Abstract

This dissertation examines the philosophy of the early Chinese Confucian thinker Xunzi . With his focus on good traits of character such as "benevolence," and on moral paragons such as the "sage, " there is a strong similarity between Xunzi's thought and the contemporary Western philosophical movement known as "virtue ethics." In this work, I investigate the extent to which Xunzi can be understood as espousing a form of virtue ethics, as a way of applying to his writings revealing new interpretive tools, and as a way of showing how he may have something to contribute to current philosophical debates. To do so, I first articulate an interpretation of virtue ethics based on the work of John McDowell, R. Jay Wallace, and Jonathan Dancy. The three most significant features of this model are the ideas that proper moral judgment is not codifiable, that such judgment is instead best understood as analogous to the cultivated expertise of a connoisseur, and that the sort of reasoning in which the moral connoisseur engages is a kind of constitutive or specificationist reasoning. I then argue that Xunzi shares these three views in relation to the highest moral standard in his ethical system, the Dao, and that therefore he can be regarded as presenting a form of virtue ethics. Next, using the topic of the unity of virtue as an organizing theme, I analyze Xunzi's conception of virtue in order to highlight the distinctively Confucian features of his version of virtue ethics. Finally, I argue that the way Xunzi combines a belief in the uncodiliability of proper moral judgment with a strong emphasis on ritual can provide contemporary virtue theorists with a helpful example for thinking about problems of social co-ordination and moral education, as well as how to effect an accommodation between their conviction, on the one hand, that right action is not reducible to a set of principles and people's need for specific practical guidance, on the other.