Abstract

Both Nicomachean Ethics and the ethics of Confucius reveal the centrality of virtues in moral practice. Virtues are achieved through cultivated habituation of emotions or feelings, and they are conducive to making moral decisions. According to the two classical schools of ethics, feeling-emotion and moral reason are internally connected . What makes them further similar is that both Aristotle and Confucius have their own formulations of ‘Doctrine of Mean’ but with the same claim that right moral decision is one appropriate to what the circumstance requires. Plain as the principle is, it is ‘indeterminate’ because circumstances vary largely from one case to another and no prior set rules can be solicited for hitting the ‘mean’. A right choice fulfilling the mean is in each case context-dependent and mostly unpredictable. Yet, no matter how ‘indeterminate’ a right choice is, the virtuous capability of hitting the mean can be surely enhanced through habituation and cultivation. Unlike the ‘indeterminate’ nature of hitting the ‘mean’ in actions, cultivation of virtues has a rather ‘determinate’ track to run on. The practice of ‘mean’ is always engaged against a social-cultural background with ‘determinate’ set of moral norms and values. Unlike modern ethics that deal solely with the question of what the right thing to do is, the moral concern of classical ethics is more complex. We shall see that the moral practice of classical ethics is composed of interconnected practical moments directing towards the pursuit of good life, and the essence of which involves achieving ‘mean’ in daily practice. Regarding the complexity, I would like to propose the ‘Determinate-Indeterminate Principle of moral decisions’ to explain the essential features of the ‘Doctrine of Mean’ in classical ethics. The method of comparison to illuminate the ‘Determinate-Indeterminate Principle’ is named ‘comparative-reconstructive’. The ‘comparative’ side of the method involves making manifest the similarities of the major concepts shared between the two schools, and then holding them in contrast with the teachings of modern ethics. The ‘reconstructive’ side of the method involves re-structuring the compared concepts towards the ‘Determinate-Indeterminate Principle’ so that the similarities of the two classical schools of ethical thought can be viewed from a new light. In other words, while the ‘comparative’ task grasps upon both the similarities within the two classical schools and dissimilarities between the classical and modern ethics, the ‘reconstructive’ task undertakes to further re-construct the similarities into commonalities captured through the explication of the ‘Determinate-Indeterminate Principle’. Thus, the ‘comparative-reconstructive’ method intends to fathom both the breadth as well as an illuminating depth of the topic