AP/HREQ 4651 3.00
Chinese Rights and Virtues in East Asia
This course uses a critical human rights approach to compare Chinese virtues of benevolence, propriety, righteousness, wisdom, and faithfulness with Western values and ideas in both ancient and contemporary perspectives. It contrasts universal claims of Western social and cultural rights with particular forms of virtue in Chinese society.
It concentrates on classical Daoism as contrasted to Confucianism in respect to East Asian civilization explored through cultural, historical, sociological and cosmological intersections. Universal claims of Western social, political, and cultural rights are compared with particular forms of virtue within classical China. Dao itself is a possible alternative to virtues and rights. Act by not acting, lead by not leading, teach by not teaching are cornerstones of Daoist thought as a negative ethics alongside both Western rights and East Asian rites. Universal principles manifest through negotiated practices of everyday experiences both East and West. To speak, to conduct oneself, and to exert effort in harmony with upright principles is the essence of Confucian virtue that anticipates Western ideas of socially guided moral conduct. The course explores Dao as an alternative ontology of human life that might render rights and virtues obsolete through a communicative body of mutually conditioned and necessarily linked, oppositely charged pairings of yin and yang, endlessly adjusting through the laying and gathering of an invisible pivot. Perhaps every event is co-constitutive, co-resonating, and equiprimordial, hence deconstructing metaphysically laden discourses of rights and virtues in favour of the eternally natural way of the water.
Course credit exclusion: AP/PHIL 4651 3.00 (prior to Fall 2019)
Prerequisites: 78 credits or permission from the Undergraduate Program Director.