In the current academic year, Duke and DKU have both established separate but coordinated Harmony Labs, focusing on comparative philosophical approaches to human, social, gender, and ecological relationships. The Duke lab is funded by FHI, and the DKU lab is funded by the Houtu Research Fund and is located within the Humanities Research Center.
This project brings the work of the two labs together in the context of a workshop on Moral Emotions in Chinese and Greek Philosophy that the Duke lab is organizing for April 10-11. The workshop invites 7-10 world-leading specialists to present at the workshop, along with participants from Duke and the local area. With the generous support of the DKU-Duke Grant, the DKU harmony lab participates in this workshop and brings the fruits of our work over the past year on issues in gender and family in Confucian philosophy into dialog with the Duke lab and its proposed workshop.
The topic of moral emotions is significant for the work of the DKU lab because we have been assessing the value of the Confucian concept of “family feeling” (qinqing 亲情) in relation to filial piety (xiao孝) as foundational for Confucian moral thought. Rather than understanding the family first and foremost as a social structure, the Confucian project seeks to understand the family principally as a set of reciprocal feelings that are natural in origin, but which are shaped and expressed through ritual propriety. A key question for Confucian ethics, therefore, is the extent to which the traditional concept of the family is foundational for all morality, or whether it is possible to ground Confucian morality in relationships more broadly. Whereas the Western tradition discussed the question of whether it is possible to have ethics “after God,” contemporary Confucians are asking whether it is possible to have ethics “after the family.” Needless to say, this is a fraught cultural and political issue, given the declining birth rate across Confucian cultures in East Asia.
The DKU Team will present our research findings in the context of the Duke workshop and engage in discussions with our two Duke partners to extend our lab projects. The two student researchers from DKU, who have been closely involved in the research and writing process, will also participate in this workshop and provide an important perspective on the potential role of students in any future version of the lab.
