China Social Science Review

No.4, 2023

The Generative Differences in Individual Emotions and Social Ethics: Beginning with the Understanding of “Individual” in China and the West

(Abstract)

Qin Pengfei

Using individuals’ form of existence and emotional ability to deduct the problem of social order or moral origin can provide a referential analytical path for discussing the Confucian understanding of social order or social ethics. The Confucian social theory regards the “person in entity,” especially a person in the “father and son” relationship, as the fundamental form of individual existence, and takes the kinship emotion between father and son in the family as the starting point for constructing social ethics. Thanks to deduction and expansion based on the father and son relationship, humans who are born to be different can also form a society with ethical order. In the realm of Confucianism, society is the natural interpretation of individuals’ human nature. This provides us with a generative pathway for universal social ethics unlike the West.