Confucian Meritocracy and Passive Virtues

Monday, April 1, 2023

12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.

Bunche Hall, Rm 4357

Luncheon served at 11:45 a.m.; talk begins at 12:00 p.m.
NO RSVP needed

Confucian meritocrats argue that moral education should not aim to make people politically active because doing so is not only inconsistent with the underlying assumptions of Confucian virtue ethics, but is likely to make people more adversarial and uncivil. According to Confucian meritocrats, moral education should aim at inculcating a particular set of virtues directly conducive to political meritocracy such as deference, dependence and paternalistic gratitude, or what Sungmoon Kim calls “passive virtues.”

 In this talk, Kim will argue that unless public purposes are set clearly by the people themselves, it is impossible to know ex ante what sorts of character traits are to be considered good. The virtuous circle between active and virtuous citizenship and effective and virtuous political leadership is possible only when the regime is democratic, facilitating the extension of the self to the wider political world predicated on public purposes that bind all to one political community

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Sungmoon Kim is chair and professor of political philosophy, and director of the Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the City University of Hong Kong. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Maryland at College Park and taught previously at the University of Richmond and Yonsei University. His research interests include Confucian democratic and constitutional theory, East Asian political thought and comparative political theory. His essays have appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Constellations, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, Philosophy East and West, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and The Review of Politics among others.

Kim is the author of six books: "Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice" (Cambridge, 2014), "Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia" (Cambridge, 2016), "Democracy after Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy" (Oxford, 2018), "Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi" (Cambridge, 2020), "Im Yunjidang" (Cambridge, 2022), and "Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights and Democracy" (Oxford, 2023). In 2016–2017, Kim was a Berggruen Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, Political Science