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Contemporary Confucians are divided into Progressive Confucians (PCs) and Conservative Confucians (CCs). On moral and political issues, PCs embrace liberal values and argue either that those liberal values can be provided with Confucian justifications or that those liberal values can be complemented with some Confucian refinements. In contrast, CCs claim that liberal values are Western local values that are alien and not superior to Confucian values. Many PCs endorse liberal values by turning Confucianism into a version of liberalism. For them, rights and autonomy become the heart of Confucianism. Moral and political equality become the key features of Confucianism too. Fairness is identified as righteousness in Confucianism. Other PCs accept certain liberal values without embracing liberalism. Liberal values become part of a backup mechanism. In this paper I point out challenges for the above two subgroups of PCs. For the first subgroup, many key elements of Confucianism are incompatible with liberalism. For the second subgroup, liberal values are erosive and gradually eating away other elements of Confucianism. As a result, PCs are in a very difficult situation.

About the Speaker

Prof. Yong Li, (PhD, Satin Louis University), Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University, Associate Dean of School of Philosophy. Prof. Li works primarily in ethics and political philosophy, and focuses on Confucian ethics and comparative political

philosophy. He serves as a book review editor for Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, an associate editor for Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, co-editor for the Book Series Routledge Studies in Contemporary Chinese Philosophy. His recent book Moral Partiality was published by Routledge in 2023. His next book, Confucian Comparative Political Philosophy, is under contract with Routledge. His recent publications appear on International Philosophical Quarterly, Acta Analytica, Asian Philosophy, etc.