Confucian Meritocracy and Passive Virtues

Confucian meritocrats argue that moral education should not aim to make people politically active because doing so is not only inconsistent with the underlying assumptions of Confucian virtue ethics, but it is likely to make people more adversary and uncivil. According to Confucian meritocrats, moral education should aim at inculcating a particular set of virtues that are directly conducive to political meritocracy such as deference, dependence and paternalistic gratitude, or what I call ‘passive virtues’. This paper argues that unless public purposes are set clearly by the people themselves, it is impossible to know ex ante what sorts of character traits are to be considered good. The virtuous circle between active and virtuous citizenship and effective and virtuous political leadership is possible only when the regime is democratic, facilitating the extension of the self to the wider political world predicated on public purposes that bind all to one political community.