Intellectual Heirs of Confucius
The most famous follower of Confucius is Mencius (c. fourth century bce), who was born around a century after the Master died. Mencius lived during a period of political division and conflict, and the eponymous text Mencius reflects its times.
Like Confucius, Mencius employed war as an illustration and allowed that it was excusable in certain conditions. Yet his basic position was that war is always bad; it was just that in some situations it was less bad than in others.Mencius stressed the inferiority of force as a means for achieving political goals even more than Confucius did, portraying war as a demonstration of a ruler's shortcomings, not leadership abilities. The ideal ruler would dislike all bloodshed and govern through moral power rather than violence. Mencius spoke strongly against offensive warfare that would subject the population to violence in order to expand their ruler's territory, saying, ‘A benevolent man would not even take from one man to give to another, let alone seek territory at the cost of human lives'.[857] [858]
He is most famous as a proponent of humane governance, and he presents compassion as an intrinsic human trait. The king's duties included showing compassion to those he governed. Mencius views this responsibility as so serious that he presents mistreating the common population or permitting them to starve through misrule as ethically equal to violence. Actual violence on the part of a ruler was the antithesis of proper government. In the case of misrule - if a king should fail in his duty to care for the people - Mencius even threatened the possibility of direct violence in the form of popular rebellion culminating in regicide: ‘Take heed! What you mete out will be paid back to you' (pp. 70-1).
The other great early intellectual adherent of Confucius was Xunzi (c.
third century bce), who is best known for his contention that human beings are by nature selfish and disorderly. According to him, if left uncorrected, those flaws would lead to contention and violence. Xunzi advocated self-improvement, which was to bring one to a state of propriety and moral correctness. Violence appears repeatedly in the text Xunzi as the functional opposite of that propriety. Xunzi differentiates between ‘arrogance or violent temper' and the firm resolution that results from legitimate moral certainty.19 It similarly distinguishes between the courage of a cultivated person and the thoughtless daring of a low person or an animal. Devotion to right action might lead a gentleman into danger, but never heedlessly. That same adherence to proper behaviour means that, ‘Even if they could obtain the whole world by... killing a single innocent person, they would not do it' (pp. 54-5).Xunzi is primarily occupied with political and social matters and expresses a now familiar focus on moral correctness and an aversion to improper violence in those realms as well. For while a good ruler will not wilfully do violence to others, nor will he permit harm to come to those in his care. The commission of violence in order to defend others or to preserve order in society might sometimes be unavoidable. But the text is clear that even the defensive use of force is inferior to proper political rule, which would of itself prevent disorder and violence, obviating the need for all violence. That governance could only come about through the exercise of the ruler's moral power, and the presence of any violence in a state thus signals the absence of that potency.
Xunzi presents a similar conception of moral power working at the level of inter-state relations. Its ideal situation is one in which the exercise of military force would be unnecessary. It portrays even the annexation of another state as something better accomplished through rectitude than fighting. The ability to obtain victory without actual violence is the mark of a superior ruler. At the same time, though, Xunzi offers a number of guidelines for the behaviour of a general during war, most of which set out situations in which lives are to be spared.