Justice and Virtue in Confucius:

Law as a symptom of moral disorder from the perspective of chinese philosophy

Abstract

Montesquieu said: “When a people have good customs, the laws become simple” (Ryckmans, 2005, p. XXVIII). This idea, which could have been drawn from the Analects, reveals the essence of the Confucian critique of legalism. While modern law sees legislation as an instrument of order, Confucius views it as a symptom of moral sickness, a dispensable tool in a society guided by ethical self-discipline. Confucian ethics replaces external obedience to the law with the excellence of the virtuous man. For Confucius, true order does not stem from legal codes but from virtue and benevolence, internalized as rites and aligned with the Dào. Confucian philosophy challenges the Western legal perspective by shifting the focus to an ethics where social cohesion arises from moral education and human flourishing, rather than legal imposition. This article seeks to reconstruct the Confucian critique of legalism, considering its contemporary relevance, and presents an alternative legal model to the modern Western tradition. Starting from the maxim that laws are simple in morally upright societies, we explore the thesis that, for Confucianism, legal normativity is a symptom of ethical failure. Employing an internal hermeneutic approach to Confucian thought through an analysis of the Analects, we examine how justice is, with such originality, performed in Confucius’s aphorisms. We propose justice as righteousness, where genuine social harmony emerges from moral education, ritual, and the cultivation of virtue, rendering legal coercion unnecessary as an organizing principle.