儒家伦理作为一种美德伦理——与南乐山商榷

摘要 最近几十年来，美德伦理在英语世界出现了较大的复兴，开始打破了道义论和功利论的垄断地位，使当代伦理学出现了三足鼎立的局面。从事比较哲学的学者也纷纷在自己的哲学传统中挖掘美德伦理的资源，在这方面儒学研究尤其突出，短短十几年出现了大量讨论儒家美德伦理的论著。当然这方面也有异议。最近南乐山在《善一分殊》一书中，就对"可以富有成效地把儒家看作是美德伦理"这种"相当流行的看法"表示了怀疑。一方面是因为他认为美德伦理存在着一些儒家伦理不存在的缺陷，而另一方面，儒家伦理具有一些美德伦理所缺乏的长处。通过正面讨论美德伦理的若干特征，并通过表明儒家伦理也具有这些特征而论证儒家伦理是一种美德伦理，可以发现南乐山所谓的美德伦理的缺陷其实并不存在，而他眼中的儒家伦理的一些长处实际上美德伦理也具有，因此我们基本上可以将儒家伦理看作是一种美德伦理。
Abstract：In recent decades,virtue ethics has been reviving in a flourishing manner in the English world,which challenges the dominance of deontology and utilitarianism and consequently helps to form a tripod-like situation of contemporary ethics. Scholars engaging in comparative study start to explore the resources of virtue ethics in their own philosophical traditions. Especially,a large number of works on Confucian virtue ethics have appeared in the last decade. Of course,there are also some objections arise. In his recent book The Good is One,Its Manifestations Many,Robert Neville suspects the "quite popular view" of "fruitfully regarding Confucianism as virtue ethics". He argues that virtue ethics contains some defects that Confucian ethics does not contain on the one hand and Confucian ethics has merits that virtue ethics lacks on the other. This paper argues that Confucian ethics is virtue ethics by demonstrating Confucian ethics have some features characterized by virtue ethics. Moreover,virtue ethics does not have the defects that Neville mentions, while it also has the merits that Neville attributes to Confucian ethics. Therefore,we can legitimately regard Confucian ethics as virtue ethics.