The philosophy that ran a state science for two thousand years, was blamed for its fall, and now answers bioethics from the family rather than the individual — Mr. Science’s oldest patron and most famous defendant.
Confucianism governed the world’s largest state science for two millennia: the astronomical bureau, the calendar, state medicine, and the examination system that made classical learning the road to office. Its epistemic virtue is zhī (knowing) ordered to chéng (sincerity) and to governance; its cosmology of resonance between heaven, earth, and ruler made astronomy a branch of statecraft and omens a department of government.
The tradition’s encounter with Western science was a national trauma and a slogan — the Self-Strengthening era’s formula ‘Chinese learning as essence, Western learning for use’ (tǐ-yòng) — followed by the May Fourth movement’s wholesale indictment of Confucius for China’s weakness and its enthronement of ‘Mr. Science’. Contemporary Confucian bioethics, an active scholarly field, works from family-based consent and relational personhood, producing positions on genetic decisions and end-of-life care that differ from liberal-individualist defaults in form as much as in content.
References
- Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (1954– )
- Ruiping Fan, Reconstructionist Confucianism (2010)