1 Is Ritual Alienating?

In the English-speaking world, virtue ethics is strongly associated with the ideas of Aristotle, and, to a lesser extent, Hume and Nietzsche; in articulating and defending virtue ethics as a theory, many contemporary philosophers draw on the ideas and theories of these thinkers. However, a number of recent scholars have emphasized reading the early Confucian thinkers, too, as virtue ethicists. P.J. Ivanhoe (2000), Bryan Van Norden (2007), and Eric Hutton (2006), among others (Yu 1998; Slingerland 2000), have all suggested that the early Confucian philosophers can and should be read as articulating a virtue-based approach to ethics. The idea is that if we think of Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi as virtue ethicists, we can tap into some immensely rich sources of material for developing virtue ethics in new directions, and we will have more resources to defend virtue ethics against objections. It is worth remembering that virtue ethics as a normative ethical theory is in one sense quite new. Before the 1970’s, debates about normative ethics in the English-speaking world centered on deontology (primarily Kant’s version, or Ross’) and consequentialism. However, a handful of moral philosophers – Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), Bernard Williams (1973; 1981) and, and Michael Stocker (1976) deserve special mention – argued against these “modern moral theories ” and their related focus on duty and obligation. They rejected the focus on the rightness of actions as the primary locus of moral attention. Instead, they sought to restore the concept of virtuous character to what they saw as its rightful place as the central concept of morality. For this, they looked back to Aristotle. Anscombe, Williams, and Stocker made a number of quite trenchant criticisms of deontology and consequentialism, but a common them