20th WCP: The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care for Aged Parents
Comparative Philosophy
The Confucian Filial Obligation and Care for Aged Parents
James Wang
Jwang@okway.okstate.edu
ABSTRACT: Some moral philosophers in the West (e.g., Norman Daniels and
Jane English) hold that adult children have no more moral
obligation to support their elderly parents than does any other
person in the society, no matter how much sacrifice their
parents made for them or what misery their parents are presently
suffering. This is because children do not ask to be brought
into the world or to be adopted. Therefore, there is a
"basic asymmetry between parental and the filial
obligations." I argue against the Daniels/English thesis by
employing the traditional Confucian view of the nature of filial
obligation. On the basis of a distinction between 'moral
duty' and 'moral responsibility' and the
Confucian concept of justice, I argue that the filial obligation
of adult children to care respectfully for their aged parents is
not necessarily self-imposed. I conclude that due to the
naturalistic character of the family, the nature of our familial
obligations (such as parental caring for young children and
adult children's respectful caring for aged parents)
cannot be consensual, contractarian and voluntarist, but instead
existential, communal and historical.
Some moral philosophers in the West hold that adult children do
not have any more moral obligation to support their elderly parents
than does any other person in the society, no matter how much
sacrifice their parents made for them in the past or what kinds of
misery their parents are presently suffering. This is so, they
claim, because children do not ask to be brought into this world or
to be adopted. Thus, the traditional filial obligation of supporting
and taking care of the aged is left as either the private
responsibility of the elderly themselves or as a societal burden on
the public. (1) For example, Norman Daniels argues that there is a
"basic asymmetry between parental and the filial
obligations" (Daniels, 1988, p.29). The parental obligation of
caring for their young children, says Daniels, is a
"self-imposed" duty, while the so-called children's
obligation of caring for their aged parents is
"non-self-imposed" and thus cannot be morally required. (2) In
her famous essay, "What Do Grown Children Owe Their
Parents," Jane English also claims that a favor done without it
being requested or a voluntary sacrifice of one for another can only
create "a friendly gesture" (Sommers & Sommers, 1993,
pp. 758-765). It incurs neither an "owing" nor a moral
obligation to reciprocate. Accordingly, "a filial obligation
would only arise," says English, "from whatever love (s)he
[the adult child] may still feel for them [her parents]." (3) The
moral obligation stops whenever the friendship relation ends.
Because we cannot always assume a friendship relation exists between
a parent and his/her children, filial obligation is not a genuine
moral obligation at all.
In what follows I shall argue against the Daniels/English thesis
in light of the traditional Eastern Confucian view of the nature of
filial obligation. I shall make a distinction between "moral
duty" and "moral responsibility" and argue that adult
children's filial obligation of taking care of and being respectful
to their aged parents should not be understood as a moral
responsibility but as a moral duty, which is, by its nature, not
necessarily self-imposed. That is to say, it is not consensual,
contractarian, and voluntarist but existential, communal, and
historical.
I. Consent and Moral Obligation
We may find a basic thesis that underline the Daniels/English
rejection of adult children's moral obligation of taking respectful
care for their aged parents. It claims that filial obligation, if it
is to be a moral obligation, should be based on the voluntary
consent of all moral agents involved. (4) Obviously, the thesis
expresses a meta-ethical principle which underlies not only
Daniels/English argument but also some major accounts of the nature
of moral obligation in the modern West. I call it the
"principle of intentional consent." "Consent" is
required because a moral action ought to be approved of by all the
persons involved in the action. It is "intentional"
because an agreement or an approval ought to be reached voluntarily
and without any kind of outside coercion or deceit. Very clearly,
this principle gets its power from Kant's concept of a person as
potentially an autonomous, rational, and free agent. (5) That is to say,
intentional consent is simply an exercise of one's autonomy and
rationality. Therefore, as a free, rational, and autonomous moral
agent, I am morally responsible only for the consequences of those
actions which I have committed voluntarily, without any coercion and
deceit. Otherwise I will not see myself behaving as a free and
autonomous being. Living in modern society, it seems that few people
can really deny the importance of the principle of intentional
consent and that of the concept of autonomy in our consideration of
the nature of morality. However, is it the absolute and exclusive
grounding of morality? That is to ask, is there any limitation of
that principle in our moral practice, especially when we consider
filial morality in dealing with the relationship between adult
children and their aged parents?
Let me try to answer the question by looking at the following
example. When Fred, a strong man and a good swimmer, (6) went by a
swimming pool on his way home, he found a three year old child
Sheila was drowning in a swimming pool with another young child John
crying nearby. Does Fred have any moral obligation to jump into the
pool to save Sheila? Most of us, I believe, would say
"yes" according to our common moral sense. But what
interests us in this example is not whether Fred ought to save
Sheila but why Fred ought to try to save her. Obviously, Fred
neither made a promise nor gave consent to a request from Sheila's
parents or Sheila herself to save Sheila when she is in danger.
However, not giving consent does not sufficiently exempt Fred from
his moral obligation to save Sheila in such a situation. To me, what
makes Fred morally obligated in this case is the existential or
factical "being" of Fred, Sheila, and John rather than
Fred's intentional consent that is crucial in Fred's moral
obligation to try to save Sheila. (7) Similar examples in our
contemporary social and moral life can also be found in the cases
such as the moral obligation of the present generation of human
beings to protect the ecological environment and to preserve some of
the natural resources for future generations, a citizen's obligation
to defend her home country, a patient's obligation not to have
physical contact with healthy persons if she knows that she has an
infectious disease, etc. All of these demonstrate that at least some
of our commonly and ordinarily accepted and practiced moral
obligations can be justified without being preconditioned by the
mutual consent of the moral agents involved in the action. That is
to say, they are, pace Daniels, "asymmetrical" rather than
"symmetrical."
In order to make the point clearer, I would like to call an
attention to the nature of our understanding of "ought" or
"moral obligation." When we say "A ought (not) to do
X," or "A is obligated (not) to do X," it seems to me
that we often have a confusion between two types of
"ought/obligation." (8) One type of
"ought/obligation" is caused solely by the intentional
consent of competent moral agents involved in the action, and I call
this moral responsibility. (9) That is to say,
a competent moral agent should be morally responsible for the
consequences caused by her consensual action. Compared with moral
responsibility, moral duty is another type of "ought/obligation." It does
not necessarily depend on the competent moral agent's intentional
consent. It is rather determined mainly by what kind of existential
situation a moral agent is in and what kind of social role she
plays. For example, a normal and healthy person is obligated to
yield to a handicapped person because the latter is handicapped.
Similarly, a hostess is obligated to show her hospitality to her
guests while a stranger is not.
Someone may argue that although many of our moral obligations are
determined by different existential situations and social roles we
play, we do often consent to be in those situations and to play
those social roles in the first place. My response to this argument
is, first, we do not always choose our existential situations or
social roles. Many times we are thrown into a situation and many
social roles are imposed on us without our previous consent. Second,
although many times a moral agent does theoretically have an option
to play or not to play a specific social role, such an option may
not always be practical and therefore not real. Third, consenting to
do something and being obligated to do something are not always the
same. Therefore, in many cases, I consent to do something because I
ought to do it, rather than it being the case that I ought to do it
because I have consented to do it.
Thus understood, moral responsibility and moral duty are two
types of moral obligation. They are different and the distinction
between them should not be confused. The difference, as I have
argued above, consists in that the former is caused exclusively by
the intentional consent of the moral agent while the latter is not.
However, they are not completely irrelevant to each other. Moral
responsibility may be seen as a special type of moral duty. That is
to say, moral responsibility is a particular moral duty of a moral
agent when she behaves as an autonomous being or when she practices
her autonomy in her consensual actions. However, a human being as a
moral agent is not only an individual autonomous being. A person is
also a social and communal being, which imposes on her duties for
caring for others as well as for her surrounding ecological
environment, and a rational being, which makes her obligated to
calculate the consequential implications of her consensual action
before she consents to it. Furthermore she is also a historical and
cultural being, a concrete and situational being, etc. All of these
essential features of a human being have created or revealed
different types of moral duties that human beings as moral agents
have. Therefore, an appropriate moral evaluation or moral judgement
of a person's action should be based on or determined by weighing
these moral duties of the person in her existential situation
against one another.
In light of the distinction between the two kinds of moral
obligation, i.e., moral responsibility and moral duty, it becomes
clear that the filial obligation of adult children to take care of
their aged parents belongs to the category of moral duty, which, by
its nature, is existential rather than consensual. It is so because
the family, which defines the adult children's filial obligation to
their aged parents, is basically a natural community rather than a
social contractarian community. As long as the natural family is
still one of the basic forms of our social and communal life, the
parental and filial obligations between parents and children will
exist. Therefore, being a son or a daughter of one's parents, one is
obligated or has a duty to respect them as parents and to take care
of them if they necessary, no matter whether one chose to be the son
or the daughter of one's parents.
II. A Confucian Concept of Justice
We may see the existential nature of adult children's filial duty
to take respectful care of their aged parents much clearer in the
Eastern Confucian moral tradition. It is well known that
Confucianism in general can be seen as a theoretical expression and
a systematic justification of traditional family values in ancient
China (Fung, 1948, p.21). Xiao (filial piety), which
primarily defines children's moral duty to their parents, has been
understood in the 2500 year long Confucian tradition as the
"root" of morality (Analects, 1:2). (10) It is, in Max
Weber's words, "the absolutely primary virtue" which
"in case of conflict, ... preceded all other virtues" in
China (Weber, 1951, p.157).
Confucius' emphasis on "xiao," as adult
children's taking respectful care for their aged parents, had a
tremendous influence in shaping the Chinese understanding of the
nature of morality. On the one hand, taking good care of one's
parents is often seen as a cardinal virtue of a moral person (jun
zi) and constitutive of being a good citizen. On the other hand,
that all the parents and the elderly received good care from their
children in the last years of their lives is taken in Chinese
tradition as proof of a good society and a good government. Because
of this, Mencius, the second important figure in Confucianism, said
that in a good society "a son and a younger brother should be
taught their obligation of taking good care of their aged parents.
The people with grey hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the
street" (Mencius, 1A:7). Otherwise it would be a matter
of shame for the children of those elderly persons as well as for
the government.
This Confucian tradition of seeing one's taking good care of
one's aged parents as a moral duty has been not only reflected in
the Chinese moral life but also in the practice of the Chinese laws
from the beginning. For example, according to the Chinese Marriage
Law, adult children's moral duty of taking respectful care of their
aged parents is defined as:
Children have an obligation to support and to assist their
parents..... When children fail in such duty, parents who cannot
work or have difficulty with their living have a right to demand
alimony from their children. (11)
Obviously, taking respectful care of one's aged parents is one of
the most important moral duties of an adult child in Confucian China
as well as in all East Asian societies. However, when we compare the
arguments used by the western liberals and those used by Confucians
on this issue, we may find that their arguments are grounded in
different concept of justice.
The Confucian concept of justice is called"yi,"
which is also translated as righteousness. Traditionally, Confucians
defined the meaning of "yi" from the interactive
relations between my "personal self" (wo) and my
surrounding social, historical, and natural communities
(qun). For example, Dong Zhong Shu (c.179 - c.104 B.C.E.),
the most famous Confucian scholar in the Han Dynasty, defined
"yi" as follows:
Yi means yi* (appropriation) to one's own person. Only
once one is appropriate to his own person can this be called
yi (righteousness). Thus, the expression yi combines
the notions of "appropriateness" (yi*) and
"personal self" (wo ) in one term. If we hold on to
this insight, yi as an expression refers to personal self.
Thus it is said that to realize yi in one's actions is called
attaining it in oneself (zi de); to neglect yi in
one's actions is called self-negligence (zi
shi). (12)
According to Dong and other Confucians during the time,
yi should be defined in term of its homophone, yi*, which
means "right, proper, appropriate, suitable." In both
classical and modern Chinese, the word yi* refers often to
one's making oneself over to become appropriate to one's surrounding
environments, e.g., one's familial, social, and natural communities.
It refers also to making one's surrounding environments appropriate
for one's self-attainment or self-accomplishment. Therefore, this
Confucian interpretation of yi in terms of yi*
indicates an interplay or a dialectical interaction between yi
and yi*, between the personal self and its contextual and
communal environments out of which an individual person reaches her
identity, realization, and accomplishment. (13) Based on this conception
of
yi as justice and righteousness and as the interplay
between individual self and her surrounding communities, Confucians
think that fulfilling one's obligations, such as being a lovely
parent and taking good care of his/her young children, and/or being
a filial son/daughter by taking respectful care of his/her parents
when the parents are old, is simply part of the way of
self-realization and of self-accomplishment. Failure to do this will
be called "bu yi" (non-righteousness). Our natural
and innermost moral feelings of "xiu" (shame) and
"wu" (dislike), according to Confucians, are simply
signals of both internal and social disapproval of these
non-righteous actions, and thus marks the beginning of the
development of righteousness and justice. (14) On the other hand, the
interplay between yi and yi* not only asks a yielding
or a sacrifice of my personal self to my environmental communities
in the way of appropriation, it also affirms my uniqueness in such
an appropriation. That not only includes my duties but also my
privileges and rights, which are due to my specific situation in my
surrounding communities. Thus understood, the Confucian concepts of
social justice and righteousness are not against the idea of
equality and fairness among the members of the society. It is rather
an affirmation of it if we consider it within a larger social and
historical context.
Some Westerners claimed that adult children's moral duty to take
respectful care of their aged parents may be seen as an unfair
request for the younger generation to make sacrifices for the
well-being of the older generation (Daniels, 1988, pp.4-6). But if
we, as a Confucian often does, take human life as an organic and
dynamic process of birth, growing, flourishing, declining and dying,
then the rationale behind the Confucian concept of filial obligation
will become clearer. Nothing seems more natural and fair than,
having received care from our parents when we were young,
reciprocating this care by taking care of our parents when they are
old. (15) Therefore, the charge of unfairness and inequality of Confucian
filiality can only make sense on the assumption that the individuals
in our social and communal life must be seen as undifferentiated,
colorless, and isolated social atoms. But for a Confucian this
assumption itself is questionable and unaccepted.
III. Conclusion: Xiao as a Virtue for Today
As we know, the family was a basic social, economic and cultural
unit of the society in China. It played a fundamental role in
regulating and stabilizing Chinese social and political life in the
past, and it continues to play an important role today. Family is
ideally the first school of virtue, and parents are often the first
teachers of their children. The values we learn from our family
life, according to Confucians, will also make possible a good
society. That is to say, we first learn how to deal with other
people in society from watching our parents deal with each other,
with our grandparents, and with us. (16) Therefore, it is very hard to
imagine that a person who is devoid of caring, or unwilling to care
for, her own family members can be a good citizen who will care for
other people in the society. This is why in the Confucian tradition
"xiao" (filial piety) was understood as the
"root" of humanity and morality. (17)
It should be noted here that "xiao" was often
used to justify and support the totalitarian and oppressive
structure of the traditional patrilinear family and society. It is
no doubt a fact that xiao played a very conservative
political role in the past. However, when scholars point out that
there was a historical connection between the kinship of the
patrilinear family and the kingship of the totalitarian state (e.g.,
Schwartz, 1985, pp. 67-75, Roetz , 1993), they often neglect the
fact that the care/love relation within a family is more natural and
more primordial, and that the care/love relation between parents and
children may not necessarily include patrilinear power and
oppression. In today's society, for example, old age is not always
associated with totalitarian political power. In many cases,
especially in the case of health care for the elderly, old people
are often disadvantaged and powerless. Considering this fact, a
Confucian would argue that advocating xiao as taking
respectful care of parents and adopting it as a moral duty of adult
children will not only increase the happiness and security of our
aged parents in their later years, but will also make members in our
society care more for each other, especially for those who are
disadvantaged.
Taking care of the aged generation has always been a social
problem for civilized societies. The question is therefore not
whether the elderly should be taken care of, but who should take
care of them? There are few doubts that one has a moral duty to take
care of oneself. But if a person has lost the ability to take care
of herself, either due to old age, or to disease associated with old
age, who, if anyone, has a moral obligation to take care of her? If
Daniels and English are right in saying that adult children do not
have any more of a moral obligation to take care of their aged
parents than any stranger on the street, or that such an obligation
only has a voluntary basis, then most likely either the burden of
care would be on the whole society or the elderly who are
disadvantaged would suffer. If letting the elderly suffer is
immoral, then placing the burden of caring for the elderly on the
whole society (through the government) would seem to be the only
option.
However, there are at least two further questions here. First,
should the society have that burden? Second, can the society or the
government really provide adequate care for the elderly? If I, as a
son, do not have a moral duty to take care of my parents, why should
I, as a stranger, have a moral duty to take care of anyone else'
parents? Is the moral duty of helping a stranger based on my
voluntary free will or on my existential status as a human being? If
my existential status as a fellow human being imposes on me such a
moral duty, why not my existential status as the son of my parents?
On the other hand, the warning signals continually coming from the
government-run Medicare system, as well as the Social Security
system in the Unite States indicate that the society may not be able
to bear the burden anymore without threatening the bankruptcy of the
whole government. From a Confucian point of view, at least part of
the problem is caused by the trend of deterioration of the family or
individualization of the society in our modern life. The family, as
a natural institution, should play a mediating role between
individuals and society. That is to say, Confucians will deny
neither the existential moral duty of the elderly to care for
themselves, nor that of members in the society to care for the
elderly. What a Confucian wants to suggest is the addition of the
familial duty fulfilled by the adult children. All three kinds of
moral duties, i.e., the individual, the social, and the familial,
need to work together in order to strive towards the Confucian
social ideal of "da tong" (the Great Harmony)
where
...... [t]he elders having a happy ending, the youths having
enough businesses to do, the young children having been well
nurtured, and all the old men without wives, old women without
husbands, old people without children, young children without
parents having been taken good care of. (18)
Notes
(1) For example, Norman Daniels told us that "In 1983
we spent ... $217 billion or $7,700 per elderly person"
(Daniels, 1988, p.5).
(2) In his "Obedience and Illusion," Michael
Slote expresses a similar idea. According to Slote, it is
"difficult to believe that one has a duty to show gratitude for
benefits one has not requested" in O'Neill & Ruddick
(1979), p.320.
(3) See Jane English, "What Do Grown Children Owe
Their Parents?" in Sommers and Sommers (1993), p.763.
(4) For example, Daniels says:"Children did not ask to
be brought into existence" (Daniels, p.29), and calls the
traditional filial relation "not self-imposed." Because of
that, "we remain without compelling foundations for filial
obligations, ..." (Daniels, p.34). English, though criticizing
the traditional understanding of the nature of filial relation as
being "reciprocal," defines filial relation as a relation
of friendship. According to her, a filial relation without a
friendship, which assumes mutual consent, does not endow any moral
obligation. In English's words, "The relationship between
children and their parents should be one of friendship characterized
by mutuality rather than one of reciprocal favors" (Sommers and
Sommers, p.762), and "After a friendship ends, the duties of
friendship end" (Sommers and Sommers, p.761).
(5) This idea can be traced back to Aristotle. According to
Aristotle, a moral praise or blame should be based on whether an
individual moral agent behaves "voluntarily or
"involuntarily." "Being voluntary," Aristotle
held, means that (1) an individual is internally motivated rather
than externally compelled to act; (2) the action may not be not a
result of ignorance or deceit. See Aristotle, 1110a5 - 1114b15.
(6) Ironically, a similar example of a good swimmer can be
also found in Daniels. However, Daniels calls it
"supererogatory" rather than "obligatory"
(Daniels, p.33).
(7) The words "existential" and
"factical" should be distinguished from those of
"intentional" and "factual." I use them in
Heidegger's sense, which is based on his theory of Dasein as
"being-in-the-world-with-others." As for Heidegger's
concepts of "existence" and "facticity," see
Heidegger, (1962), pp.78-86; 235-241.
(8) In his A Theory of Justice, John Rawls makes a
careful distinction between "obligation" and "natural
duty." According to Rawls, both "obligations" and
"natural duties" are moral requirements. Their main
distinction consists in the following three aspects: (1) obligations
"arise as a result of our voluntary acts" while natural
duties "apply to us without regard to our voluntary acts";
(2) "the content of obligations is always defined by an
institution or practice the rules of which specify what it is that
one is required to do" while natural duties "have no
necessary connection with institutions or social practices; their
content is not, in general, defined by the rules of these
arrangements"; (3) "obligations are normally owed to
definite individuals, namely, those who are cooperating together to
maintain the arrangement in question" while natural duties
"hold between persons irrespective of their institutional
relationships; they obtain between all as equal moral persons"
(Rawls, p.113; p.115). On the one hand, I agree with Rawls in saying
that one moral requirement arises from voluntary acts while the
other does not, although I don't want to use the word
"obligation" exclusively for those moral requirements
based on voluntary acts. In many cases, as we know,
"obligation" and "duty" mean the same in our
ordinary use of English. For example, we see this in sentences such
as "Citizens have an obligation to observe the laws of their
country;" or "Mentally gifted people are under an
obligation to develop their capacities." Therefore, I use
"moral responsibility" for those moral requirements cause
by voluntary acts, "moral duty" for those which are not
connected with the voluntary acts, and "moral obligation"
for both. On the other hand, I don't agree with Rawls when he says
that the content of duties has "no necessary connection with
institutions or social practice." Maybe he thinks that all
social institutions, by their nature, have a voluntary or
contractarian grounds. But we know that not all institutions or
social practices, e.g., the family, are based on contractarian
grounding. They are naturalistic social institutions. Because of
that, at least some of our moral duties arise from the status we
have or roles we play in a naturalistic social institution. It
should also be noticed that Norman Daniels, following Rawls,
mentions the distinction between the "natural duties" and
the "moral obligations" (Daniels, p.29). However, it seems
to me that he then quickly claims without a justification that a
parental duty to children and an adult child's duty to parents
belong to the category of "moral obligation," or in my
term, "moral responsibility," rather than to that of
"moral duty."
(9) In his Punishment and Responsibility, H.L.A.
Hart distinguishes four senses of responsibility, which are (1)
Role-Responsibility; (2) Causal-Responsibility; (3)
Liability-Responsibility; and (4) Capacity-Responsibility. However,
Hart's discussion of the moral sense of all the four types of
responsibility and his distinction between legal responsibility and
moral responsibility in his discussion indicate that the intentional
and voluntary consent of individuals should be the sole moral basis
of all the four types of responsibility. See Hart, (1968),
pp.210-230.
(10) As for English translations of the Analects,
see Lau, D.C. (1979) or Waley, A. (1989).
(11) The Chinese Marriage Law, Section 3, Article 15. I use
the translation of Li Chenyang.
(12) See Dong Zhong Shu, Chun Qiu Fan Lu, 8/8b; I
use Hall and Ames' translation here. See Hall and Ames (1987),
p.92.
(13) My understanding of the dialectical interplay between
"yi" and "yi*" benefits from Hall
and Ames' insightful interpretation. This interplay, according to
Hall and Ames, can be seen in that "whereas
yi denotes
appropriateness to one's own person, yi* refers to
appropriateness to one's context. Yi is the active and
contributory integrating of self with circumstances, where the self
originates unique activity and construes itself on its own term in a
naval and creative way. ... The character yi, on the other
hand, denotes the yielding or giving up of oneself and
'appropriating' meaning from the context or circumstances" (See
Hall & Ames, 1987, p.98 and pp.348-349, no.51).
(14) For example, Mencius said,"The felling of shame
and dislike is the beginning of righteousness" (Mencius,
3A:5).
(15) Here it is nothing to do with "owing" or
"paying debts," as we found in Jane English (Sommers and
Sommers, 1993). According to Confucians, life should be seen as a
flux. My parents may be seen as my life in the past and my children
my life in the future. Just like it would be ridiculous to say that
my hands, in providing food to my stomach, are "paying
debts" to the latter because it helped to keep the hands alive,
it is misleading to talk about "owing debts" between
parents and children. Therefore, the difference between English and
a Confucian on filial obligation does not consist in the
"owing/non-owing" relation, but in that the former
understands the filial obligation as a causal relation while the
latter understands it as an existential relation.
(16) There is an ancient Chinese story which is very
popular among Chinese. Once upon a time, there was a family of a
grandfather, a father, and a son. The father did not take a good
care of the Grandpa. When the Grandpa died, the father was so stingy
that he took the Grandpa's dead body out with a broken basket. When
the young boy saw it, he told his father:" Dad, please don't
forget to bring the basket back. It is still useful." The
stingy father was very happy to hear what his little son said. Then
he asked his son what he would use it for. His son answered:"I
will re-use it when you die."
(17) For example, we can read in the Analects 1:2
that "Few of those who are filial sons and respectful brothers
will show disrespect to superiors, and there has never been a man
who is not disrespectful to superiors and yet creates disorder. A
superior man is devoted to the fundamentals (the root). When the
root is firmly established, the dao will grow. Filial piety
and brotherly respect are the root of humanity
(ren).
(18) Da Tong /Li Yun; also see Mencius,
1B:5
Bibliography
Aristotle: 1985, Nichomachean Ethics, T. Irwin (trans.),
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