“When the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.”
The Analects, 12.11 (trans. James Legge, 1893, p. 165)
Confucianism
The Analects was assembled by several hands, so this is the book's position, not one man's. Sophecs reads it as role ethics, after Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, not as the virtue ethics of cultivated qualities Shannon Vallor sees. You do not enter relationships as a finished individual; the relationships constitute you, as somebody's child, colleague, citizen. What you owe is never owed in the abstract. Asked what government is, Book 12 answers with relations and not a principle: there is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.
Book 13 supplies the other half: if names are not correct, language does not accord with the truth of things. Call a system intelligent, or fair, or explainable, and the word has done work the system has not. The Confucian question about an AI is not what it maximises. It is which relationships it makes, which it degrades, and whether the people inside them can still hold each other to what they owe.
What Confucianism gets wrong
The passage this school leads with names two relations, prince to minister and father to son, and both are unequal. The objection is not hidden inside it. It is the sentence: order consists in each party being what their position requires, and the same structure covers a household and a state alike. The paper Confucian Role-Ethics with Non-Domination concedes it: role ethics is too ready to authorise hierarchy, and mutual duties do not make a ruler and a subject equals. Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee's Confucianism and Women traces what that cost, as filial piety and patrilineal descent held women in place. An algorithm can honour every expectation attaching to employer and worker and leave the power between them where it found it. Utilitarians would add that a school built on who owes what to whom has little to say about a stranger nobody stands in a relation to.
The other five
- Stoicism“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”
- Utilitarianism“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”
- Virtue Ethics“We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
- Ubuntu“A person is a person through other persons.”
- Buddhist Ethics“Treating others like oneself, neither kill nor incite to kill.”