Irene Liu

This paper aims to produce a defense of the ethical significance of Confucian ritual. An adequate defense must explain how these conventions are based in a culturally-neutral, objective ground. After a brief account of how Confucians view the relationship between rituals and moral goodness, I consider three sorts of justification. Mencian naturalism appeals to a conception of flourishing that is grounded in human nature. Xunzian consequentialism looks to how ritual brings about social order. I argue that both of these approaches fail because they are unable to account for the normative fineness of rituals, which refers to the precision and detail of ritual propriety. Instead, I look to Xunzi for a justification of rituals in terms of their role in beautifying human nature. I argue that this view provides a sort of objective ground for ritual, while also preserving their normative fineness. I conclude with remarks on how Xunzian aestheticism may be useful for understanding other areas of moral life.

Ethical pluralists hold that moral values and systems are irreducibly diverse and incommensurable according to a common scale. One criticism of the view is that accepting such incommensurability renders them unable to criticize values, practices, institutions, and so forth that are genuinely bad. This paper considers two ways that pluralists have appealed to human nature to answer this criticism. One way appeals to nature to ground a positive conception of human flourishing, whereas the other appeals to nature as a source of constraints. I argue that both views fail to meet the criticism in a satisfactory way and then advance a view that improves upon the existing options. Specifically, I argue that human nature is the standard by which it is possible to assess humaneness, which is a kind of beauty that represents the elevation or refinement of human nature. Accordingly, pluralists can deploy judgments of humaneness to criticize practices, institutions, and so forth that are not worth tolerating without violating the spirit of pluralism.