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According to Mencius, humanity and intimate love are applied to things of different orders: while a gentleman is humane to whole mankind, he owes special filial duty only to his family members.
Humanity for ordinary people (Ren Min) lies between the intimate love for one’s kin (Qin Qin) and the general care for things (Ai Wu): although humanity is above ordinary care for things, it does not carry with it the unique emotional feeling for one’s kin.For Mencius, indeed, the Mohist universalization of social relationship is to ignore one’s parents (wu fu), a fault no less grave than that committed by its egocentric opposite, the Yangist denial of all social duties (which leads to the neglect of one’s king, wu jun).
To the Confucianists generally, it would be against human nature to prescribe such universal Christian command as“You should love your neighbor as yourself”.
Among other things, love as an intense emotional feeling and obligatory commitment is necessarily limited only to a few, to whom one owes his/her special debt (parents) or who otherwise occupy prominent places in one’s family life (husband, wife, children, and other close relatives).Yet, if intimate love is to be restricted to one’s family and cannot be universalized, general respect as a personal attitude is not constrained by such physical limit, and can be reasonably required to extend over all members of society.
V.Conclusions
To sum up, the Confucian view of human dignity presupposes the potential virtues equally endowed by every human being and their irreplaceable value.Under this view, everyone has the basic dignity due to these innate virtues and deserves some respect.A Confucian gentleman, to be sure, is a person who consciously cultivates, practices and displays his virtues, and his dignified appearance invites general respect.He not only always seeks to perfect his own virtues, but also help others, within his ability, to improve theirs.Although the respect to a particular individual can be made proportional to the extent to which s/he has actually acquired human virtues, the innate human potentials, which constitute the irreducible core of human dignity, entitle everyone to at least a minimum respect.In this sense even an infant has as much innate dignity as any adult, and should receive only those treatments that will help her to develop the inborn potentials as she grows up.A criminal also has the same innate dignity, even though it is manifestly contradicted by his grievous behavior; but even he should be treated in such a manner as to help him to recover his innate virtues and to see the worth in himself, so that he becomes able to develop them on his own initiative.The legitimate actions of a state, society, or private persons are limited to those that do not inhibit anyone from attaining one’s full dignity.
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