Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji JapanThis innovative study of ethics in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) explores the intense struggle to define a common morality for the emerging nation-state. In the Social Darwinist atmosphere of the time, the Japanese state sought to quell uprisings and overcome social disruptions so as to produce national unity and defend its sovereignty against Western encroachment. Morality became a crucial means to attain these aims. Moral prescriptions for re-ordering the population came from all segments of society, including Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian apologists; literary figures and artists; advocates of natural rights; anarchists; and women defending nontraditional gender roles. Each envisioned a unity grounded in its own moral perspective. It was in this tumultuous atmosphere that the academic discipline of ethics (rinrigaku) emerged—not as a value-neutral, objective form of inquiry as its practitioners claimed, but a state-sponsored program with its own agenda. |
Contents
Contextualizing Ethics in Early Meiji Japan | 1 |
2 The Epistemology of Rinrigaku | 22 |
The Formation and Fluidity of Moral Subjectivity | 57 |
The Ethics of Spirit and the Spirit of the People | 81 |
National Morality the State and Dangerous Thought | 114 |