Rethinking Ethics: A Confucian Challenge to Libertarianism

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a talk with Henry Rosemont.

Speaker: Henry Rosemont, Jr., Religious Studies, Brown University

Central to the moral (and political) arguments of libertarians are the grounding concepts of human beings as free and rational individuals. There have been numerous attempts by both liberals and conservatives to rebut the libertarian position, but because all of those attempted rebuttals are also grounded in the same concepts, they have not been successful in the past, and there is no good reason to think they will be any more so in thee future, because the libertarian position is but the logical extension of those concepts in the moral realm.It is also a reasonable, consistent and coherent position Thus everyone unhappy with libertarianism must seek new (or very old) grounding concepts of what it is to be a human being if they are to successfully combat it philosophically. Confucius offers an alternative grounding.