Kim
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 5817 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kim |
| APELLIDO | Kim |
| FIRMA | KIM |
| AFILIACIONES | City University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2291-5896 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 79 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 426 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 78 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1971 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Confucians Don’t Want to Live in a Small World
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State-of-the-Field Essay
Can contemporary Confucian political theory contribute to both a culturally relevant and politically practicable public philosophy for East Asian societies, while simultaneously providing a model of comparative political theory that aspires to deprovincialize the West? This state-of-the-field essay examines how contemporary Confucian political theory has evolved in the past two decades in Anglophone academia, what challenges are posed to its furt…
A Symposium on Sungmoon Kim’s Confucian Constitutionalism
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Mitigating “othering” through intercultural development initiatives in higher education
This mixed-methods study examines the impact of intercultural development initiatives implemented by a college-wide council at a Midwestern university. The research explores how these initiatives influence faculty and staff cultural competencies and address “othering,” defined as the marginalization and exclusion of certain groups. Using concurrent quantitative and qualitative survey methods, the study assesses faculty and staff perceptions of th…
Two models of character education in East Asia
This paper argues that the conventional association between Confucian character education and conformism and indoctrination results from the failure to distinguish between the Confucian reflection model and the Legalist indoctrination model. Though both models of Chinese character education aim to build and maintain a well-ordered society, there are significant differences between the two in terms of nature, method, and purpose of character-build…
Truth, diversity, and Confucian epistemic democracy
Political Self-Cultivation for Humane Government
As ardent followers of Mencius and Zhu Xi, virtually all Korean Neo-Confucians during the Chosŏn dynasty rejected the Way of the Hegemon by understanding it as directly opposed to the Kingly Way, a humane government allegedly conducted by ancient sage-kings. However, Yi I 珥 (1536–1584), a prominent Neo-Confucian scholar-official in sixteenth-century Korea, endorsed the Way of the Hegemon as compatible with the Kingly Way by reconceptualizing it, …
A mediocre ruler must rule
This article explores Han Fei’s political theory of rulership by taking a cue from his observation that most rulers are mediocre in their talent or skill. Through various analogies, Han Fei creates the image of a ruler as a paranoid man whose unique political life, defined by the possession of supreme power, puts him in a life of constant fear of usurpation and regicide. While urging the ruler to maintain absolute isolation and complete emotional…
Succeeding the Mandate of Heaven
One of the most puzzling problems in Confucianism is how to justify hereditary kingship in Confucian terms. This paper investigates this puzzle—the succession of the Mandate of Heaven—by focusing on Byeon Gyeryang (1369–1430), a Korean Neo-Confucian thinker who grappled with the question of political authority and legitimacy in the formative stage of the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910). It argues that Byeon advocated the “ownership conception” of poli…
Linking Community Characteristics to Performance in Fisheries Co-Management and Community-Based Management
Political Meritocracy for Responsibility
The political theory of political meritocracy generally focuses on the political elites’ moral and epistemic ability to make a public decision that is conducive to the people’s long-term interests. Understanding political legitimacy chiefly in terms of the government’s good performance, therefore, advocates of political meritocracy stipulate a general causal relation between the political leaders’ superior virtue and good public outcomes. This pa…
Confucian Constitutionalism
This book aims to present a constitutional theory of democratic self-government that is normatively appealing and politically practicable in East Asia’s historically Confucian societies that are increasingly pluralist, multicultural, and rights sensitive—namely, Confucian democratic constitutionalism. Inspired by early twentieth-century Confucian constitutionalists such as Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming who explored the Chinese people’s self-gove…
Disaster, Heaven, and Political Responsibility
This paper investigates the Confucian conception of political responsibility as a political virtue essential for an ordinary non-Confucian ruler's actualization of humane government by paying close attention to the early Confucian discourses of Heaven and disaster. After briefly discussing Confucius's seminal idea of responsibility, this paper shows how Mencius developed the political conception of responsibility, as a noncausal responsibility sh…
The infinite unleashed
This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s politico-theological conception of time (the messianic time) against the background of the mechanical philosophy which the Copernican turn brought about. My argument is that the messianic time which intervenes in the mechanical, ‘homogenous, empty time’ shares the formal logic of the divine which intervenes in the Newtonian mathematical space–time via the differential as the non-all (not universal). Newton fo…
Making peace with the barbarians
This article investigates the Neo-Confucian discourse on war, premised on the “Chinese versus barbarian” binary, and its impact on the Neo-Confucian scholar-officials of 17th-century Chosŏn Korea. It shows that Korean Neo-Confucians suffered invasions from the Jurchens, who they regarded as “barbarians,” and that the political debate on how to respond to the “barbarians” drove the advocates of the pro-peace argument to reimagine Chosŏn’s statehoo…
Why Confucian Meritocrats Must Be Democrats
The Violence of the Benevolent Ruler
In the past two decades, scholars in China and beyond have vigorously demonstrated that the just war discourse is integral to classical Confucianism and that the classical Confucian idea of "punitive expedition" can be best understood in terms of humanitarian intervention. The sceptics, however, claim that in describing the ancient sage-king's bloodless punitive expeditions, what classical Confucians really had in mind was not so much to endorse …
Im Yunjidang
This Element aims to critically examine the philosophical thought of Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721–93), a female Korean Neo-Confucian philosopher from the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1910), and to present her as a feminist thinker. Unlike most Korean women of her time, Yunjidang had the exceptional opportunity to be introduced to a major philosophical debate among Korean Neo-Confucians, which was focused on two core questions-whether sages and commoners sh…
Service, reciprocity, and remedy
One of the most notable features in recent Confucian political theory is the advocacy of political meritocracy. Though Confucian meritocrats’ controversial institutional design has been subject to critical scrutiny, less attention has been paid to their underlying normative claims. This paper aims to investigate the two justificatory conditions of Confucian political meritocracy—the service condition and the reciprocity condition—in light of clas…
Response to Daniel A. Bell’s Review of Democracy after Virtue
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The Prospect of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
Before responding to Professors Dryzek, Macedo, Ackerly, and Li, I begin by reminding the readers of this symposium of the central aim of Democracy After Virtue. After the publication of my first book, Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice, I received two sets of comments from my critics. On the one hand, my Confucian critics wondered how “Confucian” my idea of Confucian democracy is, given my general embrace of liberal rights and…
The challenge of Confucian political meritocracy
This article aims to critically evaluate the recent proposals of Confucian political meritocracy by focusing on two sets of questions: the first set on the connection between traditional Confucianism and Confucian political meritocracy and the second set on the nature of Confucian political meritocracy (often presented in terms of ‘democratic meritocracy’) as an alternative version of democratic theory combining the instrumental conception of (mi…
A Confucian Case for Equal Membership for Foreign Domestic Workers
Daniel A. Bell, a leading Confucian and communitarian political theorist, objects to equal membership to foreign domestic workers ( FDW s) in East Asia on two Confucianism‐inspired normative and practical grounds. Bell's core argument is twofold: first, that liberal‐democratic demand for equal membership, despite its good intention, is likely to backfire, driving the current and potential FDW s into a far worse economic situation and second, that…
In Defense of Public Reason Confucianism
Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics
Surprisingly little is known about what ancient Confucian thinkers struggled with in their own social and political contexts and how these struggles contributed to the establishment and further development of classical Confucian political theory. Leading scholar of comparative political theory, Sungmoon Kim offers a systematic philosophical account of the political theories of Mencius and Xunzi, investigating both their agreements and disagreemen…
Individual-Level Factors and Organizational Performance in Government Organizations
In this journal, Rainey and Steinbauer proposed a theory of effective government organizations, and Brewer and Selden conducted an empirical study with data from the 1996 Merit Principles Survey that confirmed most hypothesized relationships in the theoretical model of organizational performance. Following these studies, this study focuses only on the individual-level factors, such as job satisfaction, affective commitment, public service motivat…
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity
Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national bou…
Testing the Structure of Public Service Motivation in Korea
Public service motivation (PSM) assumes that civil servants are characterized by an ethic to serve the public. Perry identified a multidimensional scale to measure PSM with four components: attraction to policy making (APM), commitment to public interest, compassion, and self-sacrifice. But there is little research on the generalizability and applicability of the dimensions and scale of PSM in the other countries. This study tests whether the str…
Testing a Revised Measure of Public Service Motivation
Public service motivation (PSM) is perceived as a multidimensional construct, as an overall, unobserved latent variable with various latent dimensions. The present study focuses on the relationships between PSM and its dimensions. The purposes in this study are to confirm a set of revised items as indicators of a rational base of PSM, to compare a four-factor model with various three-factor models, and to analyze whether PSM is defined as a forma…
A Longitudinal Analysis of Globalization and Regionalization in International Trade
Although there have been heated debates over globalization and regionalization, refined empirical research has been lacking. Defining globalization and regionalization as specific types of linkages between countries, we attempt to empirically examine the following: (1) Has the world been globalized and/or regionalized? and (2) If it has, what are the consequences of these processes? To explore these questions, we analyze longitudinal data on inte…
Public Reason Confucianism
If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralismwithinthe putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension betwee…
Pragmatic Confucian Democracy
In contemporary Confucian political theory, there is surprisingly little effort among the theorists to illuminate the value of democracy. When they do on rare occasions, their focus is largely on democracy’s instrumental contribution to Confucian goods. In this paper, I argue that, given democracy’s dual aspects as a political system and as a way of life, it has both instrumental and intrinsic values, and insomuch as it is a kind of democracy, Co…
Confucianism, Moral Equality, and Human Rights
This paper attempts to show the compatibility between Confucianism and human rights, first by revisiting the moral philosophy of Mencius, a key founder of the Confucian tradition, then by reconstructing the Mencian-Confucian idea of human rights from the perspective of his moral philosophy. One of my central claims is that not only did Mencius acknowledge core human rights-socioeconomic as well as civil-political-justified by his foundational fai…
Confucian Constitutionalism
By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms oflizhiconstitutionalism anddezhiconstitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, thi…
Shifting Boundaries within Second-Generation Korean American Churches
This study, based on 108 interviews and participant observation at 22 churches, examines the tension among newly formed second-generation Korean American churches in Los Angeles over its ethnic boundaries. Although all of the newly formed churches are open to non-Koreans, not all envision or desire a multiracial church. First, some pastors want their churches to remain predominately Korean American because they believe that the church is the main…
Democratization and Environmentalism
Focusing on the emergence and evolution of environmentalism in South Korea and Taiwan since the mid-1980s, this paper analyzes the relationship between democratic consolidation and environmental politics. In both countries, an environmental movement arose after a series of environmental disasters and expanded through the effective politicization of environmental issues by the opposition parties. The general relationship between environmental grou…
Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory
It is widely claimed that Mencius's account of punitive expedition can be understood as a Confucian justification of humanitarian intervention and thus has the potential to play the role of constraining China's imperial ventures abroad. This paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external obstacles—the problem of virtue's self-indulgence and the problem of justification to non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius's virtue…
To Become a Confucian Democratic Citizen
This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus fromgovernabilityof the people to theirtransformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East As…
Transcendental collectivism and participatory politics in democratized Korea
This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is b…
Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea
This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the…
Disaster, Heaven, and Political Responsibility
This paper investigates the Confucian conception of political responsibility as a political virtue essential for an ordinary non-Confucian ruler's actualization of humane government by paying close attention to the early Confucian discourses of Heaven and disaster. After briefly discussing Confucius's seminal idea of responsibility, this paper shows how Mencius developed the political conception of responsibility, as a noncausal responsibility sh…
The challenge of Confucian political meritocracy
This article aims to critically evaluate the recent proposals of Confucian political meritocracy by focusing on two sets of questions: the first set on the connection between traditional Confucianism and Confucian political meritocracy and the second set on the nature of Confucian political meritocracy (often presented in terms of ‘democratic meritocracy’) as an alternative version of democratic theory combining the instrumental conception of (mi…
On Korean dual civil society
Making peace with the barbarians
This article investigates the Neo-Confucian discourse on war, premised on the “Chinese versus barbarian” binary, and its impact on the Neo-Confucian scholar-officials of 17th-century Chosŏn Korea. It shows that Korean Neo-Confucians suffered invasions from the Jurchens, who they regarded as “barbarians,” and that the political debate on how to respond to the “barbarians” drove the advocates of the pro-peace argument to reimagine Chosŏn’s statehoo…
Service, reciprocity, and remedy
One of the most notable features in recent Confucian political theory is the advocacy of political meritocracy. Though Confucian meritocrats’ controversial institutional design has been subject to critical scrutiny, less attention has been paid to their underlying normative claims. This paper aims to investigate the two justificatory conditions of Confucian political meritocracy—the service condition and the reciprocity condition—in light of clas…
From Remonstrance to Impeachment
In his path-breaking essay that investigates the rise of judicial review in democratic Taiwan and South Korea, Tom Ginsburg presents the distinctive style of judicial review practiced by both countries in terms of “Confucian constitutionalism,” at the core of which is the practice of constitutional review as remonstrance. This Article examines whether the model of Confucian constitutionalism is still relevant in Korea, especially in light of the …
Candlelight for Our Country's Right Name
The candlelight protest that took place in South Korea from October 2016 to March 2017 was a landmark political event, not least because it ultimately led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Arguably, its more historically important meaning lies in the fact that it marks the first nation-wide political struggle since the June Uprising of 1987, where civil society won an unequivocal victory over a regime that was found to be corrupt, un…
Abating contingency
This article investigates the liberal political implications of Michael Oakeshott’s political theory of civility and civil association by focusing on his judicious attempts to abate contingency. It argues that Oakeshott’s political theory can be best understood as ‘political pluralism’, aimed at the maximalist accommodation of abundant and fluctuating human pluralities, individual and associational. By reinterpreting Oakeshott as a defender of ci…
John Dewey and Confucian Democracy
The Way to Become a Female Sage
Is there a counterpart to John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft in the Confucian tradition? If so, who is it? This paper aims to introduce and examine the philosophical thought of a Korean female neo-Confucian thinker named Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721-1793) who ardently pursued Confucian sagehood and upheld moral equality between men and women by creatively reinterpreting Confucian classics as well as advancing a sophisticated neo-Confucian philoso…
Burlingame and the Inauguration of the Co-operative Policy
Of all the Western diplomatic personalities who served in Peking during the nineteenth century, Anson Burlingame was perhaps the most celebrated figure. He acted as the first American resident minister in Peking from 1861 to 1867. He also acted as the first 'Chinese' envoy to the Western courts from 1867 to 1870, when his untimely death at St Petersburg cut short his colourful diplomatic career. Viewed against this unusual background, it is not s…
Democratization and Environmentalism
Focusing on the emergence and evolution of environmentalism in South Korea and Taiwan since the mid-1980s, this paper analyzes the relationship between democratic consolidation and environmental politics. In both countries, an environmental movement arose after a series of environmental disasters and expanded through the effective politicization of environmental issues by the opposition parties. The general relationship between environmental grou…
A Longitudinal Analysis of Globalization and Regionalization in International Trade
Although there have been heated debates over globalization and regionalization, refined empirical research has been lacking. Defining globalization and regionalization as specific types of linkages between countries, we attempt to empirically examine the following: (1) Has the world been globalized and/or regionalized? and (2) If it has, what are the consequences of these processes? To explore these questions, we analyze longitudinal data on inte…
Individual-Level Factors and Organizational Performance in Government Organizations
In this journal, Rainey and Steinbauer proposed a theory of effective government organizations, and Brewer and Selden conducted an empirical study with data from the 1996 Merit Principles Survey that confirmed most hypothesized relationships in the theoretical model of organizational performance. Following these studies, this study focuses only on the individual-level factors, such as job satisfaction, affective commitment, public service motivat…
Civil Society and Political Action in Democratized Korea
This essay aims to re-evaluate the quality of democratic consolidation in South Korea from a participatory democracy perspective. In order to do so, I, drawing on Barber's theory of strong democracy, redefine democratic consolidation in terms of the active citizenship and political dynamism that it breeds rather than in terms of stability, which overly prefers a liberal-pluralist, yet inherently conservative, civil society to a more vibrant and s…
Liberal Collectivism
Research Article| January 01 2007 Liberal Collectivism: The Korean Challenge to Liberal Individualism Sungmoon Kim Sungmoon Kim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Good Society (2007) 16 (1): 54–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/20711251 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sungmoon Kim; Liberal Collectivism: The Korean Challenge to Liberal Individualism. The Good Society 1 January 2007; 16…
Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea
This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the…
Filiality, Compassion, and Confucian Democracy
Ren, the Confucian virtue par excellence, is often explained on two different accounts: on the one hand, filiality, a uniquely Confucian social-relational virtue; on the other hand, commiseration innate in human nature. Accordingly there are two competing positions in interpreting ren: one that is utterly positive about the realization of universal love by the graduated extension of filial love, and the other that sees the inevitable tension betw…
Transcendental collectivism and participatory politics in democratized Korea
This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is b…
Confucianism in Contestation
This article seeks to present an alternative approach to understanding the politics of East Asian democratization with a special focus on South Korea. Taking the May Struggle of 1991—the largest political upheaval since the June Uprising of 1987—as a case study, it examines how Confucian moral rhetoric and practices were peculiarly employed (or exploited) in a series of authoritarian–democratic confrontations. It argues that Confucianism was neit…
Testing the Structure of Public Service Motivation in Korea
Public service motivation (PSM) assumes that civil servants are characterized by an ethic to serve the public. Perry identified a multidimensional scale to measure PSM with four components: attraction to policy making (APM), commitment to public interest, compassion, and self-sacrifice. But there is little research on the generalizability and applicability of the dimensions and scale of PSM in the other countries. This study tests whether the str…
Beyond Liberal Civil Society
This essay argues that if Confucian familism, which has been blamed as the single greatest obstacle to achieving a civil society, is creatively repossessed, the potential looks very promising for constructing a Confucian civil society that is qualitatively different from a liberal civil society predicated on moral individualism, and for underpinning its unique mode of civility ("sociability") and citizenship ("strangership"). This essay first sho…
Confucian Citizenship? Against Two Greek Models
The Secret of Confucian Wuwei Statecraft
Despite his strong commitment to the ideal of wuwei statecraft, Mencius advanced a distinct yet cohesive theory of Confucian youwei statecraft that can serve the ideal of wuwei, first by means of the principled application of individual and social responsibility under unfavorable socioeconomic conditions, and second by offering a concrete public policy (i.e. the well-field system) that contributes to a decent socioeconomic condition on which the …
On Korean dual civil society
Shifting Boundaries within Second-Generation Korean American Churches
This study, based on 108 interviews and participant observation at 22 churches, examines the tension among newly formed second-generation Korean American churches in Los Angeles over its ethnic boundaries. Although all of the newly formed churches are open to non-Koreans, not all envision or desire a multiracial church. First, some pastors want their churches to remain predominately Korean American because they believe that the church is the main…
South Korea's Developmental Democracy and Migrant Workers Policy
This paper investigates how the Korean government, under the double pressure of liberal‐democratic consolidation and economic growth, has developed its migrant workers policy in the past 2 decades. Its central claim is that even though the Korean government has revised the laws regarding migrant workers in an increasingly liberal way and driven more progressive migrant workers policies with special focus on socioeconomic rights, it could not live…
The virtue of incivility
This article argues that in order to make Confucian communitarianism a viable political vision, namely, Civil Confucianism, its emphasis on civility must be balanced with what I call ‘Confucian incivility’, a set of Confucian social practices that temporarily upset the existing social relations and yet that, ironically, help those relations become more enduring and viable. The central argument is that ‘Confucian civility’ encompasses both social-…
Confucian Constitutionalism
By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms oflizhiconstitutionalism anddezhiconstitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, thi…
Testing a Revised Measure of Public Service Motivation
Public service motivation (PSM) is perceived as a multidimensional construct, as an overall, unobserved latent variable with various latent dimensions. The present study focuses on the relationships between PSM and its dimensions. The purposes in this study are to confirm a set of revised items as indicators of a rational base of PSM, to compare a four-factor model with various three-factor models, and to analyze whether PSM is defined as a forma…
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity
Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national bou…
Before and after Ritual
Virtue Politics and Political Leadership
In the Confucian tradition, the ideal government is called ‘benevolent government’ (ren zheng), central to which is the ruler's parental love toward his people who he deems as his children. Hanfeizi criticized this seemingly innocent political idea by pointing out that (1) not only is the state not a family but even within the family parental love is short of making the children orderly and (2) ren as love inevitably results in the ruin of the st…
Between Good and Evil
Confucianism and acceptable inequalities
In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-c…
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