Abstract
Is freedom a Western concept? As a multifaceted human experience it seems fairly transcultural. Freedom is hardly a focus of philosophical discourses in China as it is in the West, and I suppose this partly accounts for the difficulty in tracking freedom and closely related notions of agency, choice, and autonomy in Chinese philosophy.Over four decades ago Herbert Fingarette raised the controversial idea about the absence of freedom in Confucian ethics. Although not intending to denigrate, Fingarette raised a polemic that has lingered to the present.1 A. C. Graham noted the sour upshot of the issue when writing that "the claim that the concept of moral choice is foreign to Confucius has offended...