4.2 EMBRACING DESIRES

Let us now look at the writings of four thinkers who helped define the strand of the Confucian tradition which embraced desires as fundamental to moral flourishing. By focusing on these four, I simplify reality in several ways, since I ignore their predecessors, their contempo­rary critics, and numerous others who put forward similar views.^[66] I implied at the end of the previous section that one reason for pro-desire views was as a corrective to the extreme views of Song thinkers, espe­cially as interpreted and promulgated by power-holders.

I turn now to the four protagonists of this section’s narrative. Chen Que and Dai Zhen offer successively more sophisticated positive accounts of desire, while Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu put their recog­nitions of desire’s positive role in the context of the important tradition of statecraft thought, which itself plays a part in the origins of nineteenth­century Chinese rights discourse. After considering their various views, I will conclude with some reflections on the similarities and differences between this strand of Confucianism and rights discourse in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

4.2.1 Huang Zongxi

I begin with Huang Zongxi (1610-95) for two reasons. First, he serves to remind us of the problems that neo-Confucians can have with the con­cept of desire, since he is far from an unambiguous proponent of satisfy­ing one’s desires. Second, his views were among those most cited by the later thinkers whom I identify as early participants in rights discourse. His treatise on statecraft, Waiting for the Dawn, was widely circulated at the end of the nineteenth century, and his history of Ming-dynasty Con­fucianism was reissued in 1905 with a new introduction by one of the day’s leading reformers.^[68]

Before looking at Huang’s writings, I must make a brief digression to explain the term “statecraft (jingshi).” “Statecraft,” or more literally “ordering the world,” is the term used by neo-Confucians to denote a set of practical concerns with governance, geography, flood control, and other matters; it is contrasted to a variety of expressions which refer to more abstract teachings aimed primarily at personal moral improve­ment. Although statecraft thought flourished in the late Ming dynasty and throughout the Qing dynasty, it had antecedents at least as early as the Song dynasty.^[69] Its hallmark is to think through Confucian values and concerns from the perspective of their actual, practical effects; thinkers who identify themselves as committed to its precepts tend to write more about government policies than about ontological or epistemic matters. Many of its adherents have been rather sanguine about the role that desires and self-regard can play in human society. In the next chapter, we will see that statecraft concerns led to, among other things, the first efforts to translate Western writings about rights. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Back to Huang. At the very beginning of Waiting for the Dawn, he writes:

In the beginning of human life each man lived for himself (zisi) and looked to his own interests (zili).

Huang recognizes the importance of “benefit” quite explicitly: The problem prior to the rise of the first sage kings was not that people cared about benefit, but that “common benefit” was ignored. He also stresses that while living “for oneself” is a problem in one sense, it is nonetheless natural: Huang concludes this passage by reiterating that “to love ease and dislike strenuous labor has always been the natural inclination (qing) of man” [ibid.]. It is striking, in this regard, that Huang makes proper rulers out to be psychological oddities. Most people do not desire to put in extraordinary labors “without benefiting” themselves - and who can blame them? Huang even notes that of early worthies, some refused to become rulers, and others, including Yao and Shun, the most famous early sages of all, undertook ruling and then quit.

The rhetorical payoff of Huang’s characterization of rulers comes in the subsequent paragraphs, wherein he shows that more recent rulers have greedily amassed all power and benefit to themselves while their people shouldered all the harm.What they have done is natural, perhaps, but it negates the role that rulers were set up to fulfill, which is to promote the general good rather than their own individual good. Still, one can’t but wonder whether Huang’s argument would have been more convincing if he had allowed that rulers can enjoy benefit for themselves, but only to a proper degree.

4.2.2 Chen Que

If we turn to Chen Que (1604-77), a contemporary of Huang and in fact his fellow student, we will find a much more plausible psychological picture of sagehood than that adumbrated by Huang.^[70] A chief charac­teristic of Chen’s thought is its ability to explain how the actions of our everyday lives can be morally praiseworthy. In his essay “Scholars Take the Ordering of Life as Fundamental,” for instance, he analyzes the “ordering of life (zhisheng)” and explains its ethical significance. “The way of learning,” he explains, “is nothing peculiar; it is simply for those who have countries to preserve their countries, for those who have families to preserve their families, and for gentry (shi) to preserve their embodied selves (shen).” His explanation of “shen” shows why this should be so:

“Shen” does not refer [only] to one’s embodied self (shen). All the affairs of one’s parents, siblings, spouse, and children are affairs internal to one’s shen. They touch one’s very skin, and so such obligations can never be passed on to others. Thus meticulously ordering one’s life is the most fundamental concern of scholars. [Chen 1979a, p. 158]

Chen makes explicit what modern thinkers call the social dimension of the self. Preserving one’s shen requires preserving all those with whom one has significant relationships, since part of how I am doing turns on how my parents, for example, are doing. This is an “internal” matter to me. It is crucial to keep in mind, at the same time, that one’s most im­mediate affairs - one’s own hungers and desires, for instance - are inter­nal as well. Chen’s understanding of our psyches embraces both our commitments to others and our most basic commitments to our physical selves.

We see this even more strikingly when we turn to Chen’s essay “Dis­cussion of Self-Regard (Si Shuo).” Si, whose primary meaning is personal or self-regard, is typically derogatory in Confucian writings.

Chen avoids descending into some sort of selfish parochialism through his analysis of that in which genuine love, and thus genuine self-regard, consists. He contrasts the means by which ignorant parents raise children to those of virtuous parents [ibid., p. 258]. The former seek to satiate all their children’s desires, inevitably side with them when disputes arise with neighbors, love to hear their children praised, and become furious if their children are ever criticized. Chen says that these methods amount to cultivating haughtiness, hatred, and vice, while harming the child’s spleen and lungs (due to excessive food and clothing). Can this be called having true self-regard for one’s children?

Virtuous parents, on the other hand, keep their children from eating too much or dressing too warmly; Chen even says that such a parent will often, upon spying his child eating, snatch the food away. Parents should also make light of any praise their children receive, but take seriously all criticisms. The result will be children who will make daily strides toward virtue. “Can we deny,” Chen concludes, “that this is to have self-regard for one’s children?”

Chen’s reasoning runs as follows.

For what it is worth, I believe that Chen’s understanding of Shun comes much closer to what a classical Confucian like Mencius would have said, as can be seen, for instance, in Mencius’s repeated assertions that it is all right for kings to be “fond of musical entertainment” or “fond of money,” so long as the king “shares [this] fondness with the people.”^[71] That is, the king’s (natural) enjoyments are fine, so long as they are not indulged to the point that he devotes all the kingdom’s resources to his own enjoyment, leaving the people with nothing. Instead, the king should recognize that the people have the same desires as he does, and see that they are able to fulfill their desires, albeit not in exactly the same ways, or to the same degree, as he can.

Accurately interpreting Mencius would certainly have mattered to Chen: He was deeply concerned with rooting out the pernicious influ­ences - as he viewed them - of Buddhism and Daoism, which he saw as infecting all of Song- and Ming-dynasty Confucianism [Chow 1994, p. 54]. For our purposes, what matters still more is that the shape of Chen’s rather plausible psychological account is mirrored in the works of some of his contemporaries and picked up by subsequent thinkers, all of which contribute to the strand of neo-Confucianism with which I am here con­cerned. Let us look now at how these ideas are developed in a somewhat less abstract context: the statecraft writings of Gu Yanwu.

4.2.3 Gu Yanwu

Gu Yanwu (1613-82) was one of the leading intellectuals of his day. Though his official career was truncated thanks to his resistance to serving the Manchus who conquered China in 1644, he traveled and wrote widely. He is remembered for his stress on the importance of evidence and practical results - abstruse metaphysics had not saved his beloved Ming dynasty from defeat - and thus figures importantly in both the “statecraft (jingshi)” and “evidential learning (kaozhengxue)” strands of Confucianism. The latter focused primarily on reinterpreting classical texts, and need not concern us here; as I have noted earlier, the former is quite important to the developments I am tracking in this and subsequent chapters.^[72]

A pair of essays by Gu Yanwu nicely illustrates the tension between individual benefit and general good with which thinkers of his day were struggling. In “On Licentiates” he is harshly critical of the civil service examination system of his day, blaming many of China’s ills on a system that fosters self-interested officials and seems to encourage corruption. In “On the Prefecture-County System,” on the other hand, Gu argues that the chief faults of the current administrative system lie in not making adequate use of “self-regard (si).” On the surface the two essays seem to take diametrically opposed views on self-regard, the first blaming it and the second lamenting that it is not better used. Closer inspection will show that Gu is more consistent than this. The ultimate goal of the two essays - a world in which all flourish, free from abuses by superiors - is the same, and in each case, self-regard is seen as a crucial and legitimate means to that end.

The responsibilities that Gu believes licentiates (those who have passed local-level civil-service exams) should shoulder range from pro­viding moral and intellectual education for the young to taking admin­istrative posts and aiding the emperor in keeping the empire in order. Unfortunately, Gu observes that the members of this key group fail mis­erably at these tasks. Only rare exceptions can actually understand the classics, and those able to put this knowledge to use in service of the emperor are rarer still. Instead, Gu says these largely dissolute licenti­ates spend much of their time in raising lawsuits and neglecting their duties [Gu 1959b, p. 22]. The result is that the group is more and more severely disciplined, but even so it seems that everyone seeks the status of licentiate.

The crux of Gu’s analysis comes in explaining why the status is so sought-after. It is not that people aim to make a good name for them­selves, which would be an appropriate motivation; rather, they wish to “preserve their selves and families (bao shen jia)” from abuse and indig­nity at the hands of local petty officials. Gu can understand this motiva­tion, asking “Whose human feelings do not favor their selves and families?” The problem is that self-preservation was not the intended goal of the exam system, and when it is put to this purpose, it becomes perverted. Bribery and cheating are rampant, and the vast numbers of licentiates do no one any good.

Immediately after this discussion Gu again emphasizes that the problem is not with people’s desires to preserve themselves, writing that not even the sagely “former kings” could do away with people’s emo­tional commitment to their selves and family. Even if the legendary sages Yao and Shun were to rise again, they could not put an end to the bribery and cheating the present structure (fa) incites [1959b, p. 22]. Since seeking official status seems to be the only way to protect one’s family, Gu cannot really blame people for seeking, and then abusing, that status. His solution is two-pronged: He believes that the institution for selec­tion of officials must be changed so that the officials can serve their intended functions, and he hints that other structural changes are needed to remove the incentive to abuse government service. His primary concern in this article is the former, pursuant to which he proposes two reforms. The first is tightening the requirements for passing the exams, which should lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of successful candidates and to a concomitant improvement in their quality; the second is an increased use of personal recommendations, rather than exam success, as a means to official promotion. Neither of these is com­pletely unproblematic. Reducing the number of successful candidates would put still further strain on a system in which the vast majority of exam-takers failed repeatedly, most never succeeding at all [Elman 2000]. It is true that recommendations allow judgments to be made about moral character in ways that anonymous exams do not. For this to work, rather than to provide even more opportunities for abuse, would require existing officials to be scrupulous in making recommendations. As we will see in a moment, Gu believes that there is more than one way to ensure such scrupulousness.

More important for our purposes than reforms to the exam system are larger changes Gu only hints at here but makes explicit in “On the Pre­fecture-County System,” for unless the problems that motivated people to seek the licentiate’s status are solved, any reform of the exam system alone is doomed to failure. If official status is the only way to preserve oneself, that is, such status will be sought by all. At the center of “On the Prefecture-County System” is the idea that unlike the situation under the ancient feudal system, in which local notables were responsible first to the people of their region and only secondarily to central authorities, in the current prefecture-county system local officials owe their alle­giance almost entirely to the central government. They are under con­stant supervision by superiors and must seek to ensure that the superiors’ goals, chief among which is the collection of revenue for the central bureaucracy, are always met. The result, says Gu, is that local officials are forced to be cruel to their people, reaching the point that they are “unwilling to provide for their people a single day’s worth of benefit (li)” [Gu 1959a, p. 12].

It is easy to see that Gu is coming at the same set of problems that he saw leading to the abuse of the exam system, but this time looking for a more fundamental solution. The theoretical basis for his analysis will sound familiar, since it, too, relies on accepting and affirming people’s self-regarding emotions. Gu writes:

The constant emotions of all people under heaven are to care for their families and have self-regard for their children. Even before the Three Dynasties it was known that the Son of Heaven’s impulse on behalf of the people was not as strong as his desire to act on his own behalf. Sages make use of this, using the self-regard of all under heaven to bring about the impartiality (gong) of a single man, thus ensuring the orderly rule of the empire. [1959a, p. 15]

This passage bears comparison with Huang Zongxi’s criticism of rulers that we examined earlier. Whereas Huang believed that early rulers - and all good ones - were able to suppress their self-regard on behalf of the whole country, Gu says that from the first, rulers were more concerned with their own well-being than with that of the people. His solution is to work with this reality, using everyone’s self-regard in such a way that the actions of the “single man” (the emperor) come out impar­tially beneficial to all.

How is this to be achieved? In earlier sections of the essay, Gu urges that county magistrates be drawn from the local populace, rather than following the “rule of avoidance,” according to which officials are required not to serve in their home counties. Rather than seeking to make officials distant from - and therefore impartial toward - the people they administer, Gu believes that the opposite policy will bring the best results. Immediately following the just-quoted passage about “using the self-regard of all under heaven,” Gu explains:

If county magistrates should come to have self-regard for one hundred li of land [i.e., for a county], then the people of the county will all be as his kin and the lands of the county will all be as his fields.... Since he treats the people as his kin, he will certainly care for them and never harm them; since he treats the county’s lands as his fields, he will certainly order them and not allow them to be abandoned.... From the perspective of the magistrate, this is self­regard, but from the perspective of the son of heaven, who is con­cerned with the orderly rule of all under heaven, no more need be done than this. [1959a, p. 15]

In other words, if the emperor allows each region to be legitimately con­cerned with its own interests, the net result will be impartial concern for every region’s interests, and thus for the interests of the whole empire. It is left to the emperor, presumably, to balance competing interests, though the implicit assumption seems to be that the legitimate interests do not, in fact, conflict - a premise we shall meet repeatedly, and examine carefully, in subsequent chapters.

In a study of Gu’s view of self-interest, the contemporary scholar Cheng I-fan concludes that Gu has

completely abandoned following the old, Song Confucian route of impartiality (gong) to an ideal state and, to the contrary, he is fun­damentally indifferent to the self-regard in people’s natures. He also does not worry about conflicts between the benefits of the world’s people, so long as everyone’s self-regard is utilized in a set, system­atic fashion. If it is not wasted nor suppressed, the world will be ordered and peaceful. [Cheng 1984, p. 92]

This is a strong reading which immediately drew criticism.^[73]1 also believe that Cheng has somewhat overstated his case, but if we read Cheng’s interpretation charitably, we should conclude that he does not miss the mark by much. It is clear, even from the sections of “On the Prefecture­County System” that I have quoted, that Gu’s ultimate goal remains one in which the general good is well served and all people benefit, and that Gu sees this goal in terms of “impartiality (gong).” Still, in Cheng’s defense, Gu does not primarily advocate impartiality as a route to that end; careful and systematic employment of people’s feelings of self­regard is largely responsible for the ultimate achievement of impartial­ity. It is also true that while in “On Licentiates” Gu does say that self-regarding desires lead to the many problems he identifies with licen­tiates, we see that Gu does not condemn these desires themselves, but rather the social context in which they prompt so many people to seek to become licentiates.The doctrines of Gu’s two essays, that is, are largely consistent with each other and with Cheng’s characterization. The only qualification I would add is that in “On Licentiates” we do see hints of impartiality still being employed as a means, rather than simply as an end, in the ways that Gu characterizes the new licentiates that his reformed exam system will produce.

4.2.4 Dai Zhen

Dai Zhen (1723-77) was among the greatest philosophers of the Qing dynasty. He was one of the few thinkers of his time to combine the prac­tical focus of the statecraft school with more abstract speculation about moral psychology and human nature. He was harshly critical of Song­dynasty thinkers like Zhu Xi, arguing that their teachings had been tainted by Buddhist and Daoist ideas, and had thus lost touch with the values of Confucianism’s classical tradition. I believe that his criticisms are sometimes unfair or exaggerated, but at their core we see the finest expression of the new perspective on desires that this chapter has been following.

Dai succinctly expresses the core of his conception of desire when he writes, “whatever comes from desire is always for the sake of life and nurture.”^[74] Rhetorically, at least, this is a complete inversion of the Song thinkers’ tendency to see desires as first and foremost problematic. Dai certainly believes that desires can go too far, as we will see in a moment, but in their origins they are good, motivating us to seek things upon whose value all agree. Although Dai mainly uses “self-regard (si)” as a technical term for desiring too strongly, in some places he treats it simi­larly to “desire,” giving it a less technical gloss and seeing it at the core of humaneness:

Both self-regard for one’s embodied self (si yu shen) and extending [this self-regard] to those close to oneself are aspects of humane­ness. Self-regard for one’s embodied self is to be humane towards oneself; to extend [this self-regard] to those close to oneself is to be humane towards those who are close to one. [Dai 1995, p. 181; cf. Dai 1990a, p. 241, and Dai 1990b, p. 116]

The basis of self-regard is having desires for oneself: caring for and seeking to nurture oneself throughout one’s life. As is the case with desires themselves, that is, self-regard starts out aimed at universally valued ends. In this passage, in addition, Dai suggests that self-regard is actually an “aspect of humaneness.” Precisely what this means is a bit obscure; I think the following passage, now put in terms of desires, makes the point clear:

[Mencius understood that desires cannot be eliminated.] There can be no greater affliction in a human life than to lack the means to fulfill that life (sui qi sheng). If, desiring to fulfill one’s own life, one also fulfills the lives of others, this is humaneness. If, desiring to fulfill one’s own life, one reaches the point even of slaying others and paying no heed, this is inhumaneness. The inhumaneness actually begins with the desire to fulfill one’s life, and if there were no such desire, necessarily there would be no inhumaneness. But if there were no such desire, then one would also regard the affliction and distress of others in the world with indifference. It is impossible for one to feel that one’s own life need not be fulfilled and yet to fulfill the life of another. [Dai 1995, p. 159; cf. Dai 1990a, pp. 146-7, and Dai 1990b, p. 82]

The last two sentences make the crucial point: We must be motivated by our desires, else we will care neither about ourselves nor about others. Without desires - which is the same as saying without self-regard, in the sense of the prior passage - there can be no humaneness.

This is the clearest statement I have found in Dai’s writings of the shift that has occurred. We saw little in Zhu’s writings to suggest that desires were more than ineliminable: a part of our human nature, to be sure, but not critical to the process of self-cultivation and world-ordering itself. Perhaps under the influence of commercialization and the other trends mentioned at the outset of this section, Dai seems to have rethought what it means to “desire humaneness.” He criticizes Song-dynasty Con­fucians as follows:

[The Song masters said] “If it does not come from pattern then it comes from desire, and if it does not come from desire, then it comes from pattern.” When they see others crying out from hunger and cold, or [feeling] the sorrow and resentment of an unfulfilled love, or hoping for life despite being close to death, it is all just “human desire”; they abstractly designate a sentiment devoid of feeling or desire as the “original suchness of heavenly pattern,” and preserve it in their hearts. [Dai 1995, p. 211; cf. Dai 1990a, p. 387, and Dai 1990b, p. 165]

Given all the invective that Song thinkers launched at “human desire,” Dai is wondering,What is left for “humaneness”? What, in particular, can it mean to “desire humaneness”? Dai believes that the Song under­standing of humaneness is “abstract” or “empty” (kong), divorced from the flesh-and-blood desires about which we really care - and which alone can serve to motivate us to do good for ourselves and others. At the heart of ethical motivation, according to Dai, are our everyday desires. Desir­ing humaneness just is desiring food - or even, in the proper circum­stances, desiring delicious food.

Particularly relevant both to Dai’s interpretation of Song neo­Confucianism and to my own larger purposes is the perspective that rulers take away from the writings of Zhu and other Song thinkers. Dai writes:

The sages, in governing the empire, embodied the people’s feelings, fulfilled the people’s desires, and the Kingly Way was complete.... Nowadays [however,] those who govern others regard the ancient worthies’ and sages’ embodying of the people’s feelings and fulfill­ment of the people’s desires as issuing mostly from baseness, trivi­ality, and tortured obscurity, and pay it no heed. As for censuring others [on the basis of] pattern (li), [modern rulers] find it easy to hold up the loftiest standard in the vast world, call it “righteousness,” and condemn people in its name.... When someone invokes pattern to censure someone below him, the faults of the one below are [regarded by] everyone as too numerous to count. When a man dies by law, there are still some who pity him; but if he dies by pattern, who will pity him? [Dai 1995, p. 161; cf. Dai 1990a, p. 387, and Dai 1990b, p. 84]

The suggestion in this passage that people can “die by pattern” is one of Dai’s most famous phrases, and it has been vehemently objected to by defenders of Zhu [Chan 1989, p. 207]. As I noted earlier, though, power­holders were able to stress the side of Zhu’s teachings they found most useful in ways that did not redound to the benefit of the people. This would have been obvious to Dai. The interpretation of Zhu’s ideas shared by Dai and the emperors was, admittedly, somewhat exaggerated and not wholly charitable. One reason that Zhu’s text remained open to this kind of interpretation, though, was that Zhu did not provide a clear, positive role for desires to serve. Dai, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Confucians, did.

I do not want to exaggerate the shift that Dai’s view of desires repre­sents. We find in his writings, after all, passages like the following:

Self-regard comes from feelings and desires, and becloudedness from the heart’s discernment. To be without self-regard is humane­ness, and to be without becloudedness is wisdom - but it is not by getting rid of feelings and desires that one becomes humane, or by getting rid of the heart’s discernment that one becomes wise. [Dai 1995, p. 211; cf. Dai 1990a, p. 388, and Dai 1990b, p. 165]

“Self-regard (si)” is used in this passage as a technical term for errant desiring. This is even clearer elsewhere, when we read that “The two great afflictions of all men at all times, self-regard and becloudedness, are simply of two roots: self-regard arises from faults in desiring, and becloudedness from faults in knowing.”^[75] This technical use contrasts with the term’s more general sense that we saw earlier, where self-regard was actually said to be “an aspect” of humaneness.

The difference between the two uses of “self-regard” arises from the fact that while we should care for ourselves, we must do so in a fashion consistent with the context in which we find ourselves and with our essentially social natures. We live in society, connected to others in many ways, fellow participants with others in groups of all sizes. Like all Con­fucians, Dai emphasizes the degree to which any assessment of whether our lives are going well must be relational: Whether we are doing well as parents depends on the lives of our children; whether we are doing well as sons and daughters, conversely, depends on the lives of our parents. Thus, in a passage quoted earlier, Dai writes: “If, desiring to fulfill one’s own life, one also fulfills the lives of others, this is humaneness” [Dai 1995, p. 181]. This of course resonates with what we heard from Chen Que, who said of the sage Shun that he “respected wealth and enjoyed protection such that none was without: this is the epitome of self-regard.”

As we have seen, Dai sometimes uses “self-regard” in just this same, broad way. In Dai’s technical sense, on the other hand, “self-regard” means to desire things inconsistent with one’s social nature. Like Chen, Dai believes that one person’s life can be fully fulfilled if, and only if, everyone’s lives are fulfilled. Suppose that one is given money and sent to buy food for the whole family. A desire to eat delicious food goes too far if one spends all the money in a teahouse on exquisite treats before one has even reached the market. The problem with such behavior can be seen in many ways, including long-term effects on what we might call one’s individual well-being. The problem shows up more immediately in one’s relational well-being: Thanks to such behavior, one is doing poorly as a son and as a brother. Depending both on how willing others are to sacrifice on one’s behalf and on how obtuse one is, it may take some time before defects in one’s relational well-being intrude on one’s individual well-being. In the Confucian analysis, this does not alter the fact that our lives’ fulfillment involves both these aspects. Improper desires are incon­sistent with the overall well-being of our true - social - selves.

The simultaneous commitments to the possibility of a cosmos in which all flourish and to the necessity of such a cosmos if any are to flourish lie at the core of much of Confucianism. Unlike many of their predecessors, each of the four subjects of this section have insisted on understanding flourishing and fulfillment in terms of our actual, concrete desires. One way to highlight this is to emphasize that while our true selves are social, they are also embodied. To somewhat differing degrees, each of these thinkers believes that our everyday desires should neither be shunned nor merely tolerated, but embraced as essential to our well-being and to our ethical advancement. For Chen, Gu, and Dai, at least, desires are necessary for proper ethical motivation. Desiring humaneness comes directly from desiring to eat, sleep, and drink. In wanting things for our­selves, we want things for others. A society in which we are able to attain the things we properly desire is a society in which others attain what they properly desire, and so insofar as we hope to attain what we desire, we have a responsibility to see that others do so as well.