The Idea of Human Dignityin Classical Chinese Philosophy: A Reconstruction of Confucianism Ⅰ
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】
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”.
Except the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany which honored human dignity as its controlling norm,
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.
