人格尊严的理念：论儒学的重构
The Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Chinese Philosophy: A Reconstruction of Confucianism
张千帆
【摘要】Qianfan Zhang has earned doctoral degrees in Physics (Carnegie-Mellon University, 1989) and in Government (University of Texas at Austin, 1999), and is currently a professor of public law at Nanjing University in P.R. China. He studied physics at Nanjing University before he first came to the United States through Professor T. D. Lee’s CUSPEA program in 1984, and was a postdoctoral fellow at University of California at Santa Cruz during 1990-1992. He then undertook legal studies at University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore until 1995, when he was transferred to UT Austin’s Government program, where he studied moral and political theory. He served as a representative for the Inter-Collegial Program of Social Research sponsored by University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the summer of 1996, and received the Ford Foundation Grant for Asian Studies for a collaborative research project in the summer of 1998. Beginning in 1998 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Economics, Law and Politics of Nanjing Normal University and a research associate at the Public Policy Institute at UT Austin in June 1999. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, American Political Science Association, and American Chinese Philosophical Association, and is now the Chief Editor for Nanjing University Law Review. Professor Zhang is broadly interested in the comparative studies of constitutional jurisprudence, legal and political philosophy, and the moral foundations of liberal democracy and constitutionalism, particularly the relevant enduring values in the classical Chinese thought. He has published a dozen articles and several books on these subjects, including “Constitutionalism and Democracy: The Seperation of Powers and Party Politics in the American Federal Government” (Chinese Social Science Quarterly, 1996), Market Economy and Legal Regulations (Shichang Jingji de Faluu Tiaokong, 1998), The Constitutional Structure of American Government (Meiguo Xianfa yu Zhengfu Jiegou, 2000), and the coming two-volume work, The Western Constitutional Systems (Xifang Xianzheng Tixi). Among other things, he is working on a project examining the relationships between constitutional engineering, social and economic transitions, and the traditional moral values in China.
【全文】
The Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Chinese Philosophy:
A Reconstruction of Confucianism[1]
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
1. Introduction
About fifty years ago, the United Nations appealed to the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of equal and inalienable rights of all members of human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.[2] Except the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany which honored human dignity as its controlling norm,[3] however, the concept of human dignity did not seem to arouse much political attention among nations of the world. While many developing nations were beset by economic hardships and political repression, developed liberal democratic nations were caught by the explosion of various political, economic, and social rights. The United States, for example, was preoccupied with the Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties and with the welfare rights and rights for women in the Seventies. And, despite the conservative turn, the world continued to be inundated with the “rights-talks” in the Eighties. Individual rights in different realms of human life--rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, rights against legal and political discriminations based on race and sex, right to procedural fairness in welfare hearings, right to physical freedom of woman versus potential rights of an unborn life, and so on--seemed to be the only ground that people in liberal democracies were willing to accept as the basis for good life. Yet rights are not self-justifying, and “rights-talks” would remain groundless without some unifying conception of human beings. Although the postwar rights movements did contribute to improving the social, economic, and political status of disadvantaged sections of the population, they shifted the focus of political, legal, and philosophical debates away from the central question about the meaning of human dignity and, without even attempting to answer this question, many invented rights remained unjustified.[4] Recently, however, there seems to be a renewed interest in the idea of human dignity among philosophers and legal scholars. Within the western liberal tradition itself, some philosophers come to treat dignity as the philosophical foundation for the existence of rights.[5] A U.S. Supreme Court Justice even made effort to found the new constitutional rights on the basis of human dignity.[6] The concept of dignity is also used, though implicitly, as a device to reconcile Confucianism, primarily a duty-oriented ethics, with the rights-based modern liberalism.[7]
The recent rise in references to human dignity has hardly contributed to its conceptual clarity, however. The concept, which Dworkin notes rightly as broad and vague,[8] has caused much confusion in literature. It has been used by authors of different convictions to stand for different meanings and with different implicit assumptions, often never made explicit and articulated. It has been employed variously to mean, among other things, the Kantian imperative of treating human being always as the end and never as means only,[9] the “intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles and norms”,[10] the inherent worth belonging equally to all human beings,[11] the actually developed and mutually recognized moral status of a person,[12] the act and the capacity of claiming one’s rights or the self-controlled expression of rights,[13] the right to secure inviolable moral status against degradation and disgrace in the context of the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment in the United States Constitution,[14] self-respect implying respect for others as opposed to purely self-centered esteem,[15] the quality or state of being worthy and esteemed which requires respect for one’s physical or psychological integrity,[16] full realization of human power and rational existence,[17] the existentialist “authentic dignity of man” as found in man’s thrownness into the truth of Being,[18] the universally shared human reality as given by God or the unique value of human being created in the image of God,[19] and the all-embracing Confucian ideal of humanity (Ren) composed of “concentric circles” of the self, the family, the state, human society, and the cosmos.[20] While some of the connotations are vague and unclear in themselves (what is meant by the end as opposed to mere means? what is full realization of human power? etc.), others conflict with one another (e.g., human dignity as intrinsic quality universal to all versus extrinsic characters present only in some human beings). It is perhaps not far-fetched to say that the current discussions of human dignity are mired in the stage of conceptual chaos.
In this paper I seek to clarify the concept of human dignity by introducing the contribution of classical Confucianism to this subject. As I indicate in the title, however, it is a reformulation of the Confucian view, for the concept of human dignity was neither explicitly mentioned in classical Confucian text nor systematically explained by traditional interpretations. I nevertheless argue that it is the most adequate concept for understanding and interpreting Confucianism, which discovered the dignity of man in the innate virtues (De) unique to mankind by which every man and woman is enabled to live a morally decent and materially self-sufficient life. The paper is divided roughly into two parts. After a brief review of the conceptual development in the West, I explain, primarily in the words of Confucius and Mencius, the meaning of human dignity as exemplified by a Confucian gentleman.[21] Next, I shall discuss the connection between the Confucian concept of dignity and the western concepts of rights and duties. Conceding that Confucianism failed to espouse the modern ideas of democracy and liberty, as some might contend,[22] I argue that the idea of human dignity, which is firmly rooted in Confucianism, does contain the potential of receiving new interpretations that can bring about basic compatibility between the Chinese cultural tradition and the prevailing western notion of liberal democracy. While human dignity implies a universal demand for its protection and respect, and thus is primarily a duty-oriented concept, the universal duty imposed on the state and society does confer definable rights to the individual. I argue, indeed, that compared to the Hobbesian theory of natural right, on which the western liberal tradition is founded, the Confucian concept of human dignity can accommodate a more balanced and consistent view of rights and duty.
2. The Concept of Human Dignity in the West: An Overview
Like the notion of individual rights, human dignity is surely a western concept. But in the prevalent rights-oriented ethical discussions today,[23] “human dignity” is not among the terms that are often talked about. And in those academic works that do mention the phrase (even in their titles), it is often left undefined and is used to express moral convictions the authors take for granted to be self-evident.[24] Yet, of course, the concept of human dignity is anything but self-evident. Having comprehensively surveyed the conceptual development in the history of western philosophy, Spiegelberg finds it compelling to conclude that the meaning of “human dignity” remains vague and inconsistent, and the clarification of the concept still poses a “genuine challenge” to contemporary philosophers.[25] To facilitate comparison with the Confucian idea of human dignity discussed below, I provide here a brief account of the conceptual development in the West.[26]
