Curie Virag
Kindness as a Virtue in Early Confucian Ethics
The virtue of kindness cuts across a number of terms that
have been of central importance in the Confucian tradition.
While the most obvious counterpart to our modern notion
of kindness (or to the Sanskrit Buddhist term maitrī) might
be a term like en 恩 (kindness, favour, benevolence),
discussions around other values and virtues such as ren 仁
(usually translated as ‘humaneness’ or ‘benevolence’), ai 愛
(love, care, concern) and de 德 (virtue) can also be
appropriately taken as ‘kindness’ depending on the context.
My paper examines the discussions around these terms in
the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius and Xunzi. While it is
uncontroversial that each of these terms represented values
that were important in early Confucian writings, a major
early tension in early Confucian thought was that between
care for one’s own vs. care for everyone else. This being the
case, if kindness entails a kind of universally directed
concern for others, when, and in what ways, can these
foundational Confucian texts be understood as positing an
ideal of kindness? What might we learn about kindness as a
virtue, and about how to nurture and foster kindness, in
light of the ways in which kindness was conceptualised in
the early Confucian tradition?
Curie Virág is Associate Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She works in the
history of ethics, epistemology, moral psychology, and
philosophical anthropology in classical China and across
traditions, with a particular focus on emotions. She is the
author of The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy (Oxford
2017) and co-editor, with Douglas Cairns, of In the Mind, in
the Body, in the World: Emotions in Early China and Ancient Greece
(Oxford 2024). She has published on such topics as pleasure,
contempt, moral agency, practical wisdom, self-cultivation,
and cross-cultural methodology in the study of emotions.
She is currently working on her second monograph,
tentatively titled Emotional Worlds: Self, Community and Cosmos
in Medieval China.