1. What if the Father Commits
a Crime?
Rui Zhu
Apparently, Socrates and Confucius respond similarly to the question if a
son should turn in his father in the case of the father’s misdemeanor. When
Euthyphro, flaring his pride of his moral impartiality, tells Socrates that he is on
his way to report his father because he has thrown one of the household slaves
into a ditch and left him bound there until he was dead, Socrates says, “Good
Heaven! Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this
and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced
in wisdom.”1
According to Socrates, only a man of high wisdom knows how to prosecute
his father righteously, but Euthyphro does not appear to have this wisdom. When
his interlocutor observes that an upright man in his state would bear witness
against his father if he misappropriates a sheep, Confucius contradicts the
interlocutor’s understanding of uprightness by speaking in a matter-of-fact tone:
“In my country the upright men are of quite another sort. A father will cover up
for his son, and a son his father—which incidentally does involve a sort of up—
rightness.”2
Confucius stands on the same line with Socrates but seems the more radical
of the two. Socrates does not directly refute Euthyphro and only suggests that he
make sure he understands what he is doing before going any further. Socrates is
not only typically Socratic—indirect and suggestive—but also sounds so rea-
sonable that Euthyphro appears in contrast to be a reckless youth who harbors
Thanks to Antony Flew, Glenn Joy, Dean Geuras, Taj Watkins, and two anonymous refer-
ees of this Journal.
1
Euthyphro, 4.b., in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, Ind.,
1997).
2
Analects, XIII, in Si Shu Zhang Ju Ji Zhu, ed. Zhu-xi (Beijing, 1983), 146 (all of the
italics in this paper are mine).
Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
1

2. Rui Zhu2
only a faint understanding of morality. Confucius’s response is more rigid, for
he categorically dismisses an act of the Euthyphroian kind. He demands that
father and son cover up for each other in the case of either one’s guilt. Compared
to Socrates, Confucius advocates the position that seems a little too strong and
leaves no room for justice, while Socrates does not have that problem with jus-
tice. This is how we feel about Socrates and Confucius on our first impression.
The prima facie observations that we make from the remarks of Socrates and
Confucius seem both plain and unproblematic.
By embedding these remarks into their respective social or philosophical
cultures, this paper will show that our previous observations are not quite accu-
rate. The apparent affinity of the Socratic and Confucian stances belies different
underlying moral philosophies. We want to use their comments as bridges to
explore the early Greek and Confucian ethics and show how different a picture
we see after things are examined within their traditions.
The issue of a possible father-son conflict may be treated as a case study of
the early Greek (the Heroic era until the age of Socrates) and early Confucian
(Confucius and Mencius) morals. There is a strong theme in the early Greek
morals that allows, or sometimes demands, a son such as Euthyphro to pros-
ecute his father for the sake of justice, because justice, instead of love (philein)
or filial piety, is the governing principle in the early Greek ethics. Confucian
ethics is founded on love (human-heartedness), which in turn is extended from
the love between father and son. All moral principles including justice are de-
rived from this extension of love. The mutual love of father and son then be-
comes the governing principle in the case of Confucianism.
A Guilty Father: The Greek Motif
The question, “What if the father commits a crime?” has a certain realistic
aroma to a boy coming of age in the Hesiodic Greek world. That father has to be
overcome by son before some relief from strife becomes possible is a familiar
theme in Greek literature. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Uranus (the sky) incurs hatred
from all his newborn children since he hides them in their mother Gaia’s womb
and does not let them return to the light, for no reason other than that he enjoys
“his wicked work.”3
Kronos, one of his sons, depicted as “the great, sinuous-
minded,” ambushes and castrates him:
[Kronos] reached out from his hiding place and seized [Uranus]
with his left hand, while with his right hand he grasped the huge, long,
and sharp-toothed sickle and swiftly hacked off his father’s genitals and
3
Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, tr. Apostolos Athanassakis (Baltimore, 1983),
155-58.

3. 3What if the Father Commits a Crime?
tossed them behind him—and they were not flung from his hand in vain.
Gaia took in all the bloody drops that spattered off.4
Following this is an event that significantly mitigates the ugly nature of cas-
tration and would discourage a reader from over-moralizing it. Aphrodite is born
from the severed genitals and becomes the goddess of love and beauty. That the
delivery of this most attractive goddess, whom every god either envies or loves,
is a result of this event may leave it prone to interpretation by any “sinuous-
minded” son as a proof that castrating your own father is not always unforgiv-
able.
In the case of Homer, his story is different. He relates no tale of castration
but attributes Aphrodite’s birth to the union of Zeus and Dione.5
He does ac-
knowledge another story of the same motif, appearing inTheogony as well, about
Zeus’s driving his father, Kronos, down to Tartaros and having him chained
there. Kronos is repeatedly specified inIliad as the person who lives in that area
of “the utmost margin of earth and sea,” while Zeus sometimes threatens to sen-
tence other gods to the same region.6
It appears that, although Homer may find
such stories of father-son struggle displeasing, he cannot avoid all of them.
Socrates and Plato are disgruntled by what has been passed on to them from
Homer and Hesiod. Plato wants to drive out all poets from his Republic because
of their impious depictions of gods. But even at the point of a wholesale cam-
paign of revising Homer and Hesiod that is being launched in Republic, Plato’s
hesitation seems to tell a larger story than his resolution does:
I mean Hesiod telling us about how Uranus behaved, how Kronos pun-
ished him for it, and how he was in turn punished by his own son. But
even it were true, it should be passed over in silence, not told to foolish
young people. And if, for some reason, it has to be told, only a very few
people—pledged to secrecy and after sacrificing not just a pig but some-
thing great and scarce—should hear it, so that their number is kept as
small as possible.7
It appears that Plato has to respect the burden of a long tradition to such
extent that he feels he cannot simply eliminate the whole memory of a compro-
mising, unhappy past. He instead insists that the skeleton should be kept in the
closet, lest the malleable youth be corrupted by it. In fact the father-son clash as
a theme still occurs as a fairly common phenomenon at the time of Socrates.
Strepsiades is badly beaten by his son, Pheidippides, as depicted by Aristophanes
4
Ibid., 178-84.
5
Iliad, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1974), 5. 370-71.
6
Ibid., 8. 478-81, 14. 203-4, 273-74, 278-79, 15. 225.
7
Plato, Republic, II. 378.

4. Rui Zhu4
in his Clouds; furthermore, the blame is partly put on the victim.8
In Plato’s own
Sophist, the stranger claims that he has to commit parricide (though figura-
tively) before he reaches the truth—a theme later remotely echoed by Aristotle
in Nicomachean Ethics,9
“It will be necessary for us, in defending ourselves, to
put the speech of our father Parmenides to the torture and force it to say [the
truth].”10
Respect and Fear: Ambivalence of a Son
We have no reason to take as history those fantastic stories of parricide and
castration, but their presence in the Greek literary tradition, coupled with the
evidence of their conspicuous absence from its Chinese counterpart, shows at
least that the ancient Greeks acknowledge, or are willing to acknowledge, the
natural or potential frictions between father and son. This moral realism of the
early Greeks pins them down in a different circumstance from where Chinese
may find themselves on the issue of what would be the governing principle for
the father-son relation. By “governing principle” I mean a principle that has to
be yielded to if social or moral conflicts arise. So it is the principle that overrides
other principles. While early Confucians idealize subtle affections between fa-
ther and son, on whose basis they would proceed to complete their moral theory,
the Greek realism has made the emotional bond between father and son too
flickering to be a governing principle.
For Greeks the father-son relation is modeled after the human-gods relation.
An ancient Greek boy’s duty to piety is a duty both to his father and immortals.
The father should be looked upon in the eyes of a boy as a godlike figure that
demands respect and fear. In LawsPlato compares our attitude towards gods to
that of ours towards fathers (and mothers): “we should be quick to appreciate
how very relevant … the subject of worshipping gods will be to the respect or
disrespect in which we hold our father and mother.”11
Filial piety is according to
Plato tied to divine worshiping. How Greeks view their gods is reflected in their
view of fathers. Just as gods are both powerful and willing to wreak havoc on
the entire polis for a minor offense, a father in rage is also able to bring ruin to
the whole family. Respect and fear represent the feelings of Greeks toward their
fathers as well as gods.
8
Clouds, in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, ed. Moses Hadas (New York, 1962).
9
Aristotle comments that truth is more important than his loyalty to Plato and his theory:
“still, it presumably seems better, indeed only right, to destroy even what is close to us if that is
the way to preserve the truth. ... For though we love both truth and our friends, piety requires us
to honor the truth first.” See Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a15.
10
Sophist, 241d.
11
Laws, XI, 930e.

5. 5What if the Father Commits a Crime?
Greeks believe that gods often take the father’s side against children.12
If a
father is angry and puts a curse on his children, gods would listen and fulfill that
curse on his behalf. This poses him as a terrible threat to his son because a curse
on the father’s part, even at his rare, insane moment, would come to pass cour-
tesy of all-too-willing gods. Oedipus probably does not realize what kind of fate
he has sealed for his family when he throws down a curse on Polyneices and
Eteocles.13
Theseus prays against his son, Hippolytus, out of a false suspicion
that he has violated Phaedra, Theseus’s wife. As a result Hippolytus suffers a
wretched death, for which Theseus could only lament to no avail: “O glorious
Athens, realm of Pallas, what a splendid hero ye have lost! Ah me, ah me! How
oft shall I remember thy evil works, O Cypris!14
Because of a father’s strange power to determine the fate of his folks—
Oedipus’s burial site is believed to be the determining factor in the future fortune
of Thebes15
—a son who understands this would naturally fear his father, perhaps
beyond any other emotion he has for him. Plato clearly thinks that fear and re-
spect are the right emotions a son ought to have, and that educating him on his
good behavior takes no better route than letting him know the efficacy of his
parental prayer:
Anyone with his wits about him holds the prayers of his parents in fear
and respect, knowing that the cases in which such prayers have been
brought to pass have been many and frequent. This being the way of
things, a good man will regard his elderly forbears as a veritable god-
sent, right up till they breathe their last.16
It appears that Greeks take respect and fear as the more effective means in
stabilizing a family than other means such as love. Yet these emotions cannot yet
perform at a place in ethics where love feels its impotence to function as the
governing principle. Their vulnerability is evidenced by frequent backlashes from
sons’ fury and resentment. When things are smooth, a son respects his father; but
if things go bad, his fear would not always deter him from blaming his father, for
the son would hold him responsible exactly because of his perceived power. Even
gods cannot escape this burden of responsibility. In the beginning of Odyssey,
Zeus is seen complaining at the gathering of immortals at Zeus’s Hall: “Ah, how
shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods. For us alone, they say, come
all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, com-
12
See ibid., XI 931c.
13
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1564: “you [Polyneices] will fall yourself, polluted with
blood, and equally your brother [Eteocles].”
14
Euripides, Hippolytus, 1466.
15
See Oedipus at Colonus, 398.
16
Laws, 932.

6. Rui Zhu6
pound their pains beyond their proper share.”17
Zeus’s displeasure is not un-
founded. Sometimes mortals appear too willing to use their deus ex machina to
get out of an embarrassing situation by putting the blame on a god. It is
Agamemnon who instigates his dispute with Achilles by robbing him of his share
of the booty from a raid, in this case a woman; but when it is time to make
amends with Achilles in order to avert an impending rout by Trojan troops,
Agamemnon makes this concession: “The Achaians often brought this up against
me, and chided me.But I am not to blame. Zeus and Fate and a nightmare Fury
are, for putting savage Folly in my mind in the assembly that day, when I wrested
Achilles’ prize of war from him.”18
When Menelaus, furious at his wife Helen’s submission to Paris, confronted
her after the fall of Troy, Helen’s explanation strikes a similar tone to that of
Agamemnon: “I ask my own sad thought, what was there in my heart, that I
forgot my home and land and all I loved, to fly with a strange man? Surely it was
not I, But Cypris, there! Lay thou thy rod on her.... My wrong done hath its own
pardon.”19
While fear and respect stop no mortals from blaming gods, fear and respect
could hardly stop a son from finding faults with his father if things are rocky.
Oedipus gets no help from his two sons when he desires to spend his remaining
years in his native city, for they both share the thought that their father needs to
go into exile to save the city from future trouble. Telemachus grieves to Athena,
disguised as a traveler, about the misfortune suffered by his household after his
father, Odysseus, was presumed dead on the way back from Troy. He seems to
hint that the family would have been saved from all these troubles had his father
died a more graceful death: “I would never have grieved so much about his death
if he’d gone down with comrades off in Troy or died in the arms of loved ones,
once he had wound down the long coil of war. Then all united Achaea would
have raised his tomb and he’d have won his son great fame for years to come.”20
Is Telemachus trying to tell Pallas Athena that his father shares some of the
blame, too?
Justice: The Governing Principle
Neither love (philein) nor fear (plus respect) could function as the govern-
ing principle in the case of the father-son relation. Actually, the Greeks’ ambiva-
lent sentiments toward their fathers (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the
Greeks’ willingness to acknowledge this ambivalence) could be perceived as the
reason for their upholding justice in the place of a governing principle. As the
17
Odyssey, 1. 38-41.
18
Iliad, 19. 98-102.
19
Euripides, The Trojan Women, 949-58.
20
Odyssey, 1. 274-79.

7. 7What if the Father Commits a Crime?
highest end of rational life justice must not be compromised by any emotion,
including love, respect or fear.
The importance of Justice for human affairs is reflected in the purpose of her
birth in Hesiod’s Theogony—she is born for man only. Her mother is Themis,
her father, Zeus, with Lawfulness and Peace as her two sisters. Together with her
two sisters she watches “over the works of mortal men.”21
In Works and Days
Hesiod appeals to his brother, Perses, that he should “obey justice and restrain
reckless wrongdoing.” If Justice is wronged, she weeps like an innocent maiden
being violated. In the end, as Zeus’s daughter, she is always “the winner in the
race against insolent crime.”22
In Cratylus Socrates illustrates the governing character of justice through
the study of its etymology. Some people believe, as Socrates observes, that jus-
tice is the smallest and fastest element in the universe, penetrating and generating
everything there is. “Since it is governor and penetrator [diaion] of everything
else, it is rightly called ‘just’ [dikaion].” Socrates suspects that justice and Zeus
represent the same principle for all beings, for “just” (dikaiou) and “Dia” (Zeus)
are both related to such a cause through which (di’ ho) a thing comes to be.23
Although the meaning of justice is admittedly complex, it is foremost con-
cerned with two things in the realm of man. The first thing it is associated with is
lot, the Greek concept of fates. According to one of the two biographies on Fates
in Theogony, Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the three sisters of Fates, are sib-
lings of Justice (while in another biography they are daughters of Night).24
Fates
cast different shares of good and evil to mortals; as a result, each individual has
his boundaries. Fulfilling one’s duty within his lot is essential for the overall
social peace and order. Justice is the maiden who roams among men, inspecting
those who have tried to stretch their lot and doling out punishment for any trans-
gression.
The second thing that concerns justice and is related to the concept of lot is
making sure that every civic arrangement has to be in concomitance with the
divine cosmic order Zeus has established since he came to power. The divine
order is paramount to the welfare of immortals as well as mortals. Before Zeus
there is no order in the universe. So, gods, as fathers and sons, fight and engage
in games to undermine each other. Zeus is able to stay in power after dethroning
his father and manages to escape fates of his father’s kind for no other reason
than that he has successfully established order on Mount Olympus.
As the governing principle for all human affairs, justice binds the relation of
father and son. A son’s lot is to respect his father. Injustice would be committed
if one flings “cruel words at aging parents as they stand before the threshold of
21
Theogony, 903.
22
Works and Days, 213-30.
23
Plato, Cratylus, 412d-413b.
24
Theogony, 216-18; 905-7.

8. Rui Zhu8
old age.”25
A father is responsible for maintaining the household and raising a
son in order to continue the family heritage. Because resources are sparse, at
times a father is advised to “beget an only son to nurture it,” so the wealth “will
increase inside [his] house.”26
This limit on children to increase wealth may
sound overly calculating, but Greeks see it differently. Hesiod’s dispute with his
brother over the patrimony bears witness to the point that the discord could have
been avoided had his father produced just one scion. As the governing principle,
justice overrides other principles if conflicts occur. This may mean either that a
father has to abandon and leave his son in the hand of justice for the sake of civic
order or that a son may have to bear witness against his own father, if any of
them is guilty of injustice.
In Iliad there is a passage where Zeus laments to Hera about a painful
deliberation he is going through. Sarpedon, a son of his with a mortal woman,
will die an imminent death in his battle with Patroklos, Achilles’ best friend.
Zeus holds his son as “the dearest of men” to him, and is wondering if he should
“catch up Sarpedon out of the mortal fight” and place him in a far away rich
land. Hera responds:
My lord Zeus, what a curious thing to say. A man who is born to die,
long destined for it, would you set free from that unspeakable end? …
Ponder this: should you dispatch Sarpedon home alive, anticipate some
other god’s desire to pluck a man he loves out of the battle. Many who
fight around the town of Priam sprang from immortals; you’ll infuriate
these.27
Hera warns Zeus of the danger of compromising the divine order he himself
has established. By granting a partial favor to his son he would forfeit the means
to prevent other gods from doing the same. Hera asks Zeus to let his son fall, and
Zeus eventually has to yield. A son’s decision whether or not to abandon his
father in the name of justice is apparently tougher, not just because of possible
backlash from his father (for he may find a god on his side). But the general
wisdom is that if a son has to stand against his father, he should firstly, due to the
severity of the situation, take great caution, and follow careful procedures, and
secondly, he should never commit perjury, even if he loves his father dearly.
Prosecution and Perjury
If a father commits a crime, his son has an obligation to bear witness against
him, so long as the son knows the truth. A just charge from the son against an
25
Works and Days, 331-32.
26
Ibid., 376-77.
27
Iliad., 16. 433-38.

9. 9What if the Father Commits a Crime?
unjust father does not violate but upholds the very just principle of piety. In
Greek culture filial piety is founded on man’s piety to gods. If a father compro-
mises justice, his son’s piety to gods overrides his filial piety. A father could be
called impious if he has brought injustice to his son, and this would not make
sense if it is only filial piety that matters. For instance, the charge of paternal
impiety is repeatedly brought on to Theseus after he subjects Hippolytus, the son
an Amazon queen bore him in his youth, to the aforementioned undeserved
wretched death by praying against him. Artemis tells Theseus that he has slain
his son “most impiously,” while Hippolytus groans before his death: “Ah! ah!
woe is me! foully undone by an impious father’s impious imprecation!”28
Piety enjoins a guilty father’s son to seek justice. In this sense Euthypro’s
thinking, despite protests from his family, is concomitant with the general mor-
als. This explains, better than does Socrates’ usual indirect pedagogical style,
why Socrates challenges Euthyphro on only his haste but not his act per se. In
Laws Plato offers a carefully engineered civil procedure for a son to seek justice
against his father:
[If a son wants to file a charge,] this is the law the son must observe.
First of all he must go to the eldest Guardians of the laws and explain his
father’s misfortune, and they, after due investigation, must advise him
whether to bring the charge or not. If they advise that he should, they
must come forward as witnesses for the prosecution and plead on his
behalf.29
Plato advises that a son first report his father to the proper authorities, the eldest
Guardians in this case, and let them decide whether or not he should file a law-
suit. After investigation, the authorities would tell the son their decision and
promise to speak on his behalf if the charge goes to court as recommended.
While a son has a duty to gods to prosecute his father if necessary, literature
does not tell us whether or not he must fulfil this duty every single time. Another
well-specified duty, which leaves him little leeway once he is called to witness by
the authorities, may compensate for the lack. A son would never be pardoned if
he commits perjury or tries to cover up for his father at court. A son’s refusal to
voluntarily seek justice against his father may be only a failure of his duty, but
perjury adds another injustice to an already existing injustice, a crime doubled in
the fullest sense.
Hesiod apparently thinks that perjury is one of the gravest injustices a man
could do. “Oath, who,more than any other, brings pains on mortals who of their
own accord swear false oaths.”30
By wronging Justice, the daughter of Zeus, a
28
Euripides, Hippolytus, 1310-55.
29
Laws, XI, 929e.
30
Theogony, 231-32.

10. Rui Zhu10
man subjects his family as well as fellow citizens to the rage of gods, for “many
times one man’s wickedness ruins a whole city.”31
One should never think that he
could save his father by contradicting the will of gods. If his filial piety clashes
with his religious piety, the latter should always be given the upper hand. Doing
otherwise is not only wrong but also useless, for justice always wins against a
crime by a mortal. For this reason, the Confucian idea of covering up for a
family member is categorically ruled out by both morals and wisdom.
Shun and His Father
One of the staunchest moral maxims of the early Confucianism is this. A
son has to protect a guilty father even if this means a run from justice. For a
Confucian, nothing comes above his filial piety. Confucianism does not question
an individual’s social or legal obligation but locates filial obligation both practi-
cally and theoretically prior to the rest of duties. If a circumstance is such that a
person could not fulfil his filial piety without violating his social duty, he should
not be held back from fulfilling the filial order.
Mencius contains a conversation between Mencius and one of his students,
Tao-ying, that illustrates the Confucian understanding of justice and filial piety.
Tao-ying asks Mencius what would happen if Shun, the legendary Sage-king’s,
father kills someone. Mencius replies that Shun’s Minister of Law would have
him arrested. “But isn’t Shun going to forbid that?” asks Tao-ying. Mencius
says: “How could he forbid it, since he shoulders the destiny of the nation.” Tao-
ying presses on: “But is he then going to do nothing?” Mencius’s answer re-
minds us of the remark Confucius gives in the beginning of the paper: “Shun
sees forfeiting the world as if abandoning worn shoes. He would carry his father
on his back and escape to a seashore village, where they would happily spend the
rest of their life and forget the world.”32
To a king nothing is more important than justice; this is why Shun does not
forbid his Minister of Law from arresting his father. To a son nothing is more
important than his father; this is why Shun snatches up his father and relocates
him somewhere else, an interesting contrast to Zeus’s thinking of snatching up
his son from mortal combat. But when the king and the son are personified in the
same individual, as in a moral dilemma such as Shun’s, the role of being a scion
would lead him to forfeit the role of being a ruler. When Shun hides his father,
his purpose is not to compromise the social justice, but live up to his filial pi-
ety.33
31
Works and Days, 240.
32
Mencius, XIII, in Si Shu Zhang Zhu Ji Zhu, ed. Zhu-xi (Beijing, 1983), 359-60.
33
The fact that Shun is only a legendary figure should not hamper us from taking Mencius’s
discussions seriously. Our concern is what kind of father-son relation is desired by Mencius
rather than facts about some father-son relations.

11. 11What if the Father Commits a Crime?
Love: The Overriding Principle
The Confucian maxim that filial obligation comes before social obligation is
explicable by three rationales. By examining them, we will be able to see why
Confucian ethics takes love, specifically love between father and son, as the
overriding principle, in contrast to the Greek revering of justice.
1. Social values emanate from family values according to Confucianism.
Family is not only where a person grows up but also the fountainhead of his
social and moral cultivation. He learns how to become a good citizen by learning
how to become a good family member first. In the eyes of the general public a
person’s moral character is magnified by, and matters most in the case of, his
family conduct, to such an extent that a socially well-behaved person won’t elimi-
nate other people’s moral suspicion until they see him as a good father or son as
well as a good citizen. That a Confucian society is built on families is seen in the
fact that family relations define social relations, but not vice versa. One’s rela-
tion to his father determines his relation to his ruler, while his relation to his
siblings determines his relation to his friends. A person can always fall back on
his family relation to search for guidance for his social intercourse. For this
reason the family bond has to be stronger than the social bond in order for the
former to support the latter. A person should love his father more than he loves
his ruler, and love his brothers more than he loves his friends. For Mencius, this
gradation of love is so important that equal love such as that championed by
Mohists is no more than a pointer to the fact that they have no genuine concern
for their fathers.34
2. Moral feeling is more important than right or wrong in the Confucian
ethics. Confucius conveys this message by stressing the precedence of ren, hu-
man-heartedness, overyi, righteousness. Ren is love, while yi means something
one ought or ought not to do. For Confucius, one who does what is right but
without right feeling is much worse off and pernicious than another who has
right feeling but does wrong. The first kind is an incorrigible “sycophant” (ning-
ren) who wants to coax people into a false belief about himself, while the latter
kind represents a nature of good but unrefined groundwork whose perfection is
attainable through the education of propriety (li).35
What is right or wrong gov-
erns a person’s outward behavior, which should always be substantiated by an
inner feeling of love. The root of morality is internal humane feelings of a person
34
Mencius, VI, 272.
35
Confucius says: “Clever talk and pretentious manner are seldom found in ren.” (Analects,
I, 48); “Clever talk, a pretentious manner, and a reverence that is only of the feet—Zuo Qiuming
was incapable of stooping to them, and I too could never stoop to them.” (V, 82); “Is ren indeed
so far away? If I desire to have ren, ren arrives.” (VII, 100); “Fan Chi asks about ren, the Master
says, a man of ren loves man.” (XII, 139); “The painting comes after the groundwork.” (III, 63),
etc.

12. Rui Zhu12
whose moral actions amount to nothing more than outward manifestations of
those feelings. Confucius deems that keeping one’s outer manners consistent
with his internal feelings, a consistency called by Confucius “uprightness,” is a
premise of utmost importance for moral cultivation. Confucius has no tolerance
of a person who is not upright, namely, a person who acts in concealment of
what is inside of him: “How can we call Wei Sheng Gao upright? When someone
asked him for vinegar he went and begged it from the people next door, and then
gave it as though it were his own gift.”36
Wei Sheng Gao is a sycophant in the
sense that he does good just for good’s sake, in an attempt to conceal the fact that
he is unable to do the good (when he does not have vinegar). If one does not have
the right feeling, which is the most crucial factor indicating his behavioral po-
tency for Confucius, one should not act merely for the sake of good despite his
feeling. In a community it is impossible for someone to like everyone; if he
follows his genuine emotion, he would naturally befriend some folks and dis-
tance or antagonize some others. Confucius calls someone who is well liked by
everyone in his community as “the spoiler of virtue.”37
3. The Confucian ethics takes family love as the root of love for other people
and the foundation of overall morality. Confucian moral cultivation is a process
of extending your feeling from within to without and from yourself to other
people. This process of extending has two aspects:zhong (loyalty) andshu (con-
sideration). The maxim zhong (loyalty) means the positive extending: if you
want to obtain something for yourself, obtain it for others; the maxim of shu is
the negative extending: never do unto others what you do not want others to do
unto you.38
According to Confucius, his whole doctrine amounts to just the ways
of zhong and shu.39
In order for extending to be possible there must be some-
thing to be extended. A Confucian cannot avail himself of a divine order such as
the one set up by Zeus in the Greek world (or a supreme will such as that of God
in Christian ethics), since Confucius professes no interest in gods and spirits.40
A Confucian extends his natural love, his “four buds of innate feelings of hu-
manity,”41
and ultimately his love derived from biological bonds. The natural
bond between father and son is the starting point of a person’s moral cultivation
and the solar energy powering other moral relations, for it is by this relation that
they are made possible. Master You, a student of Confucius, puts this matter
into explicit terms:
36
Ibid., V, 82.
37
Ibid., XVII, 179; see also, XIII, 147.
38
Ibid., VI, 92 (on zhong); XV, 166 (on shu).
39
Ibid., IV, 72.
40
Ibid., XI, 125; VI, 89; VII, 98.
41
Mencius, III, 238, calls feelings a man is born to have; namely, sympathy, shame, yield-
ing, right or wrong, as “four buds,” whose extension and cultivation determine a person’s moral
virtue.

13. 13What if the Father Commits a Crime?
Those who in private life behave well towards their parents and elder
brothers, in public life seldom show a disposition to resist the authority
of their superiors.... It is upon the trunk that a gentleman works. When
that is firmly set up, the Way grows. And surely proper behavior to-
wards parents and elder brothers is the trunk of Goodness?42
It is important to note that one loves his father not so much because he deserves
to be respected as because cultivating this love is the determining factor in the
success of his own moral endeavors. You love primarily not for the sake of your
father but for the sake of your own welfare. This shift of weight has two implica-
tions in Confucian ethics.
Firstly, a dishonored or dishonorable father is no excuse for his son not to
love him. A good part of Mencius’s teaching spins off from his discussion of how
Shun, the Sage-king, deals with his “sinuous-minded” father, Gu-sou.43
Although
Gu-sou conspires with Shun’s brother to abuse and even kill Shun, Shun laments
for his misfortune but loves his father to no lesser degree. Confucius and Mencius
urge people to maintain family love despite internal frictions, because family
love is what morality eventually amounts to. The unbalanced tolerance Confucius
and Mencius show toward an evil father, in contrast to their criticism of an evil
king, speaks volumes on the real concern of Confucian ethics. If a king is bad, he
deserves to be deserted by gentlemen (according to Confucius44
) or to be slaugh-
tered by his people (according to Mencius).45
The patriarchal authority breaks
down at this point—a father needs to be loved despite his evil, because one’s
relation to him symbolizes the entire realm of moral living; a bad king deserves to
be finished off despite his patriarchal authority over all his people.
Secondly (because one loves his father for his own virtue’s sake), one’s love
of father would dwindle to irrelevancy (to his moral cultivation) if he does not
nurture a feeling of love within himself. Confucius stresses that love of one’s
father is not an economic concept on how a son should support the livelihood of
his father. It is about respect: “ ‘Filial sons’ nowadays are people who see to it
that their parents get enough to eat. But even dogs and horses are cared for to that
extent. If there is no feeling of respect, wherein lies the difference?”46
Confucius
points out that the really difficult thing in serving one’s parents is the “demeanor”
(“se” in Chinese).47
Demeanor means a spontaneous outflow of genuine emo-
tions inside a person. If one serves his parents in the right way but is disgruntled
42
Analects, I, 47-48, translation from The Analects of Confucius, tr. Arthur Waley (New
York, 1989), 83.
43
See Mencius, IX, 303; XII, 359; VII, 287; etc.
44
Analects, V, 75, 77.
45
Mencius, II, 221.
46
Analects, II, 56, translation from Arthur Waley, 89.
47
Ibid.

14. Rui Zhu14
within, he does not have the right demeanor. To do right things is not that diffi-
cult. It is much more difficult to maintain a good and healthy emotion towards
your folks and beyond.
Filial love is thus the governing principle in the Confucian ethics. That fam-
ily is the base unit of a society explains why social obligations come after family
duty. That moral emotion is more important than moral action accounts for why
love is the highest end of a virtuous person. That filial love is the extending base
of all other loves, together with the two other reasons, establishes the maxim that
the nothing should be allowed to act as a spoiler of a carefully nurtured love
between family members.
The Demeanor
While the success of an individual’s moral cultivation largely hinges upon
how well he loves his parents inside his person, his demeanor towards them
takes on a dimension of theoretical importance, besides its obvious practical
relevancy to his virtue. This point could be illustrated by a simple comparison
between Plato and Confucius. Plato admonishes children to fear and respect
their fathers. Confucius urges children to nurture a subtle love for their parents.
Plato’s purpose is practical, for respect and fear on the part of a son would help
stabilize a family. If Plato fails to deliver his message, it only means a failure of
that message itself, but in no way endangers his theory of law and ethics. By
contrast Confucius’s interest is theoretical as well as practical. If it were a mat-
ter of chance for anyone truly to love his family members, Confucius’s view
would suffer from both theoretical infirmity and practical infeasibility. For this
reason, how to cultivate a good demeanor between father and son on the regular
and everyday basis becomes an issue of ponderous gravity.
Neither Confucius nor Mencius harbors much illusion about the subtle na-
ture of the father-son love, but its importance dictates that it cannot be left to
chance. There is an interesting passage in Analects that has apparently inspired
Mencius. Benefited by a conversation with Confucius’s son, Bo-yu, Chen-kang
notices that Confucius twice dismissed his son during a period before his son
learns what he ought to learn, the Odes and the rituals, in this case. Chen-kang
is described as going away delighted, saying, “I asked about one point, but got
information about three. I learnt about the Odes, about the rituals, and also
learnt that a gentleman keeps his son at a distance.”48
While it is debatable whether or not Chen-kang’s understanding is accurate,
Mencius not only adopts but also expands Chen-kang’s view. According to
Mencius, a father should never educate his own son, for education is a rectifying
process, with disciplinary actions as its necessary components. If a son makes a
mistake, his father has to criticize him; on seeing no effect, the father would
48
Ibid., XVI, 173-74, translation modified based on Arthur Waley, 207-8.

15. 15What if the Father Commits a Crime?
naturally become frustrated and angry. If that happens, their relation would turn
sour. Mindful of this danger, Mencius propagates his view, based on a historical
observation: “In ancient times, people exchange their sons to educate. Between
father and son there should not be any rectification. Rectifying creates fissure.
Nothing is more ominous than a fissure between father and son.”49
For Mencius,
constricting personal space of moral freedom, as required by private tutoring,
could bring a son in contradiction to his father. So, as Chen-kang observes, a
wise man keeps his son at a distance. Although the doctrine that a father should
not teach his son is attributable to Mencius’s creativity, the spirit of its careful
approach is consistent with Confucius’s general stance. Confucius wishes, as an
acknowledgment of the fact that proper affection and proper distance are mutu-
ally complementing, that relations between gentlemen be kept as light as water.
While a father is advised to keep his son at a certain distance (morally or
physically, or both), Confucius stresses that, with regard to proper demeanor on
the part of a son, he should not thwart (bu-wei, no-thwarting) his father at any
time. The word “no-thwarting” has a subtle shade of meaning, illuminated by
comparing the attitude of no-thwarting to that of “following” (cong). A son who
follows his father would have to carry out his command whenever it is issued,
regardless of its merit or demerit. By contrast a son who sees his father’s lapse
but does not thwart him would wait for the best occasion to appeal to his reason.
He would not either impose on his father or obey his father blindly. Confucius
never asks anyone to follow his father blindly, but he twice brings up the point of
no-thwarting: “In serving his father and mother a man may gently remonstrate
with them. But if he sees that he has failed to change their opinion, he should
resume an attitude of deference and not thwart them; may feel discouraged, but
not resentful.”50
Confucius’s message is the same as that of Mencius—a son does not thwart
his father despite the discrepancy of their views because a subtle love between
father and son needs to be maintained at all times. The father-son love is the
Archimedes’ point of an individual’s life and of the pyramid of the overall moral
order. The way Confucius and Mencius handle the relation reminds one of Lao-
zi’s description of the only proper way to handle a big nation: it is like frying
small fish.51
Socrates and Confucius
A son ought to bear witness against his father, according to the early Greek
ethics, when the circumstance becomes necessary for him to represent justice.
49
Mencius, VII, 284, for reference also see, VIII, 299.
50
Analects, IV, 73; also see II, 55: “Meng-yi-zi asks about filial piety. Master replies: no-
thwarting.” Translation based on Arthur Waley, II, 88; IV, 105.
51
Lao-zi, ch. 60.

16. Rui Zhu16
Justice represents divine value reflected on earth, and should not be wronged for
the sake of any human reason. Although a son should respect his father, the
social ranks or family status of people become less important when the matters
touch on issues of gods. Indeed, a father is a commanding figure to his Greek
son and gods are known to be on the side of his father most of the time. Just as
humans should respect and fear the power of gods, so a son should respect and
fear the power of his father. In the ancient Greek world, love, or affectionate
emotions of the similar kind, is remarkably off the center of most ethical theories
on the relation of father and son. Greeks are in general more proud of being a
citizen of a polis than being a son of someone. They live first as citizens, under
the providence of a city god, and uphold justice and rationality as their motto.
But the early Confucian ethics departs from the Greek in some important
ways. It is deliberately secular, harboring no interest in divine affairs. Man is the
center of Confucianism. Healthy emotions of men are extolled as genuine ex-
pressions of the highest end of human virtue. The teleological function of moral-
ity is not to stifle emotion in general but to nurture the refined and proper and to
restrain the coarse and excessive. Since a society is founded on families (the
society would be sapped of life and would thin into a ghostly apparition, if it was
devoid of the reality of functioning families), people’s social relations are mod-
eled after family relations, which is in turn modeled after the relation of father
and son, with this latter relation blooming from a subtle but warm emotion in the
deep recess of an individual’s person.52
A man should start his living by cultivat-
ing that emotion, first towards his father and mother and then to brothers, friends
and people beyond. As the first and defining piece of the Confucian edifice, the
father-son relation demands meticulous nourishment, whose priority must not
be overtaken by any other relation or duty. A father should protect his son and
vice versa, if any of them is guilty. A man who bears witness against his family
member shows that he is either inherently evil (since he lacks good feeling to
even his closest folks) or a “sycophant” who betrays uprightness by seeking
goodjudgmentwhilecompromisinghisloveofhisbeloved.ThatiswhyConfucius
proclaims that, as quoted in the beginning of the paper, there is “a sort of up-
rightness” involved if a father or son protects the other party, despite the fact
that he is guilty.
52
As a matter of fact, someone could object, a Confucian son often fears and respects his
father just as much as a Greek son does. This is indeed to some degree true, and it is something
Confucius and Mencius may have unintentionally helped to bring about by emphasizing dis-
tance and demeanor. But this only means the theoretical differences are not always reflected in
reality. The Confucian ethic of love is much more idealistic than the Platonic realism. The
similarity between the two social realities magnifies the difference between the two ethical
doctrines.

17. 17What if the Father Commits a Crime?
Looking through the differences between the early Greek and Confucian eth-
ics, we now have a more accurate picture of the significance of the remarks of
Socrates and Confucius. Socrates’ reserved response to Euthyphro turns out to
be more controversial than it seems, particularly if he means that no one should
prosecute his father,53
due to the fact that there is a strong theme in Greek tradi-
tion that is largely on Euthyphro’s side. Judging from the ethical tradition of the
epic and the pre-Socratic eras, Euthyphro is far from a convenient narrative
device whose role is the devil’s advocate; instead he is, notwithstanding his moral
hubris, a spokesperson for a long-standing theme of justice in Greek history. The
Socratic indirectness (challenging Euthyphro’s manner of action instead of ac-
tion per se) in this case stems more from his respect for the tradition that Euthyphro
represents, than from his usual pedagogical style.
Confucius’s lack of qualms over the possible bad spillover of his absolute
demand for mutual cover-up from father and son turns out to be exactly the way
it ought to be in the spirit of Confucian ethics. Perceived from the perspective of
the overall Confucian ethical system, Confucius’s rigid disapproval of an act of
the Euthyphroian nature is necessitated by that system’s need for an absolute
moral foundation. If Confucian ethics has any hope of being practically feasible
and theoretically coherent, it must dictate a categorical prohibition of any kind of
father-son clash. Confucius’s un-Socratic explicitness and inflexibility symbol-
ize a matter not just of style but of philosophy.
The situations in which Socrates and Confucius find themselves are quite
different. Socrates faces a tradition which upholds justice above a son’s filial
loyalty and appears to be responsible for Euthyphro’s rash behavior. Socrates
wants to temper that theme with wisdom and caution. Confucius is faced with the
task of establishing a tradition at its inception. While Socrates stands at the end
of an era, Confucius is at a beginning of one. He is concerned with how to build
and to consolidate a moral foundation (love in this case) so that it could support
the entire system of Confucian morals. In a sense Socrates ends a tradition by
being moderate, and Confucius starts a tradition by being strong and adamant.
Southwest Texas State University.
53
If we interpret the Socratic stance as an absolute disapproval of prosecution of the father,
in the same way we read Confucius’s message [on the reason that no one is truly wise, according
to Socrates from Apology], Socrates would appear almost a radical from the traditional Greek
perspective.