’s goodness is extended to others so that there are many followers. Zhu Xi approves this interpretation.132 He claims that here one is not happy because having a large number of followers shows that one is virtuous, for since one already gets it, why should one be happy only after other people follow oneself? One should know that what one has got for oneself one also wants others to have. However, when there are only one or two followers, one does not feel very happy. When there are a lot of people following one (in becoming virtuous), how can one not be happy?

Of course, the way of setting up personal example (shenjiao 身教) does not always work, and so some supplementary methods must also be used. For example, Zhu Xi states, “if you do not know [what is inherent in you], I will tell you so that you will know it; if you do not know how to practice, I do it here in front of you and with you.”133 Here Zhu Xi mentions two additional methods. The first is teaching by words (yanchuan 言傳). In his view, while all Confucian sages teach by personal examples, all classics by sages perform this function of teaching by words. The second is to make people do good things and not do bad things by rules of propriety and even punitive laws. It is true that, when made to do good things and not to do bad things in this way, people are not thereby virtuous. However, for Zhu Xi, at least people will not do bad things. More importantly, if this method is always followed by the other two about whether one gets virtue himself and not whether others know that one is virtuous, as to teach others by personal example is predicated on the assumption that others know that one is virtuous. Zhu Xi is aware of that: “When one’s moral action moves others so that there are many followers, one should be happy; but if others do not know about one’s moral actions, one should not be unhappy” (ibid., 406). What is crucial here is whether one wants to show that one is virtuous or desires others to be virtuous. 128 Ibid., 493. 129 Ibid., 319. 130 Ibid., 404. 131 Analects 1.1. 132 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 405. 133 Ibid., 204–5.

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methods, teaching by example and teaching by words, people will gradually become clear about their virtues and become virtuous. In the passage we quoted above on Analects 8.9, we have already seen that, for Zhu Xi, “to make them do things without making them know them does not affect their following the principle. By the time they realize the principle by themselves, they will naturally do things.” When discussing this same Analects passage with his student, Zhu Xi again claims that “People can be made to follow dao but cannot be made to know it.” This means that as long as they are practicing morality as a habit, they will naturally experience and understand it. It is important “to encourage them in their toil, put them on the right path, aid them and help them, let them understand dao by themselves, and then help them establish their virtues.”134 When you teach people, if you do not encourage them, put them on the right path, help and assist them, and yet want them establish their virtues, this is a short cut and not a way of teaching others.135

In short, for Zhu Xi, a truly virtuous person should be like the sage king Shun, who “completes his own goodness, is good to others, and makes the goodness of others illuminating.”136 Thus, Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can avoid the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on the deep level.

V. The Self-Centeredness Objection on the Foundational Level. We have now examined Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian response to the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on both the surface level and the deep level as discussed by David Solomon, an advocate of virtue ethics himself. A virtuous person desires to do virtuous things and takes delight in being virtuous. This, however, does not mean that this person is self-centered. First, the things that a virtuous person desires to do are virtuous things, things that require the person to be concerned about the interest and welfare of others. Second, the interest and welfare of others that a virtuous person is concerned about is not limited to their external and material benefits but also includes their characters. As we have seen, while both Confucianism and Aristotelianism have resources for the former, clear evidence for the latter can only be found in Confucianism.

Here Zhu Xi is quoting Mencius 3a4. My translation follows Zhu Xi’s understanding, which may not be what Mencius or the sage King Yao means, as Mencius in that passage is quoting Yao. 135 Zhu Xi, Classified Sayings, 1078; see also 242. 136 Ibid., 1161. 134


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However, the self-centeredness objection goes even deeper than anticipated by Solomon. Thomas Hurka raises his objection to virtue ethics as foundationally egoistic. This objection agrees that a virtuous person is concerned with the interest of others; it would also agree with Confucians that the interest of others a virtuous person is concerned with includes their characters; and it would even agree that the virtuous person is concerned with the good, both external and internal, of others for their sake and not merely for the sake of the agent himself or herself. However, it claims that virtue ethics is still self-centered or egoistic, for the virtuous person is concerned with the interest of others, including their characters, for their sake, ultimately because the person is concerned with his or her own interest in fully realizing his or her virtue. In Hurka’s view, virtue ethics presupposes an egoistic theory of normative reasons whereby all a person’s reasons for action derive from his flourishing. The resulting virtue-ethical theory need not be egoistic in its substantive claims about action; it can tell people to promote others’ pleasure and knowledge [and, we may add, virtue] even at the expense of their own. Nor need it be egoistic about motivation: it can say that to act virtuously, they must care about others’ pleasure and knowledge [and virtue] for its own sake. But it is what I will call foundationally egoistic, insisting that their reasons to act and be motivated in these ways derive ultimately from their own flourishing.137

Hurka’s objection here is partially a response to Julia Annas’s defense of virtue ethics as being neither self-centered nor egoistic. In her defense, Annas makes a distinction between self-centeredness in content and self-centeredness in form. She claims that a virtuous person is not self-centered in content but can be regarded as self-centered in form: What I have to develop, in order to successfully achieve my final good, are the virtues. . . . [B]ut all virtues are dispositions to do the right thing, where this is established in ways that are independent of my own interest. Thus the fact I aim at my own final end makes ancient ethics formally agentcentered or self-centered, but does not make it self-centered in content. . . . [A]chieving my final good, happiness, whatever that turns out to be, will involve respecting and perhaps furthering the good of others.138

Annas insists that a virtuous person, by being virtuous, is committed to respecting and furthering the good of others for their sake and not merely as instrumental to his or her own good or end. Nevertheless, Annas agrees that Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 232; emphasis added. Annas, The Morality of Happiness, 223.

137 138

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virtue ethics is self-centered in form, as a virtuous person respects and furthers the good of others in his or her effort to achieve his or her own final good. This, in Hurka’s view, means “that they [virtue theories] connect all of a person’s reasons for action to his own flourishing. Assuming his flourishing is a state of him, this makes the theories egoistic in my foundational sense.”139 While Hurka can agree that a virtuous person respects and furthers the good of others for their sake, he or she does it in such a way that it is ultimately for his or her own sake. In other words, a virtuous person is concerned with his own good, and yet due to the nature of his own good (virtue), he has to be concerned with the good of others and to be so for the sake of others. To use Richard Kraut’s terms, it is for one’s own sake that a virtuous person should benefit others for their sake. While Kraut himself finds it unintelligible to speak of “benefit[ing] others for their sake for your own sake,”140 we can see the point that Hurka tries to make. On one level, the virtuous person, in contrast to a prudential person, does benefit others for their sake. If the person benefits others for the sake of himself or herself, whether externally or internally, the person is not a virtuous person. However, on a foundational level, the virtuous person does so indeed for his or her own sake: to be a virtuous person. Now, according to Hurka, it is “not virtuous—it is morally self-indulgent—to act primarily from concern for one’s own virtue. Someone motivated by the theory’s claims about reasons will therefore be motivated not virtuously but in an unattractively self-indulgent way.”141 One way to respond to this self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics on the foundational level is that the virtuous person is fundamentally or ultimately other-regarding. It is true that the virtuous person seeks his or her goal, but the goal he or she sets for himself or herself is to respect and further the good of others. In this sense, a virtuous person acts for her own sake only in the sense that she seeks to realize her own goal, which is to respect and further the good

Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 232–3 n. 28. Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 136. 141 Ibid., 246. It is important to point out that, in discussing the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics, we have been primarily focused on the eudaimonistic version of virtue ethics and not its aretaic version, some advocates of which (such as Michael Slote) claim that it is immune to such an objection (see footnote 49 in this article), as it focuses on what is admirable. However, Hurka argues that this charge of foundational egoism is also applicable to aretaic virtue ethics, for “even an aretaic theory says a person has reason to act rightly only because doing so will express virtue on her part” (ibid., 246). In another place, Hurkas adds, “An aretaic theory likewise gives a self-regarding explanation, that the action will be something admirable on the agent’s part, and this is, again, not the right explanation. Because they focus so centrally on the agent’s virtue, virtual-ethical theories find the ultimate source of his reasons in himself, in what virtuous actions will mean for his flourishing or admirability” (ibid., 248). 139 140


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of others.142 In other words, a virtuous person is concerned with the good of others. Only in the sense that the goal of respecting and furthering the good of others is his or her own goal and not anyone else’s goal can the virtuous person be regarded as being virtuous for his own sake. To imitate what Richard Kraut says, it is to benefit others for my (agent’s) sake for their (patients’) sake. Kraut himself would certainly regard it as equally unintelligible, but the implied idea here is that, while (as Julia Annas says) the virtuous person aims at her own flourishing “just in the sense that she is living her life and not mine,”143 the life she lives is to respect and further the good of others. In this sense, the virtuous person is essentially other-regarding. Thus, if the self-centeredness objection claims that virtue ethics reduces the good of others to the good of the agent, this reply to the objection seems to claim that the good of the virtuous agent is reduced to that of others. However, in this sense, Hurka claims that, instead of self-indulgence, virtue ethics now turns to be self-effacing: virtue ethicists can say that to flourish or express virtue, a person must act from genuinely virtuous motives, such as a desire for another’s pleasure for its own sake. If she instead aims at her own flourishing or virtue, she does not act from the required motives and so does not achieve the flourishing or virtue that is her goal. This requires the theories to be what Parfit calls self-effacing, telling agents not to be motivated by or even to think of their claims about the source of their reasons.144

This seems to Hurka ironic, because “some partisans of virtue ethics have been vocal critics of the self-effacingness of consequential theories . . . but their own theories have the same feature, if anything in a more disturbing way.”145 To avoid this dilemma between self-indulgence and self-effacingness, a correct understanding of the nature of virtues, particularly Confucian virtues, is not to see it as either foundationally self-indulgent (for the sake of oneself by acting for the sake of others) or as foundationally self-effacing (for the sake of others through acting for one’s own sake); it is rather to see it as both “to benefit others and to benefit oneself.” Moreover, it is not to see them as two independent 142 Christine Swanton, for example, argues that, “in defense of eudaimonism, one may claim that reasons for ‘type or range X’ pertain to the point of X as a virtue, and that in turn is constituted by the aim or target of X. So, for example, if X is the virtue of friendship, X-type reasons have to do with expressing friendship in acts of affection, promoting the good of the friend, and so on. No surreptitious or covert egoism seems lurking here. In short, reasons for type X derive from the target of X and are not themselves reasons for a claim that X is a virtue” (Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 79). 143 Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” in Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Coop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 522. 144 Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 246. 145 Ibid.

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reasons, as Kraut says,146 as if a virtuous person can have one without having the other or can have one before the other; it is rather to see them as two sides of one and the same reason. As we have seen, a virtuous person in the Confucian tradition cannot be an altruist (serving the interests of others) without taking good care of one’s own great body, to use Mencius’ terms, which is his or her heart/mind. In this sense, an altruist has to be an “egoist”; however, one cannot be an “egoist” (taking care of one’s own great body) without serving the interests of others. In this sense, an “egoist” has to be an altruist. This point is made more vivid by Zhu Xi. As we have seen, Zhu Xi has a very broad conception of selfishness and a correspondingly broad conception of selflessness. For Zhu Xi, a selfish person is a person who is unwilling to share with others not only his material possessions but also his skills and virtues, and particularly relevant here is the last item. A person who is only concerned about one’s own virtues but not about the virtues of other people is also a selfish person and for that reason is not a virtuous person. So a truly virtuous person is a selfless or altruistic person in the broadest sense, a person who is not only concerned with others’ material and intellectual well-being but also their characters. In this sense, if asked why she acts altruistically, the virtuous person will naturally reply, “Because I want to be an altruistic person.” However, it is at least odd if Hurka wants to claim that such a person is still foundationally egoistic: the person acts altruistically/selflessly only because the person wants to be an altruistic person and not because he or she really wants to act altruistically. It is odd because, obviously, we cannot claim that a person acts really altruistically only when he or she does not want to be an altruistic person. In other words, it is odd because we cannot claim that an altruistic person is an egoist even in Hurka’s foundational sense. At the same time, however, we cannot say such a person is self-effacing because it is the kind of person he or she wants to be, he or she is happy in being such a person, and he or she finds his or her true self in being such a person.147 Thus, the two apparently antithetical ideas, egoism and altruism, the selfregarding and the other-regarding, or the self-indulgent and self-effacing, are combined. Moreover, they are combined not in such a way that a virtuous person is partially egoistic and partially altruistic or sometimes completely egoistic and sometimes completely altruistic, but in a way that the person is completely “egoistic” and completely “altruistic” simultaneously: a virtuous person acts entirely See Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, 137. I think this Confucian way of dealing with this issue is better than the way presented by Barbara Herman, which seems to me more clever than convincing. According to Herman, instead of being concerned with others’ well-being in order to be a virtuous person, a virtuous person is concerned with others’ well-being because of his or her virtues (Barbara Herman, “Rules, Motives and Helping Actions,” Philosophical Studies 45 [1984]: 369–77, at 370–1). 146 147


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for the sake of one’s true self and so is completely egoistic; however, this is only because the virtuous person defines his or her true self as one concerned with the good of others and so is entirely altruistic. It is not correct to say that the virtuous person is primarily or foundationally an “egoist” as if he or she takes care of the interests of others only as a means to serve the interests of his or her own true self, just as it is not correct to say that the virtuous person is primarily or foundationally an altruist as if he or she takes care of his or her own true self only as a way to serve others. Rather, altruism and egoism here completely overlap. As illustrated by the figure used by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, which looks like a duck in one way and a rabbit in another way,148 a virtuous person looks like an egoist in one way (he or she serves his or her own goal: being an altruist) and an altruist in another way (he or she sets his or her very goal to serve the interest of others). However, in Wittgenstein’s figure, take away the rabbit, and you will not have the duck, and vice versa. Similarly, in a virtuous person, take away egoism, and you will not have altruism left, and vice versa.149 In this sense, it is wrong to ask, as a Kantian may well be tempted to ask, whether a virtuous person does a virtuous thing because he or she thinks it is to his or her interest or because the person thinks it is really a right thing to do. In the Kantian view, if the former, the person does the virtuous thing for a wrong reason; and only if the latter can the person’s action have any genuine moral worth. In the Confucian virtue ethics, however, to be self-interested and to be concerned with others are not only not contradictory, they are not even two things that happen to coincide perfectly: they are actually one and same thing. When one seeks one’s true self-interest, one must be performing moral actions; and when one performs moral actions, one must be seeking one’s true self-interest. Thus, we can say that a person seeks the interest of others (is other-regarding) precisely in order to seek one’s own interest (to be self-regarding); and we can also say that a person seeks one’s own interest (is self-regarding) precisely in order to seek the interest of others (to be other-regarding). To be self-interested in this sense is identical to being interested in others. The very action that promotes the interest of others, precisely when and because it promotes the interest of others, promotes one’s self-interest, as one’s self-interest is precisely to promote the

148 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edition (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 194. 149 Although Brad Hooker thinks that it is not realistic, he does admit that, “for a deeply virtuous person, the conflict between virtue and self-interest can fade to the point of invisibility. If you have built your life around the project of being virtuous, then you may view any future for you in which you spoil that project as inferior to any future for you in which [you] achieve it” (Brad Hooker, “The Collapse of Virtue Ethics,” Utilitas 14 [2002]: 22–40, at 25).

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interest of others. Thus, the more virtuous (more concerned with the interest of others) a person is, the better his or her self-interest is served, and vice versa. In this connection, I think Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of love is quite illuminating. According to Frankfurt, there are two aspects of love. On the one hand, the inherent importance of loving is due precisely to the fact that loving consists essentially in being devoted to the well-being of what we love. The value of loving to the lover derives from his dedication to his beloved. As for the importance of the beloved, the lover cares about what he loves for its own sake; . . . however, what he loves necessarily possesses an instrumental value for him, in virtue of the fact that it is a necessary condition of his enjoying the inherently important activity of loving it.150

These two aspects are so closely interwoven that, for Frankfurt, it is foolish to ask whether I love someone for the sake of the beloved or for the sake of my own enjoyment in loving the person. He uses the following example to illustrate his point: Consider a man who tells a woman that his love for her is what gives meaning and value to his life . . . the woman is unlikely to feel . . . that what the man is telling her implies that he does not really love her at all, and that he cares about her only because it makes him feel good. From his declaration that his love for her fulfills a deep need of his life, she will surely not conclude that he is making use of her.151

So what is most distinctive of virtue ethics in general and Confucian virtue ethics in particular is that, when a virtuous person takes care of the interest of others, he or she does not have to overcome his or her inclination. Instead, one takes delight in being concerned with others because by being concerned with others one satisfies one’s desire, achieves one’s goal, realizes one’s true self, and therefore feels happy. However, it might be asked why it is not enough simply to be moral or why one must also take delight in being so. This is perhaps also what is behind the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics. When asked why a virtuous person should benefit others, virtue ethics explains, in the end, that “this will make his life better or admirable, but that is, intuitively, not the right explanation. The Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),

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59.

151 Ibid., 60. In addition to the parental love for children, Philippa Foot also uses the example of friendship to make the same point: “What friendship requires a friend to do for a friend may indeed be onerous, involving even life itself. But what is done in friendship is done gladly, con amore” (Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 102).


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right explanation is that it will make the other’s life better.”152 To respond, first of all, we have to agree that the moral life recommended by virtue ethics is a better life for the agent than the lives recommended by alternative theories of ethics. For example, Michael Stocker asks, “what sort of life would people live who did their duties but never or rarely wanted to?”153 Obviously, whether such a life is good for moral patients or not, this cannot be a good life for the moral agent, as the agent has to make a great effort to overcome his or her natural inclinations in order to perform moral actions and therefore cannot take delight in performing such actions. This is made most clear by Kant’s separation of morality from happiness. Of course, critics of virtue ethics think that whether a moral life is good to the agent is irrelevant or at least not important; what matters is whether it is good for moral patients. However, contrary to what we may normally think, such moral actions as recommended by Kant are hardly good for moral patients either. To see this, let us look at Michael Stocker’s following hypothetical scenario: Suppose you are in a hospital, recovering from a long illness. You are very bored and restless and at loose ends when Smith comes in once again. You are now convinced more than ever that he is a fine fellow and a real friend—taking so much time to cheer you up, traveling all the way across town, and so on. You are so effusive with your praise and thanks that he protests that he always tries to do what he thinks is his duty, what he thinks will be best. . . . [T]he more you two speak, the more clear it becomes that . . . it is not essentially because of you that he came to see you, not because you are friends, but because he thought it his duty . . . or simply because he knows of no one more in need of cheering up and no one easier to cheer up.154

This example shows clearly that only when and because a virtuous person’s action benefiting others makes the agent’s life better can it make his or her patient’s life better. In other words, virtue does make a difference with one’s action.155 Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, 249. Michael Stocker, “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” in Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, ed. Daniel Statman (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press 1997), 67. 154 Ibid., 74. 155 A critic like Brad Hooker also agrees that, on the view that virtue is intrinsically morally valuable, “a world containing virtue would be a morally better world even if it contained no different behavior, no more happiness, and no more of everything else valuable. Is this view right? Is there less moral value in my doing the same thing you’re doing, if you’re doing it out of a genuinely good character and I’m doing it out of compulsion or fear of punishment? The answer seemed to be, ‘Yes’” (Hooker, “The Collapse of Virtue Ethics,” 25–6). The only disagreement I have is that when one acts virtuously, there will always be more happiness, with regard to both the agent and the patient, than when one acts with compulsion or fear. So I think he is wrong to claim that “not 152 153

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VI. Conclusion. In this article, I assume, without argument, that Confucianism in general and Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism in particular is a virtue ethics, a type of ethical theory that has emerged or, rather, has been revived in the Western philosophical world in the last few decades. My interest is to explore the possible contribution that Confucianism, even if it is not a virtue ethics, can make to contemporary virtue ethics. With this in mind, I focus on the self-centeredness objection to virtue ethics in this essay. The objection states that, since virtue ethics recommends that we be concerned with our own virtues or virtuous characters, it is self-centered. In response, I argue that, for Zhu Xi, the self that a virtuous person is concerned with is constituted by precisely such virtues as to incline him or her to be concerned with the good of others. While such an answer is also available to Aristotelian eudaimonistic virtue ethics, I argue that Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can better respond to the objection on a deeper lever. On this level, it claims that, while a virtuous person, as in the eudaimonistic virtue ethics, is concerned with the external and material goods of others, he or she is concerned with his or her own character. Since virtue ethics thinks that one’s character is more important than material benefits, virtue ethics is self-centered in this deeper sense. I argue that a virtuous person in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism, unlike one in Aristotelianism, is virtuous because the person takes care of not only the material well-being but also the character traits of others. Moreover, Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism can respond to the self-centeredness objection on a foundational level (that a virtuous person promotes the good, both internal and external, of others, ultimately for the sake of his or her own good). I argue that, in Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism, one’s concern with oneself and one’s concern with others are inseparable, and therefore one cannot say which is more foundational or ultimate.156 Kutztown University Kutztown, Pennsylvania

every more virtuous life contains more personal good than every less virtuous life. Virtue is not necessarily a personal good of lexically greater value than others” (ibid., 25). 156 I would like to thank Michael Slote, the first reader of the initial draft of the paper, and Thomas Hurka, the commentator on an earlier version of this paper when it was read at a panel at APA Pacific in Vancouver in 2009. I benefitted greatly from their comments. I also want to express thanks for the comments made by Steve Angle, Kenneth Dortor, P. J. Ivanhoe, Justin Tiwald, Tong Shijun, Richard Stichler, Zhang Rulun, Yang Guorong, Yu Jiyuan, and many others when an earlier version of this paper was read on several other occasions. Finally, my gratitude goes to an anonymous reviewer of this journal as well as its editorial staff for their helpful suggestions for revision.