1 Introduction

The nature of the Analects raises important questions regarding what it

means to read it responsibly, what it means to be guided by it. While it is
surely true that the best sorts of books retain a suggestively open character,
the Analects permits an unusually generous set of possible, and indeed plau-
sible, directions for inquiry. The text itself seems indirectly to acknowledge
this. In describing his teaching, Confucius avers that he provides but “one
corner” and invites the student to infer the other three.1 To the extent that
Confucius’ claim about his teaching applies to the text itself, the reader has
work she is charged to do. She must complete the square. What I wish to do
in this study may in some measure be understood as an effort to make this
shape, to complete the square I believe suggested by the text. However, it is
perhaps more accurate to characterize what follows as a struggle with the
“one corner.” As Confucius’ claim suggests, the shape we achieve in learn-
ing will depend upon where we begin. The “corner” presumably marks a
boundary and circumscribes the shape one may make, yet the corner itself,
the starting point, is not clearly marked.
Because the Analects largely lacks the signals that would unambigu-
ously direct us to its purposes, the reader is perhaps more than typically
directed by her own interests. Given what the text offers about the need
to devise appropriate conclusions through our own efforts, such is less a
liberty one takes with the text than a necessary element of reading it. How-
ever, I believe that the interests that motivate our efforts to complete what
Confucius offers also often inform where we begin. What is the corner the
text provides? Confucius does not say. Nor do the text’s authors. Thus even
where we strive to follow faithfully what the text suggests, the fi rst inter-
pretive challenge consists in locating the corner, or at least a corner, from
which to begin. My interest, the sort of corner I seek, is self-consciously
theoretical. That is, I wish to discern a governing logic that renders the
Analects’ compelling moral sensibility intelligible as moral theory. Before
I sketch what this entails, I wish simply to distinguish this sort of reading
from other approaches and, in so doing, address some of the methodologi-
cal elements in what I offer.
Given the structure and composition of the Analects, there are many
obstacles to identifying a governing logic of the text. 2 While I do not
ignore these obstacles in what follows, I nonetheless seek to articulate a
2 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
general understanding of the text that largely sets aside issues concerning
the authorship or dating of individual passages. I wish, in short, to treat
the text as a received text, a text historically presented to readers as con-
taining if not a wholly unified vision, a generally intelligible and coher-
ent vision. In adopting such an approach, I do not discount the worth of
efforts to parse the text’s historical strata in order to distinguish features
of its composition and locate what may be diverse commitments in evi-
dence in them. Indeed, I see such an approach as complementary rather
than competing. Like all complex texts, the Analects invites a diversity
of interests and methodological approaches; our sense of it would surely
suffer impoverishment were we to insist upon only one. The Analects can,
for example, illuminate much about early Chinese history, hagiography,
text composition, and political culture. While it is unlikely that any single
account can well fit all that the Analects offers, it has operated through
millennia of Chinese history and more recently in the west as a source of
moral insight. Whatever else it may also be, it is a work of moral philoso-
phy and it is in this way I shall treat it.
The moral philosophy presented in the Analects and, more generally,
traditionally assigned to Confucius has of course generated a sizeable cor-
pus of work. This work ranges from ostensibly straightforward commen-
tary on the Analects to treatments that self-consciously aim to elaborate
upon what the text alone can offer. In what follows, I hew narrowly to the
text itself, largely foregoing the supplements of later Confucian tradition.
Here too while there are a plurality of possible and valuable approaches,
I want, insofar as possible, to treat the text in a most basic fashion as a
singular text.
While I largely abjure analysis of compositional issues or consideration
of the later Confucian tradition, the presentation I provide does self-
consciously distinguish two distinct, and in some ways separable, ways
of reading the text: as a moral manual and as moral theory.3 Qua moral
manual, the Analects operates as a compendium of practical and direct
moral advice. It observes a variety of human circumstances, asserts values
that can govern responses to such circumstances, and recommends strate-
gies for navigating common areas of human experience. It suggests ways
to direct our feelings toward others, toward events, and toward ourselves.
It provides rules of thumb by which to operate, examples to consider and
appropriate, and a progression of moral development to follow. In short,
the Analects provides a guide for living, serving as a handbook of sorts that
can assist anyone who wonders what to do, how to feel, or how to think
about the circumstances, people, and events of her life.
The historical influence of the Analects owes in no small measure to
its having been seen as an especially potent and effective manual, and it is
unambiguously clear that whatever else the text does, it aims to do just this,
to provide moral direction to its readers. When we approach the text in this
way, seeking from it a way of life that immediately answers to our concerns
 Introduction 3
and needs, the “corners” it offers are several. Where personal moral cul-
tivation is concerned, Confucius proposes a number of places one might
begin and suggests that deciding among them ought to be informed by self-
knowledge. There is a full complement of moral commitments or virtues
any earnest moral learner would seek to cultivate, but one or another might
provide a special focus based on her existing capacities, temperament, and
life circumstances. Thus while Confucius suggests that all moral learners
aim at ultimately making a defi nite shape, he also seems to expect that
the corners from which they begin may appropriately differ in accord with
conditions particular to them.4
To read the Analects as a moral manual is just to take it as providing a
way of life, a path toward self-cultivation. This sort of guidance is, how-
ever, distinct from moral theory and this distinction is critically impor-
tant in what follows. 5 We can initially distinguish the moral manual from
moral theory by observing that, most basically, one may follow the injunc-
tions and instructions a manual provides, and do so successfully, without
understanding why one enjoys success. This is clear if we consider the way
other sorts of manuals work. I may, for example, follow the instructions
provided in a do-it-yourself furniture guide and assemble a fi nished rock-
ing chair absent any specialist appreciation of the craft I undertake. I may
know little of the myriad types of wood, how the specific wood with which
I work characteristically responds to various techniques and treatments, or
understand the logic of assembling this part of the chair in advance of that.
I may not even entirely understand what I seek to build. I may, that is, set
out to make a chair like other rockers I have seen but have little idea what
physical principles are at work in preventing such chairs from tipping over
or collapsing. Nonetheless, despite my ignorance, having carefully applied
the instructions, I achieve a working rocker and may enjoy the fruits of
my labor.
So too, I think it clear that human beings can and do operate in accord
with moral instruction without ever appreciating why and how their efforts
yield success. They may thereby come to enjoy an enriched life, to achieve
harmonious relations with those they love, to fi nd a variety of satisfactions
otherwise unavailable. Yet even so, they may be hard pressed to adumbrate
abstract reasons why their lives are working or articulate more generally
what “working” in this context means. As my analogy implies, just as one
may craft a working rocking chair by following instructions, so too one
may craft a working life. Moreover, just as there is value in having a chair
that does not tip over, there is a similar value with life. And this is so
whether one can explain the logic at work or not.
Much of the Analects, I believe, can be understood to assign priority
to “not tipping over,” to achieving a “working” life. It is not, fi rst and
foremost, concerned with explaining the more abstruse elements of why
this piece of its moral structure attaches to that or with giving a complete
abstract or general account of a life that works. It operates most obviously,
4 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
in other words, as a manual. Nonetheless, like any manual, we expect it
that it offers the instruction it does informed by a certain, more robust
understanding. I may not know why my adherence to instructions yields
success, but I expect that the author of my instructions does. Indeed, I oper-
ate on some trust that she does, that she has good reasons for directing me
as she does. Thus while the Analects may not foreground its wider logic,
we expect that it has one, that there resides behind its various injunctions
and instructions a governing sense that addresses the why and how. In this
study, I propose a theoretical model that I think fits the moral direction the
Analects gives.
Approaching the text with a markedly theoretical interest requires
some important concessions and caveats. First, as is already implied, I
acknowledge that the desire to apply a theoretical model to the text is an
interest I self-consciously bring to it. And it is a specialized interest, one
I do not presuppose need be shared by any able reader of the Analects.
While human beings generally do, throughout their lives, reflect on moral
questions and engage in moral struggles, it is far less clear that they do,
or even should, reflect on or engage in moral theory. As is the case with
rocking chair assembly, we often need no elaborate explanation in order
to accomplish our ends. Moreover, I believe there is some risk in philoso-
phers protesting the importance of theory too ardently. I take it as a given
that the world is populated with many good people who have no explicit
moral theory and that their goodness suffers no insufficiency for this.
Philosophers, I worry, so emphasize theory that we often lose sight of this
or, more severely, simply deny this. We risk a bias against goodness unac-
companied by theory and thereby a disconnection from how morality
features in most human lives.
While the philosopher’s bias for theory perhaps provokes a general worry
about the craft of philosophy itself, I judge it particularly important to fore-
ground this concern in the case of the Analects. For the Analects does not
share this bias. As I previously noted, the text appears to function primarily
as a moral manual and, unlike some of the manuals in the western philo-
sophical corpus, it does not appear intended to offer conveniently abbre-
viated “reminders” of more elaborate and theoretical commitments. The
Analects is not akin to Epictetus’ Handbook, a work deliberately designed
to rehearse shortened and thus practically useful versions of the much
more elaborate Stoic arguments its users would have known. Moreover,
Confucius is no Socrates, worrying away at whether those who purport
to be good can vouchsafe their goodness through abstract understanding.
Instead Confucius seems to attend uncommonly closely to the capacity
of good people to inspire robust morality. He appears to fi nd ordinary,
“unphilosophical” goodness adequate to its purposes and to fi nd no insuf-
ficiency in it. As will become clear, my interpretation rests on just this, on
theory following the lived experience of goodness rather than serving as a
precondition for it. At this stage, however, it is enough to note that insofar
 Introduction 5
as more abstract arguments can be said to be at work in the text, they work
in ways somewhat hidden or implicit, informing the flow of instruction as
a sort of undercurrent below the surface.
If I am correct that the Analects most readily lends itself to treatment
as a moral manual, then the task of reading it for theory invites a series
of questions. Among the most salient are the methodological and motiva-
tional. That is, how should one proceed in reading a manual for theory?
Why undertake such a reading, given the risk of assigning a misplaced
emphasis not intended in the original? How ought we evaluate the outcome
of such an undertaking? I shall take these in series. My answers here are
necessarily preliminary.

FROM MANUAL TO THEORY

Perhaps the most obvious technique for moving from manual to theory is to
engage in a process of reverse engineering. We take the instructions offered,
examine them as individual elements and as a totality, plumb them for inti-
mations or suggestions of more theoretical commitments, incorporate what
we know and can discover about the context in which they are offered, and
fi nally devise the account that best takes measure of all of this. While such
a procedure would in no way be easy to follow, it nonetheless seems decep-
tive in its simplicity and embeds assumptions we may not wish to endorse.
A fi rst worry with this approach is that inferences from instruction to
theory may well go wrong on account of the manual’s mode of presentation.
Because Confucius clearly does on occasion tailor his claims to the needs
and capacities of his interlocutors, the generality and abstraction theory
requires may be frustrated by the particularity of circumstance. An appar-
ently general claim about, for example, the need for patient effort reads
differently where it is made to a notably impatient student. While the text
often does signal the circumstances in which Confucius’ claims are made
and to whom he makes them, we cannot be sure that some passages do not
deny us relevant context or that we know enough about Confucius’ various
interlocutors to understand the context that is offered. Consequently, there
is, and I suspect always will be, an importantly provisional and tentative
quality to the sorts of conclusions we can draw.
A second and deeper worry concerns the nature of inferential reasoning
more generally. The sorts of inferences I will fi nd clearest, most compelling,
and most sensible will rely not simply on what is before me, the text I seek
to interpret, but on myriad other elements as well. The language in which I
speak and reason, the traditions of thought and value I have inherited, and
the experiences that have shaped my intellect are but a few such elements.
Reasoning is not thereby wholly idiosyncratic and personal, but it is con-
ditioned in ways that render any simple reverse engineering of a classical
Chinese moral manual highly suspect. For the capacity to share inferences
6 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
may depend in important ways on sharing some signifi cant measure, if not
all, of the elements that structure and inform reasoning more generally, on
our being importantly like those we seek to understand. Put simply, there
is much debate in the literature about how much like us we can assume the
ancient Chinese to be. And, the more unlike us we suspect they are, the less
confident we should be that we can reliably draw implied commitments and
claims from what they explicitly say. Here too, then, we fi nd cause to hold
our conclusions somewhat lightly. Indeed, we may despair of making any
at all or at least of trusting any we do make. I shall shortly address why I
nonetheless think it worthwhile to try, but fi rst let me address what I think
a particularly important potential difference between us and the authors of
the Analects.
In undertaking this project, I join a host of other scholars who have
sought to articulate what underlying general commitments may inform and
structure the Analects. The methods employed by these scholars vary con-
siderably, but I think we all agree that there are wider commitments and
values in play in the Analects than those that are explicitly given, or at
least that the structure of the commitments and values explicitly averred
may be more elaborate than what is immediately apparent. A fundamental
question we all are obliged to consider, however, is whether any implied
commitments, or their implicit arrangement, rise to the level of what we
contemporaries would consider “moral theory.” In short, if we aim to move
from the instructional manual to theory, are we taking the text in a direc-
tion it does not naturally go?
I have likened the interpretive process of reading the Analects for theory
to reasoning from a particular set of do-it-yourself furniture instructions
to a wider understanding of furniture building. This analogy may work in
some respects. We do reasonably expect the author of our rocking chair
assembly instructions to operate upon, though not necessarily explicitly
give, a general wisdom about chairs and woodworking. Does she, however,
thereby possess a theory of chairs or woodworking? Indeed, does she need
a theory about chairs or woodworking? My own intuitions, with respect
to rocking chair makers at least, suggest that she may not and need not.
Wisdom—serviceable and even thoroughgoing wisdom—is not identical
to theoretical understanding, nor is theoretical understanding a necessary
condition for such wisdom. With respect to the Analects, however, I think
the case more complicated. That the text has a wisdom of the sort we would
ascribe to master rocking chair makers I take as a given, but whether the
text has an implicit moral theory or not will depend significantly on how
we defi ne moral theory and what criteria we expect theory to fulfi ll.
For the purposes of this book, I shall follow Linda Zagzebski in defi ning
moral theory as “an abstract structure that aims to simplify, systematize,
and justify our moral beliefs and practices.”6 My contention, however, is
not that the Analects has a moral theory in this sense. I think that in many
respects, our expectations of moral theory just are one of the significant
 Introduction 7
differences between ourselves and the authors of the Analects. As I argue
more extensively in Chapter 3, particularly where the justification of moral
practice is concerned, there is reason to think that the authors of the Ana-
lects simply will not have shared some of the concerns contemporary moral
theorists bring to their work. I nonetheless suggest that the text can be
understood to sufficiently fulfill the other conditions for theory—simpli-
fying and systematizing moral practices—in a way that allows the con-
temporary moral theorist to address her concerns with justification. Here
I simply wish to emphasize, in a necessarily preliminary and abbreviated
fashion, that there are important doubts regarding the Analects’ capacity
to directly yield a moral theory in the way we have come to expect or with
the elements we tend to assume.
All of the concerns I raise of course warrant much more detailed treat-
ment and this I seek to offer in the more elaborate arguments that follow.
Despite these initial concerns about both the nature of the Analects’ pre-
sentation and real historical and contextual issues, however, I judge the
Analects to give sufficient indications of a simplified and systematized logic
to make a theoretical study both possible and worth pursuing. The move
from manual to theory is, however, neither seamless nor historically secure.
I thus shall neither claim nor aspire to show that my account reverse engi-
neers the text in any strict sense. Indeed, I expect and hope that the result
will offer something new. My interests, as I have emphasized, are particular
and I will look to the text with those interests without presupposing their
priority for the text’s authors. To treat the text thus entails the acknowl-
edgement that I, as its reader, engage it as an individual for whom certain
questions are more pressing than others. In this, I am influenced by Mon-
taigne’s account of the student’s process in education:

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make
of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram.
Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and
blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His
education, work, and study aim only at forming this.7

This study has about it an undeniably “here and there” character. I “plunder”
the Analects in the hope of formulating what Montaigne calls “judgment”
and what I would here characterize as an account of moral practice that can
enliven and inform contemporary sensibilities. While some of the motiva-
tions for this study are surely evident already, let me address them explicitly.

WHY THEORY?

There may be some suspicion that, given all of the above, reading the Ana-
lects for theory is, to put it mildly, an odd endeavor. If we retain some
8 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
measure of skepticism that the authors of the text possess theory in a sense
we would readily recognize and, moreover, worry that an interest in theory
is a somewhat peculiar preoccupation of the contemporary philosopher
rather than an interest that is or need be more widely shared, why then
query the text’s potential for moral theory? Perhaps a complete answer
requires that I begin by acknowledging that one reason to do it is that it is
already being done. That is, there exists already a robust body of literature
that investigates the Analects’ potential for moral theory and this study
merely joins a scholarly conversation well underway. But this of course just
makes the question more general and invites us to wonder what motivates
the conversation. My own reasons, I suspect, reflect some of the same inter-
ests as many engaged in this work, but it is worth stating them plainly.
My own conviction is that there are some things the Analects does
exceptionally and unusually well. There are few texts in the philosophi-
cal corpus that succeed as well as the Analects at rendering a compelling
portrait of the moral contours of ordinary experience. The text presents
us with a beguiling philosophical hero of sorts, Confucius, but it gives
us him in a way that bears close affi nity to the way in which life more
immediately affords us our personal heroes, complete with undramatic,
prosaic moments and flashes of puzzling personality. It also speaks to our
most common troubles—for example, the deaths of parents and anxieties
about children—with a gravity that recognizes their significance for us.
It speaks to our most common joys, affi rming the pleasures of compan-
ionship among family and friends, suggesting not that these are ever and
always delight but that they more generally, and with all their complexity,
nourish our well-being. It speaks to the sense that our moral lives are often
conducted not in the raw tension of dramatic dilemmas, but in the delicate
and subtle interactions of daily intercourse with others. The Analects, in
short, attends uncommonly well and closely to just the sorts of value too
often elided, neglected, or even occasionally and self-consciously dismissed
in much of moral philosophy.8 To the extent that we care deeply about these
features of moral life and wish, in Montaigne’s idiom, to make a honey that
includes them, the Analects constitutes an especially rich and attractive
source of pollen.
Just as the Analects offers something distinctive to our moral reflec-
tions, so too does moral theory. While I shall of course have more to say
about what moral theory can contribute, a general sketch will include the
elements I have identified, such as simplifying, systematizing, and justi-
fying moral practice. As Zagzebski observes, a moral theory is, first and
foremost, an effort to lift from the confusion and complexity of experience
an abstract structure that describes, in general terms, the moral domain.9
Unlike a moral manual, it is not most immediately concerned with provid-
ing direction, but instead aims to survey, explain, and interconnect the ele-
ments that inform direction. The most immediate function of moral theory,
then, is to provide an account of the “how” and “why” of actual moral
 Introduction 9
practices and beliefs, illuminating broad values implicitly sanctioned by
our moral activities and commitments, relationships between these values,
and the ways in which these values attach to more basic features of our
experience. Less directly, moral theory can serve as the prompt to revise
moral practice. For what we discover about moral practices by its offices
may reveal heretofore unnoticed tensions or elisions that the necessarily
more complex in situ nature of moral practice conceals. We may fi nd that
those values we enact in practice are incompletely or poorly expressed by
what we do, bear relation to other values that would modify our manner of
expressing them, or otherwise require alteration based on what reflection
on their general nature has disclosed. In sum, the value of moral theory
resides in its capacity both to explain ourselves to ourselves and to change
ourselves in response to what our explanations disclose.
In aiming to address the Analects from the perspective afforded by moral
theory, I operate upon the joint assumptions that moral theory can explain
moral experience in important ways and that the Analects depicts features
of moral experience that are particularly important to us. Where moral
theory aims to survey broadly the moral domain, the Analects points us to
features of that domain that I believe require better theoretical expression
than they have so far been given. In applying theory to this text, then, I trust
that whether we ever understand it in its own right, our effort to under-
stand it from our own perhaps peculiar or idiosyncratic vantage promises
to show us something enriched.

EVALUATING THE MOVE FROM MANUAL TO THEORY

As the foregoing reflections suggest, evaluating the success of a theoretical

model of the Analects cannot simply reference whether or not the model
gets the Analects “right” or, more precisely, presents an historically accu-
rate representation of the text’s moral logic. This is a standard perhaps
impossible to meet and it is not, at any rate, what I seek to provide. None-
theless, I do expect that one test of this account will be the extent to which
it allows us to make sense of the text, both as a comprehensive whole and
with respect to how well its various aspects seam together. The sense we
thus make may not mirror that of its authors, but neither should it go mark-
edly astray from or actively distort what they offer. It should, in the idiom of
the Analects itself, keep warm the old while appreciating the new (2.11).
To “keep warm the old” in my account will mean simply to aim at a rea-
sonable fidelity to the text, and in particular to what I would characterize
as its “spirit” rather than its “letter.” The “letter” of the text is of course
in some ways opaque, but it is also clear in ways we wish it were not. Like
many ancient texts, the Analects appears to endorse, for example, perni-
cious perspectives on gender.10 We do well to recognize such perspectives
and consider carefully the ways in which they may compromise the utility
10 Moral Exemplars in the Analects
of the text for our own moral reasoning. In my account, I will not directly
address such issues, but my fidelity to the text will aim at preserving those
parts of the Analects I judge to suffer least from such concerns. I will, that
is, strive to “keep warm” the elements of the text that can speak effectively
to an audience like ourselves and allow to “grow cold” those historical ele-
ments that cannot.
To “appreciate the new” in my account will entail, as I have described,
bringing my own interests and the instruments of contemporary moral the-
ory to bear on the text’s sensibility. In this, I aim at meeting a standard of
usefulness. While I believe that the Analects can, on its own and in its own
right, speak to a contemporary audience in compelling ways, I seek in some
ways to amplify its voice and broaden its vocal range. The result, I hope, will
provide both a new manner of reading the text and, with this, a new way of
applying the Analects’ insights to our own philosophical circumstances.

EXEMPLARISM

Given reasonable doubts about whether the Analects has, simpliciter, a

moral theory, it may be too much to hope that we can fi nd a corner from
which to begin making the shape of a moral theory. Nonetheless, I want to
suggest that the text is fashioned in such a way to recommend one distinc-
tively compelling possibility: its exemplars. Where we look to the text as a
manual, the guidance it offers often consists in the recommendation that
we seek to emulate notable others or, in the alternative, avoid emulating
notorious others. Indeed, I suspect it would be difficult to apply the Ana-
lects’ moral instruction in one’s own moral development absent the element
of emulation. Many of the text’s more abstract moral recommendations,
moreover, come to vivid life in the text, as the authors present us with nar-
rative accounts depicting the text’s various dramatic personae engaged in
moral activity. I wish to argue that these exemplars and narrative figures,
the people the text describes and enjoins us to take as models, constitute
the “one corner” from which we can infer the wider logic of the text and
construct a robust moral theory.
Many scholars of the Analects recognize the formidable role played
by the moral exemplars depicted in the text. The Analects’ treatment of
moral learning assigns high significance to the force and efficacy of emula-
tion of exemplars, and there are few who write about the Analects’ ethical
vision without making some appeal to its exemplars, and to Confucius in
particular. As Donald Munro observes, the early Confucians considered
emulation “not just one way of learning; it was by far the most efficient
way, and one could inculcate any virtuous behavior in people by present-
ing the right model.”11 More recently, Sor-hoon Tan has analyzed the role
of exemplars in the text and observes that the prevalence and vivacity of
moral exemplars in the Analects indicates a robust commitment to a moral
 Introduction 11
psychology in which imagination plays a signal role.12 The text’s presenta-
tion of “paradigmatic characters” implicitly enjoins the moral learner to
engage her imaginative powers, powers that are, Tan observes, often more
important for moral learning than reasoning: “Rational argumentation
is secondary to the presentation of paradigmatic characters to move us
to emulate them. Imagination is crucial to the process of understanding
because it is able to give more weight to particularities and because of its
closer relation to the emotions and desires.”13 Tan’s argument rests on
the observation that the self cultivation both endorsed and modeled in
the Analects requires a willingness on the part of the moral learner to be
commanded by exemplary others, to fi nd the full complement of human
capacities—from emotion to desire to understanding—engaged by her
imaginative identification with them.
What I offer here may be understood in some measure to press Mun-
ro’s and Tan’s suggestions further. Where their focus is largely the role
of the exemplar in personal cultivation and moral learning, I suggest for
the exemplar a role more ambitious still. The exemplars of the Analects,
I maintain, can be counted the origin of a theoretical vision. From them,
the text’s various moral conceptual schemata emerge. In making this sug-
gestion, I am much influenced by the recent work of Linda Zagzebski, who
argues that moral theory more generally can be grounded in our responses
to exemplary moral figures. While Zagzebski’s work aims ultimately to
provide a distinctively Christian exemplarist virtue ethic, I believe its appli-
cation to the Analects promises fruitful insight. Indeed, I believe it stands
to render explicit what many readers of the Analects intuitively apprehend:
The moral exemplars of the Analects are not merely important, but indis-
pensable and necessary to its ethical vision.