Between the Family and the State: The Common Good and the Confucian Habits of the Heart

There are many ways of approaching the topic of the common good. The approach of Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues is more useful for this chapter because their discourse of the common good is deeply embedded in social analysis. It seems to me that a Sino-American dialogue on the common good will be more focused and less likely to talk past one another if our discussions are equally grounded in social analysis. I am not a sociologist but an observer of China, and I read social scientists’ works on China. As a result of the emergence of the global economy and China’s increasing integration into this economy, the moral-social symptoms of the diseases of American as well as Chinese societies unsurprisingly overlap in many ways. Hence, America and China can learn from one another in the ways that promote the common good in our respective societies.