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Confucian Ideas In The Chinese Mind Underlying Moral Decision Making
Baoqi SU*
* Ph. D. Candidate, Graduate School of Integrative Environmental Sciences, University of TsukubaInstitute of Biological Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba Science City 305-8572, JAPAN
The traditional Confucian culture has been considered to be representative of Chinese culture, and it has directed social, educational, and moral actions in Chinese society for more than two thousand years. The ancient Chinese medical ethics was also established on the foundation of Confucian ethics. This paper starts with examining Confucian ideas of "a moral person", which is expressed of a Junzi (the moral person or the superior man).
The Confucian conception of "person" is important to understanding the way people resolve moral dilemmas of practical medical issues in contemporary Chinese society. Some of the important implications, such as the moral status of the fetus, abortion, death, physician-patient-family relationships, and finally "medicine as an art of humaneness" are given as examples in the second part of this paper.
This paper concludes that Confucian views in facing new bioethics issues brought about by recent advances in medicine could be seen as offering important contributions to the ongoing development of Chinese society. The Confucian thoughts should not be ignored even though the solutions of contemporary China's bioethics dilemmas cannot be found only in the historical dimension, because they are fundamental constructs to what we might call the "Chinese mind".Keywords: Confucian ideas, Mind, Genetics, Bioethics, China
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