Epistemic Democracy and Confucian Good Government Sor hoon Tan ( 陳素芬 ) In comparing the Confucian ideal of good government with contemporary democratic ideals, the most obvious common ground is government for the people, which has been linked to the minben ( people as basis ) tradition in Chinese thought. Mencius, who acknowledged the people as the basis of the state (4A5), advocated benevolent government (renzheng) as the method for bringing peace and order to the world, benefitting the people and setting an example for posterity (4A1). 1 As the solution to political chaos dominated by tyrannical governments (2A1), the method of benevolent government includes not punishing the people harshly or taxing them heavily, but instead taking good care of the people, assuring them of a decent livelihood, educating them, leading them to follow the way taught by Confucius (1A5; 1B5; 3A3). According to Mencius, benevolent government is the only way to ensure that a ruler will have the people s support and loyalty (1A7; 1B11; 1B12).There are many ways in which we may understand and achieve government for the people. For critics of democracy, government by the people is an unlikely if not impossible path to that goal, since the common masses usually lack the knowledge or expertise and are insufficiently virtuous for the job; moreover it is assumed that the few would decide and act more effectively and efficiently than the many. Confucius and his followers during the pre Qin period certainly did not advocate government by the people ; they believed that having exemplary persons (junzi) with ethical characters in power was the crucial guarantor of government for the people. Such ethical exemplars were and probably will always be few in number. 2 However, 1 Unless otherwise stated, translations of the Mencius is from D.C. Lau, Mencius, Chinese Classics: Chinese-English Series (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984); English translation first published by Penguin, 1979. 2 Confucius lamented, I will never get to meet a sage (Sheng ren ) I would be content to meet an exemplary person (junzi ). Analects 7.26, translated by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius (New York: Ballantine, 1998). 1
cynicism is so widespread in today s politics that asking if a government comprises exemplary persons with ethical character probably will elicit only incredulous laughter or sneering cynicism. More often, when people talk about good government now, all they are asking for is effectiveness of government organizations in discharging their functions. This is by no means a simple requirement as the functions of government have become significantly more complex and the problems more difficult to solve over the centuries, so much so that there is a growing literature about societies becoming ungovernable. In Mencius utopia, every household can afford silk and meat for their elderly, who will also be spared any hard labor, no one goes hungry, and everyone is educated to be proper sons and younger brothers (1A3; 1A7; 7A22). The ideal of government for the people today would have to be quite different. How does a country get out of a recession, reduce unemployment, provide affordable healthcare, prevent inequalities and migrations from creating social tensions, educate its next generation, ensure just distribution of resources, deal with its neighbors who might have imperialistic ambitions or no qualms encroaching on its key interests? How should a country balance the people s desire for more wealth with environmental concerns, how does a government persuade the people to give more weight to the latter? These few questions are only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to the problems contemporary governments are expected to solve to satisfy its citizenry. Managing the economy, ensuring justice and protecting public interests, dealing with internal factions and ethnic/class tensions, negotiating the treacherous terrain of international relations, weighing our responsibilities to our own community and global concerns, are tasks requiring considerable knowledge and skills. There is a growing literature about societies becoming ungovernable; even the less pessimistic recognize that the functions of government in the last century have become increasingly complex. Critics of 2
democracy maintain that the average citizens lack not only the expertise required to meet the challenges of governing modern polities but even adequate knowledge and understanding of issues, parties, and politicians to make sensible, let alone wise, electoral choices. Yet, there are also epistemic defense of democracy arguing that popular participation increases epistemic capabilities of democratic governments. Could such epistemic justifications of democracy be convincing to modern Confucians? Does the Analects and the Mencius have anything to contribute to the contemporary discourse about the importance of knowledge in good government and democracy? The Confucian advocacy of government of virtue is well known. Did they therefore ignore questions of knowledge, perhaps because government was a much simpler task then, or are we mistaken in that presumption? Did Confucius and Mencius simplistically assumed that the knowledge and virtue always go together, naïvely mistook the expert for the virtuous, or unrealistically expected the virtuous to be expert enough for anything and everything? Is the same idea of knowledge or at least some kind of equivalent even present in these ancient texts? Or one might turn around and criticize the modern conceptions of knowledge required for government for being too narrowly instrumental and favor the Confucian interest in wisdom as the disposition to deliberate well about the proper ends of human life. Is there such a distinction between knowledge and wisdom in the Analects and the Mencius? Those of us working on Chinese Philosophy who communicate our research results in Chinese always struggle with the problem of translation. *There is no problem translating the words knowledge or wisdom into modern mandarin, but finding their equivalents in ancient Chinese texts is more problematic, even though the relevant Chinese scripts 知 and 智 associated with those two ideas have ancient roots. Where they appear in ancient texts, such as the Analects and the Mencius, highly respected scholars disagree about their translation. Besides variants of wisdom and knowledge; other 3
possible translations include realize, understanding, intelligence, recognition or acknowledgement, appreciate, aware, and foresight, and thought. *In some passages of the Analects and the Mencius, the ethical connotations of 知 and 智 are evident in their objects, which include authoritative conduct, appropriateness, ritual propriety, excellence, worthiness, the sage and the way. In the latter text, the very basis of ethical conduct, the famous four sprouts of good human nature, include 智 besides ren, yi, and li. In these passages, 知 and 智 are usually taken to mean wisdom; if they refer to knowledge, it would be ethical rather than factual or instrumental knowledge. *Not all occurrences of 知 and 智 in these two texts are clearly ethical. Sometimes zhi 4 is used with connotations of being ineffective in or contrary to ethical action and other desirable ends, which prompt translations that avoid wisdom in favor of alternatives, such as clever or cleverness. One reference to those who are zhi 4 is downright uncomplimentary when Mencius complained that he disliked the tortuousness in those people. That this complaint was in the context of theories about nature that only resorted to precedents and had profit or gain (li 利 ) as their basis, and given Mencius presenting of li as a pejorative opposite to ethical notions such as yi, the quality of zhi 4 in this passage seems to be the opposite of what is ethical. Another Mencius passage cites a saying among the people of Qi, to the effect that zhi 4 hui is insufficient for success if one does not make use of the circumstances (2A1). Lau s translation of Mencius 6A9 begins with a question about a king s lack of wisdom but ended with a point about being clever, both wisdom and clever translating the same mandarin term, 智. * Besides ethical objects, other objects of 知 and 智 include a very mixed list including the items that range from the mundane to the profound. Do we take this as evidence that attention is paid to factual and instrumental knowledge? Probably, but it would be misleading to draw any rigid line between the ethical and factual or instrumental. 4
*Take for example, Mencius s statement that the sprout of zhi 4 is the heart of right and wrong (2A6). The tendency is to read right and wrong in ethical terms; but shi and fei have a more general sense of affirming and denying, and therefore may also refer to what is or is not the case in a situation, and need not pertain to what contemporary philosophical discourse considers ethical. So understood, the heart of right and wrong is the capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from falsehood, and therefore refers to knowledge in the sense of true beliefs or empirical claims about the world. Fact and value are inseparable when knowing or assessing people. When Mencius said that he knew five officials in charge of provinces in Qi, it meant that he knew about the way they had discharged their official responsibilities, and perhaps also that he was personally acquainted with them (he definitely met at least one) this is empirical knowledge. However, this was in the context of Mencius informing the ruler of Qi that only one of those officials realized his own fault, which indicates that Mencius zhi 1 was also an ethical assessment. Indeed the empirical knowledge he had gained of the officials was most probably guided and shaped by his intention or tendency to form ethical judgments about them. Appreciation of people often includes recognizing and valuing both ethical characters (de) and nonethical abilities (cai and neng) that make them efficacious in various ways. Ethical assessment and valuing would not be possible without empirical knowledge of that person s behavior. Confucius judged someone s character on the basis of that person s actions. Mencius went beyond observing behavior in his concern about people s motivations and other psychological states in understanding or appreciating people. *Even when treated as an ethical excellence together with ren, 智 does not preclude empirical knowledge, which may enter into action in different forms. Action may be based on false opinions or knowledge, or it may be motivated by appreciation arising from knowledge in the form of direct acquaintance with something. Ethical action, such as choosing to live among those who are benevolent, 5
requires both knowledge of the value of benevolence and knowledge of where and how it is to be found. Knowing about and experience of what is appropriate (ethically or in some other way) may give one zhi 4, but so does knowing about contingent facts, such as what would be the outcome of an action or what actually happened or would happen. Wisdom comes at least in part from knowledge. The Duke of Zhou was accused of lacking in wisdom because he did not know that his brother, Guan Shu would use the power given to him to rebel. Rather than treating wisdom and knowledge as mutually exclusive, overlap and interdependence between them make it more appropriate to think of zhi 1 and zhi 4 as to know and to be wise, or wisdom knowledge. Insofar as the separation of fact from value, and the drawing of boundaries around the domain of the ethical in order to free other domains (be it politics or science) from the dominance of values generally, and ethical values in particular, are modern developments, it is anachronistic to apply those distinctions to ancient texts such as the Analects and the Mencius as if one could be sure whether a passage is about facts or values, about ethics or politics. While a certain anachronism is inevitable in any attempt to read ancient texts in the modern context, especially if one also attempts to find something in the teachings that is relevant to modern problems, one balances this by questioning, and even undermining, the modern distinctions, by applying those distinctions tentatively and pragmatically, and by emphasizing and exploring the relationship between what we have conceptually distinguished, in order to reconstruct contemporary problems and draw on resources from philosophical traditions to solve them. *While empirical knowledge is no doubt relevant to governing effectively, the Analects does emphasize the ethical. For Confucius, exemplary persons, who are the people most fit to govern, need not have many abilities beyond their ethical accomplishments. In some cases, trying to acquire such abilities or knowledge may distract one from the ethical cultivation which is more important for good government. 6
Confucius judged Fan Chi a petty person because the latter wanted to learn farming and horticulture, when Confucius expected his students to focus on ritual propriety (li), appropriate conduct (yi), and making good on their word (xin) in order to serve the people well. Mencius rebutted Xu Xing s view that the ruler should farm and cook his own meals, in defense of a division of labor wherein those who use their mind rule and those who use their muscles are ruled. This may lead readers to think that Confucius and his followers are dismissive of useful crafts and even empirical and technical knowledge; certainly their critics even during Confucius time parodied them as people who do no work and cannot tell one grain from another. More recent attacks continued to depict Confucian scholars as moralistic elitists who shun honest labor yet exploit workers. Prioritizing ethical accomplishments over knowledge and skills that only contribute to material production does not mean dismissing the latter. Confucius disapproval of Fan Chi does not amount to a claim that the two are inherently incompatible, but should be read in the context of Fan Chi being a student who had difficulty understanding Confucius, either because he was not very bright or he did not work hard enough on what Confucius was trying to teach him. Confucius disapproval is targeted at the neglect of ethical concerns; it is not a rejection of non ethical knowledge and skills. To want to learn farming when the failures of governments made it almost impossible for people to support themselves showed an ignorance of priorities that deserved criticism. Confucius himself was known to have many skills which nevertheless did not interfere with his ethical cultivation. However, the need for cooperation in social life and the possibility of division of labor means that not everyone needs to be ethically accomplished and capable in every way in order for a state to be well governed. It is unrealistic to expect all who take up political office to meet that high standard of an exemplary person. *Confucius permitted lesser qualifications for taking political office, such as Zilu s decisiveness, Zigong s understanding, and Ranyou s cultural accomplishments these abilities will not make them great 7
ministers who could serve their lord with the way (dao 道 ), but they are at least good enough to make up the numbers in order to carry out the daily bureaucratic tasks. While some ethical accomplishments would be a consideration for government appointments at any level, knowledge and skills are not unimportant. Besides recognizing and appointing those who are ethically worthy when such people are available, an exemplary person employs others according to their abilities that is, ensure that they are effective instruments. Does this separate the means from the ends by drawing a line between the nonethical and the ethical when we compare the exemplary person s employing others as instruments with the observation that the exemplary person is not a vessel? The conjunction of the two passages might imply that the ethically accomplished exemplars are the ones worthy enough to determine the ends in government while lesser mortals serve them as means to achieve those ends. However, such absolutist and rigid division is unnecessary. Those who are employed as vessels need not be mere instruments insofar as they are not completely without ethical dispositions. Confucius s students might be ordinary ministers and were instruments insofar as they obeyed their lord s order, but even they would stop short of patricide or regicide. Analects 2.12 should not be read as rejecting the suggestion that an exemplary person should be useful in any way; it is rather a caution to use one s own ethical judgment and not allow others to use oneself in unethical ways. This is the basis on which a great minister could serve another as ruler, but would resign if he could not do so in accordance with the way. Among Confucius students, Zigong was the most successful in worldly terms. Yet Confucius noted that his ambition was tempered by ethical accomplishment. Confucius called this student a vessel which might be his way of deflating the implied vanity of Zigong s demand to know what the Master thought of him or a reference to his usefulness in terms of material and official success. Perhaps relenting or in the interest of fairness, Confucius went on to revise that assessment to a most precious and sacred kind of vessel. Comparing Zigong to the sacrificial vessel used in the ancestral hall of the Xia and Shang dynasty, Confucius 8
acknowledged that his material and official success, which required both knowledge and abilities, was not at the expense of his ethical character. One could be useful in serving ethical ends. * When Mencius was asked why he was so delighted at the prospect of Yue Zhengzi taking political office in Lu, he singled out the latter s fondness for the good (haoshan 好善 ), rather than his being widely informed (duo wenshi 多聞識 ) or his thought and foresight (zhilü 知慮 ). Was Mencius dismissing the importance of knowledge about the world and practical realities, be it from experience, observation, communication, or thought, when it comes to good government? He was not denying that Yue Zhengzi s knowledge and skill would make him effective in solving problems and therefore would help him govern well. The reason Mencius emphasized fondness for the good above those in political office having knowledge and skill is itself related to the importance of knowledge to good government. This passage from Mencius 6B13 sounds like an acknowledgement of what is known as the problem of bounded rationality. One person s knowledge is often insufficient to solve complex problems, which have better chance of being solved by pooling the knowledge of many. No matter how experienced, knowledgeable or well informed those in office, their knowledge alone would not be enough for good government. Knowledge of the good that which have ethical value as well as efficacious means to desirable ends (both could be encompassed by shan ) is distributed throughout the population, and those who would seek and invite such knowledge by their fondness for the good would govern better than those who believe themselves to be omniscient. The disposition to care for the people and to act so as to benefit them ren as the basis of government needs to be accompanied by knowledge about the world and the ability to discriminate among a range of possibilities in order to determine which act would benefit the people or what would be the appropriate policy to adopt if a government has the people s welfare in mind. Mencius compared renzheng with the tools of carpentry, compasses and the square, the level and the plumb line 9
invented by the sages (4A1), which suggests that benevolent government consists in a set of actual institutions or guiding practices invented by Former Kings or sages for the purposes of benefiting the people and bringing peace to the world. Governing well would require knowledge of the facts about these institutions and guiding practices, and of how to go about establishing them and making them work. A Confucian government of excellence must also be knowledgeable and skillful in statecraft. *Despite the priority of the ethical in Confucian good government, there are indications that sometimes being ethical may not be enough to do the job. When Mencius accused Zi Chan of not knowing how to govern, he was not questioning Zi Chan s ethical character. He acknowledged the generosity (hui 惠 ) of Zi Chan s act of using his own carriage to ferry people across the rivers. Zi Chan s failure lay in not knowing more effective and efficient ways of helping the people as a whole, and not just random individuals. *While zhi 1 and zhi 4 are valued and needed for good government, there is also textual evidence that Confucius and Mencius considered them inadequate on their own, and inferior when they conflict with other excellences such as ren and li. Analects 15.33 maintains that knowledge alone is inadequate in political life without ren and li. Mencius compared two students learning to play weiqi from Yi Qiu, the renowned weiqi master (6A9). They shared the same lesson and therefore received the same knowledge about weiqi and how to play it; but one concentrates his mind on the game and listens only to what Yi Qiu has to say, while another, though he listens, dreams of an approaching swan and wants to take up his bow and corded arrow to shoot at it. Mencius pointed out that the latter will never be as good at the game because of his inattentiveness and lack of effort in learning, and not because he has less zhi 4. One might take this zhi 4 to refer to the native sprout rather than fully developed wisdom knowledge, or one might also take it to refer to the knowledge being passed on by the weiqi master which, like book knowledge and other second hand knowledge, will remain useless if a student does not make it his own 10
by concentrating his mind to attain it with intention (zhuan xin zhi zhi 專心致志 ). In either case, the difference in the student s weiqi performance is apparently not due to a difference in zhi 4. *Benevolence may be incompatible with certain kinds of knowledge; the lack of such knowledge would be defensible, even desirable. Mencius 5A2 tells a story of Zi Chan, which casts doubt on the latter s zhi 4 because he was deceived by a conniving fish keeper, who equated the lack of zhi 4 with accepting a falsehood instead of knowing the truth. Zi Chan s ignorance about what actually happened might also imply an inadequate disposition to discern truth from falsehood otherwise they would have investigated the situation and perhaps responded differently and hence a lack of wisdom. This failure in knowledge wisdom stemmed from his faith in the good of humanity. One with such faith tends to believe that others would behave appropriately, which may seem credulous or foolish on occasion. In a related passage in the Analects, Confucius s least favorite student presented him with a scenario, which elicited a rebuke from the Master that, an exemplary person can be deceived, but not duped. Exemplary persons can be deceived because they are not omniscient. However, they cannot be led astray by what is not in accordance with the way, implying that their ethical judgment does not fail while their ignorance of contingent facts is excusable if due to benevolence. Mencius conceded that even sages are not infallible or omniscient in the case of the Duke of Zhou sending his brother, Guan Shu, to rule Yin and Guan because he did not know that the latter would rebel (2B9). On this basis, Chen Jia judged the Duke of Zhou to be less than perfect in knowledge wisdom and wanted to use this as an excuse for the King of Qi, who was embarrassed by rebellion in his conquered territory of Yan. To Mencius, the Duke of Zhou s error is fitting (yi 宜 ) because he understandably thought the best of his own brother; his lack of zhi 4 is akin to Zi Chan being duped by the greedy fishkeeper. This is very different from the King s failure in not foreseeing the Yan rebellion against his tyranny, when earlier Mencius had advised him to practice benevolent government if he wished to win 11
the hearts and minds of those he conquered. In the former, zhi 4 was temporarily hampered by ren; in the latter, both are lacking. Moreover, the lack of ren probably caused the lack of zhi 4 in the King of Qi: having no interest in what would benefit the people or what would be the ethical way to govern, he never cultivated the disposition to discern the good and failed to seek knowledge of ethical values, of practical means to govern well, and of the effect of his actions on people. Such failure of knowledge is ethically reprehensible. Fallibility and lack of knowledge could and often do lead to failures in action and undesirable outcomes, in government as much as in personal life, but it is important to fail for the right reasons. In some instances, the lack of wisdom knowledge is defensible, even desirable. The above study of zhi 1 and zhi 4 in the Analects and the Mencius shows that these texts do not subscribe to any hard and fast division between factual knowledge and ethical knowledge or wisdom. Without making an issue of the distinction, they do not deny the necessity of empirical and technical knowledge for effective government, which is implicit in their discussion of good government, even though it remains true that ethical excellence has priority. Without the necessary empirical and technical knowledge, even an ethical government for the people would not be able to deliver what the people need and desire, what would be good for the people, or set up institutions and organize social life so that the people will follow good examples and live ethically. However, empirical and technical knowledge when detached from ethical considerations would be inadequate for Confucian good government. Which kind of empirical and technical knowledge to seek, and how they should be employed, towards which ends, would have to be determined by Confucian ethical values. Though not explicitly discussed, the possibility of certain kinds of knowledge, or knowledge in certain circumstances, being incompatible with ethical excellence such as benevolence is recognized. The acceptance of ethically grounded epistemic fallibility, despite its corresponding practical ineffectiveness, is illuminating. Effectiveness is not everything for Confucians; unless one is heading in the right direction, clearing the path of obstacles would be a waste of time and effort. 12
Neither Confucius nor Mencius assume that those who are ethically excellent benevolent, appropriate in their conduct, observant of ritual, wise and trustworthy would have all the necessary knowledge and skill for effective government. Given human limitations, the need and benefits of cooperation, ethical excellence and knowledge required for good government could be distributed among different individuals, but Confucians would insist that ethical excellence lead the way. This is the import of the texts claim that exemplary persons themselves need not have many abilities but employ others according to their abilities. *To read the early Confucian conception of government by ethical excellence as implying that only a minority with a monopoly on wisdom and knowledge should rule over the ignorant masses pushes one in the direction of an anti democratic interpretation of Confucianism. Analects 8.9 has often been singled out as evidence of the incompatibility between Confucianism and democracy as government by the people. The common people can be induced to travel along the way, but they cannot be induced to realize (zhi 知 ) it. There are various ways of trying to rescue Confucianism from authoritarianism by interpreting this passage in different ways. For example, rather than a charge of ignorance which disqualifies them from political decision making, one could argue that it has to do with how people acquire knowledge of the way, not by being ordered or caused by another to know but by voluntary learning by oneself. Such hermeneutical efforts will be strengthened by the recognition that, while Confucius and Mencius advocated that those with highest ethical accomplishments should govern, they need not be seen as denying participation to others with lesser ethical accomplishments, as well as useful knowledge and skills that would contribute to good government. Mencius 6B13 is interesting in its oblique criticism of the claim that those in power have a monopoly of knowledge or wisdom when it comes to what is good (shan), including what is good for the people. It implies that, instead of employing those who are very knowledgeable but arrogantly uninterested in 13
others views, it is more important to have government officials with proper concerns for those affected by government policies and actions, who will seek in others the appropriate knowledge for addressing those concerns. Mencius 6B3 together with other passages admitting that an exemplary person need not have all knowledge and skills may be read as agreeing with contemporary observation that officeholders, like everyone else, have bounded rationality, which means that our imaginations and calculating abilities are limited and fallible. The modesty and willingness to admit fallibility in Confucian ethical attitudes should render it easier to accept the limited capabilities f ethical governments. If modern Confucians desire government for the people, they would acknowledge that those in office, not being omniscient, need to consult others regarding both goals and means of good government. This may still fall short of democracy if the problem of bounded rationality could be solved by employing a limited number of experts as consultants; political decision making processes would then remain authoritarian, even if more enlightened and effective. Moving beyond authoritarian solutions would require epistemic justification for democracy based on arguments that, compared with an individual decision maker or other undemocratic political decision making process, democratic processes be it voting mechanisms or forms of public deliberation are more likely to yield, if not exactly the right answer, then at least the better answer to the practical questions of politics. If it can be shown that democratic participation, such as some forms of public deliberation at various levels, is required to understand and choose government policies and action that are best for the people, then the Confucian advocacy for good government implies support for such forms of democracy. The strongest resistance to enlisting Confucian support for democracy, of any kind, comes from the belief that an essential tenet in Confucianism is hierarchy of some kind. Even if Confucians recognize that the best government still has to rely on some outside help where knowledge of best outcomes for the people is concerned, if there is no epistemic equality, in that not everyone is equally knowledgeable about government policies and what is needed to achieve government for the people, then there would 14
be no reason to prefer equality in decision making. However, no viable system of government, indeed no form of social life, can require that everyone has equal say in everything. It is not undemocratic that there are areas of decision making and action in which expertise must rule. To value equality is not tantamount to complete rejection of inequality; what it means is to put the burden of justification on inequality. Epistemic defense of democracy does not deny the fact of epistemic inequality, but it rejects the justification of political inequality on the basis of epistemic inequality. Epistemic democracy theorists reject undemocratic epistocracy without denying the relevance of epistemic criteria for democratic decisions. As David Estlund puts it, The moral challenge for any epistemic conception of political authority, then, is to let truth be the guide without illegitimately privileging the opinions of any putative experts. One possible approach is to maintain that there is a plurality of equally legitimate preferences on a wide range of issues requiring collective decision and government action, and everyone knows best what his or her preferences are. Insofar as government for the people aims to satisfy as much of such preferences as possible, everyone affected by any collective decision and political action should be given equal say. However, it could still be argued that few could translate such preferences into choice of policies which would, or representatives who would, cater best to their preferences. It remains an open question whether this problem could be solved by better communication and education. The Analects and the Mencius have nothing to say to the problem of how to aggregate individual preferences into democratically legitimate social choice in a modern polity. It is only to be expected that such ancient texts, written in vastly different times, are of no help when it comes to direct solution of contemporary problems in all their specificities, most of which had not been dreamed of or imagined. To draw inspiration from such texts through philosophical comparison, one identifies specific resemblances in problems of human interaction and pays attention to the different ways in which the problems are approached, understood, and different solutions are recommended. The differences focus our attention 15
on hitherto taken for granted aspects of each and raise questions which open up new possibilities for each. Confronting modern democratic alternatives challenges Confucians to re examine, inter alia, the role of inequality in its philosophy even as democratic theories taking Confucianism seriously should reexamine its understanding of what kinds of equality are viable and desirable, what kind of knowledge matters most, and how success should be understood in good government. The primacy of the ethical in early Confucian thinking about government challenges the tendency in contemporary politics to relegate the ethical mostly to the private realm, and limit public ethics to matters of administrative honesty. Unlike purely proceduralist justifications that ground democratic legitimacy on facts about the procedure, epistemic justification of democracy would appeal more to Confucians as it is based on procedure independent standards that could include ethical criteria. From a Confucian perspective, an epistemic democracy would not simply be a matter of democratic processes that are effective in producing high GDP alone; material prosperity would instead be the basis of achieving goals of ethical living consistent with Confucian way of life. While Confucianism has nothing to contribute in terms of reforming electoral mechanisms, Confucian teachings on appreciating others provides another perspective on democratic processes that focuses critical attention on the criteria of electorate decisions. Citizens in democracies need to ask themselves who they should elect into office. Should they look for those with knowledge in certain areas political scientists, lawyers, economists, engineers, and others holding degrees from well regarded universities and organizational or management skills? Should they assess candidates for political office by the outcome of policies, projects, and actions they have been party to? Should they evaluate policy outcomes by their economic impact on themselves or on the whole country, by their nation s military strength or global image, by the degree of social harmony or global competitiveness? If they learn from Confucianism, democratic citizens would elect those who would listen to their views about what is good for them, set good examples and lead them towards the good without coercing them when they disagree about what 16
constitute the good. The elected need not have all knowledge and skills necessary to achieve the desired outcomes, but they need the knowledge and skill to find those most adept at the task. From the Confucian perspective, reform of democratic systems need to pay attention to the questions of how to get citizens to take the ethical seriously and how to enable them to do this more effectively in exercising their political power. 17