Life Can’t Be Without Community: The Social Ethics of the Chinese

The communitarianism that emerged in the West in the late twentieth century confronted the individual-centered ethics since the Enlightenment by highlighting the social and interactive character of human ethics and arguing that the individual and his or her “self” are essentially determined by the community to which he or she belongs. In contrast to the previous politics of rights, which emphasized the inalienability of individual rights, proponents of communitarianism emphasized the value of community and family, and often embraced a patriotism based on communal consensus, which is very close to the connotation of “family, state and the world” familiar to ancient Chinese. However, the ideological resources and founding backgrounds of the two are very different, as communitarianism was aimed at the excessive expansion of liberalism based on property rights that has emerged since the seventeenth century, and its argument does not depart from the basic direction of identifying with the value of freedom.