A drawing of Confucius from a seventeenth-century book. The original caption read: “Confucius, The celebrated Chinese philosopher.” From Su shu; The morals of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher. London: Printed for Randal Taylor, 1691. BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY.
Confucian ethics teaches that no fixed and binding rules govern the moral life. Rather, a person must be trained to weigh the relative value of actions in specific situations….