Abstract

From the time that ethics emerged as an academic discipline in Japan in the 1880s, it functioned as an apparatus of the state, working to produce the unity and order the state demanded through the cultivation of a common moral outlook on the one hand, and providing philosophical justification for the oftentimes violent suppression of socially disruptive or "dangerous" thought and practices that ran counter to the needs of the state on the other. Rinrigaku academics justified the state's acts of suppression by insisting on the universal status of its particular and perspectival claims concerning "the good." Seeking to establish itself as the dominant arbiter of the good, rinrigaku projected its claims outward and backward in time . ;As rinrigaku's authority increased, religious apologists, natural-right theorists, and later, advocates of anarchism and individualism, found themselves with little authority to speak for "the good." Resistance to rinrigaku took various forms. Some defended their moral views by asserting that they were not inconsistent with the scientific theories and methods of rinrigaku. This had the effect of strengthening rinrigaku's authority. Others resisted not by accommodating the claims of rinrigaku, but by redefining "moral action" in ways that subverted the authority of rinrigaku and the state. Whatever the strategy for resistance, rinrigaku scholars' efforts to disqualify competing normative orientations from moral discourse entailed the violence of suppression, and oftentimes violent resistance. ;Broadly speaking, this project examines the role of moral discourse in the formation of the nation-state by investigating the production of conceptions of "the good," the formation of moral subjectivity, and the violence carried out under the banner of moral universality. Stressing the contingency of moral claims, I suggest that the notion of the "universal" be set aside, and that we view ethics as an ongoing conversation about multiple moral possibilities rather than as a search for universally binding moral truths