The Way without crossroads revisited

Abstract

Herbert Fingarette argued that for Confucius the Way is 'a way without crossroads', that is, that a moral agent never genuinely faces a choice between competing ways. This paper mostly defends that claim, though with reference to the Mencius rather than the Analects. Some reformulation is required. Fingarette's conception of what it would be for a way to feature crossroads is (intentionally) bound up with thick concepts of choice and responsibility that derive from western traditions. This makes it unlikely that any early Chinese philosopher conceived of the way as having crossroads in his intended sense. Accordingly, I reformulate the idea in what I hope are less tradition-bound terms. This leads me to focus on three questions. How did the authors of the Mencius conceive of the ostensible ways of their rivals? What did they have to say about hard cases in which norms they endorsed conflict? And what role if any did they give to normative judgment in the moral cultivation of an individual? (This need not be the normative judgment of the individual concerned, it might be the judgment of a teacher or an ancient sage, for example.) I argue that the answers to these questions imply that the authors of the Mencius conceived of their way as a way without crossroads. Most of my time will be spent on the third question, since that turns out to be trickiest. I argue that the authors of the Mencius thought of moral cultivation in such a way that it made sense to ask whether and to what extent an individual was cultivated, but not whether the individual had been cultivated in the right way. This is so even on interpretations (such as my own) that take the Mencius to be advancing relatively modest claims about human nature: even if the spontaneous dispositions of our nature do not do all the work in explaining how we can develop morally, the texts consistently ignore, disavow, or rule out the possibility that our cultivation will be guided by normative judgment.