Conf%cianand Feminist Perspectives on the Self 77

riety of ways; can a highly insensitive person perceive accurately what the
categorical imperative requires, or what will truly bring the greatest happi-
ness to Chc greatcst number, or whac it means to genuinely respect the rigl~ts
of others?
In all probability the answer to these questions is "no," thus underlining
Anneclc Bairr's claim &at without presupposing &c concept of t r g s ~uni-,
versalist moral theory will ensure only that human

life will be nasty, emotionally poor, and worse than brutisli (even if tongcr), if
tillat is afI morality is, or even if that: coercive stmcture of morality is regarded as
the backbone, rather elian as an available crutcli, should the main support fail.
For the main support: has to come from those we entmst with the job of rearing
and training persons so that they can be trusted in various ways,. . . A, very
cuinplex network of a great variety of sorts of trust stmctures our moral rela-
tionships with our fettows, and if there is a main support to this network it is
the trust wc place in eliose who respond to elic trust of new members of the
rnorai community, namely to children, and prepare them for new Esrrns of
tmst.23

A final remark on particularism, linking it to the religious: Can the moral

lead to the spiritual, and the secular to the sacred!ll I do not believe that Con-
fucius worried only about one's obligations toward specific others. O n the
contrary, I believe he had a strong sense of empathy with, and a concept of,
humanky writ large.
All of tbe specific human relations of which W are a pare, interacting Miich
the dead as well as the living, will be mediated by the courtesy, customs, rit-
uals, and traditions we come to share as our inextricably linked histories (the
Zzi unfold; and by fulfilling the obligations defined by chcsc relationships we
are, as the early Gonl'ucians wuuld have seal us, following the human way. It
is a colrlyrehcnsive way. By the manner in which we interact with others our
Iivcs will clearly have a moraI dimension iniusing nll, not just some, of our
conduct. By the ways in which this ethical interpersonal conduct is effected,
with reciprocity, and governed by civility, respect, affection, custom, ritual,
and tradition, our lives wiIl also have an acstl-retic dimension for ourselves
and for others. And, again, as the early Confucians would have seen us, by
specifically meeting our defining traditional obligations to our elder and an-
cestors on the one hand, and to our contemporaries and descendants on &c
other, we undergo an uncommon yet spiritually authentic form of transcen-
dence, a human capacity to go beyond the specific spatiotemporal circum-
stances in which we exist, giving our personhood a sense of humanity shared
in common, and thereby a sense of strong continuity wirh what was gone
before and what will come later, and a concomitant commitment to leave this
earth in a better condition &an we found it. There befag no question for &c