儒家義利之辨與“經濟人”假設

Abstract

It has been very popular for a long time that some people thought that Confucian philosophy attached too much importance to personal loyalty and fought against or even opposed to one`s material benefit, and meanwhile considered the tendency that Confucian philosophy weighed higher personal loyalty than material benefit as a historical obstacle to the process of modernization. In this article, the author investigated the originality of Confucian philosophy and thought that none of the Confucian thinkers repulsed material benefit. On the contrary, Confucian philosophers thought much of personal pursuit of material benefit. The Confucian idea about ``much loyalty, less benefit" does not mean denying the pursuit of personal benefit. In fact, they insisted the harmony instead of the total collision between the pursuit of personal loyalty and material benefit. The prerequisite for their unification was “personal loyalty prior to material pursuit”. This kind of Confucian standpoint on “one`s pursuit of personal loyalty superior to material benefit” is one of the native cultural resources that should be taken full advantage of in our construction of the socialist market economy.