Lecture Prof. Roger T. Ames (Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University): Confucian Role Ethics: A Challenge to the Ideology of Individualism

When talking about the Chinese philosophy and culture, we will always recognize the importance of the antique tradition by appeal to familiar categories. Confucian role ethics is an attempt to articulate a sui generis moral philosophy that allows this tradition to have its own voice. This holistic philosophy is grounded in the primacy of relationality, and is a challenge to a foundational liberal individualism that has defined persons as discrete, autonomous, rational, free, and often self-interested agents. Confucian role ethics begins from a relationally constituted conception of person, takes family roles and relations as the entry point for developing moral competence, invokes moral imagination and the growth in relations that it can inspire as the substance of human morality, and entails a human-centered, a-theistic religiousness that stands in sharp contrast to the Abrahamic religions.

The lecturer Roger T. Ames is a Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University, a Berggruen Fellow, and former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He has authored several interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture and has recently been engaged in in writing articles promoting a conversation between American pragmatism and Confucianism.