Why I Think A Confucian And Aristotelian Turn Is Impossible.
If one reads the recent scholarship on Confucianism and Aristotle with the metaphysical lenses of Kit Fine and Timothy Williamson firmly in view, a far more aggressive conclusion emerges than is usually admitted in contemporary moral education and comparative philosophy. The conclusion is not merely that transplanting Confucian ren or Aristotelian phronesis into modern digital, neoliberal, or authoritarian contexts is difficult. The conclusion is that, strictly speaking, it is impossible to instantiate these virtues in their original sense under radically altered social ontologies. Fine’s account of essence and grounding shows that the relevant virtues are constituted by specific dependence relations. Williamson’s account of modality shows that even if those virtues remain coherent in logical space, they cannot be concretised in worlds where the necessary institutional supports are absent. The upshot is incompatibilist, not reformist.
Begin with Fine. Fine’s central claim, developed across his work on essence and grounding, is that necessity is not the deepest modal notion. What matters is what holds in virtue of what something is. Essence is not merely what is true in all possible worlds where a thing exists. It is what makes the thing the thing it is. If you alter what grounds a thing, you alter its essence. This is not semantic quibbling. It is a structural claim about identity.
Now consider the way ren is treated in much recent philosophical scholarship of Chinese philosophy. It tends to emphasise early Confucian concern with dependence, authority, trust, ritual, and the shaping power of social norms. There is a proliferation of essays on trust (xìn), deference to tradition, the cultivation of character through ritual (lǐ), and the embeddedness of moral agency in family and community structures. Trust (xin), for example, is often reconstructed not simply as reliability but as a normatively loaded form of dependence on authoritative traditions and exemplars. Essays on ritual stress that lǐ is not mere etiquette but a formative practice through which emotional dispositions and social hierarchies are harmonised.
If these accounts are even approximately right, then ren is not an inner psychological state detachable from its environment. It is essentially relational. It is grounded in patterned practices of family hierarchy, teacher–student authority, and ritualised interaction. Remove those grounding relations and you do not get defective ren. You get something else entirely.
Fine’s framework forces the issue. Suppose we attempt to “update” ren for a modern setting by stripping away thick hierarchical role obligations while retaining a core of universal humaneness. We say ren just means benevolence or empathy, now democratised and global. On a Finean analysis, that manoeuvre changes the essence. The dependence on hierarchical ritual structures is not an accidental feature of early Confucian ren. It is part of what makes ren ren. Once you detach ren from those grounding relations, you have not transplanted it. You have replaced it with a different virtue that happens to share a name.
The same point applies to Aristotelian phronesis as treated in contemporary virtue ethics scholarship, including the work of Kristján Kristjánsson and others influenced by the Aristotelian revival. In Aristotle, phronesis is inseparable from life in a polis ordered toward shared goods. It presupposes stable roles, common ends, and a conception of flourishing in which individual and communal goods are intertwined. It is formed through habituation within a structured civic order.
Fine’s metaphysics renders this non negotiable. If phronesis essentially involves deliberation about a shared conception of the good embedded in stable forms of life, then transplanting phronesis into a hyper individualised, market driven, algorithmically mediated society alters its grounding. In such a society, shared ends are replaced by competitive optimisation, identities are fluid and instrumental, and public discourse is fragmented by platform logics. The dependence relations that constituted phronesis in Aristotle’s world are gone. Therefore the virtue cannot be instantiated as that virtue.
One might protest that there are structural similarities between ancient and modern settings. Imperial politics in pre Qin or Han China and contemporary centralised party states both exhibit hierarchy and bureaucratic order. Ancient slave holding economies and modern global capitalism both rely on exploited labour. But Fine’s notion of grounding makes clear that surface structure is not enough. What matters is what makes what it is. Ancient imperial authority was justified within a cosmological and ritual framework in which moral cultivation and hierarchical roles were publicly articulated as part of the natural order. Contemporary authoritarian systems often justify authority through ideological dogma and maintain it through surveillance and technocratic control. The relational matrix is different. The dependence of the subject on authority is grounded in different norms, practices, and epistemic conditions. Therefore the ethical form that can be constituted within that matrix differs.
Williamson reinforces this incompatibilism from a modal angle. On his necessitist view, ren and phronesis can still exist as coherent items in logical space. There is a possible world in which ren is concretely instantiated through thick family networks, ritual practices, and trusted exemplars. There is a possible world in which phronesis is concretely instantiated within a polis structured by shared goods. But in our world, those institutional conditions are absent or radically transformed.
Williamson distinguishes between existence in the broad logical sense and concreteness in a given world. A thing can exist in the domain of possibilities yet fail to be concrete here. Applied to ethics, this means that ren and phronesis may remain coherent ideals, but they cannot be concretised under contemporary social conditions. They cannot be made real in the robust sense required for actual moral formation.
Consider surveillance society. Essays on Confucian trust and ritual presuppose forms of interpersonal recognition and deference that are not mediated by pervasive monitoring. In a society where interactions are tracked, scored, and potentially punished, trust is replaced by compliance and risk management. Ritual becomes performance under observation. The dependence relation between student and teacher or child and parent is no longer grounded primarily in moral authority and mutual recognition, but in external enforcement and reputational calculus. Under Williamson’s terms, ren remains in the domain but cannot be concrete because the practices that would instantiate it are structurally undermined.
Similarly, in hyper aggressive neoliberal contexts, the Aristotelian alignment between individual flourishing and communal good is fractured. When institutions are organised around metrics, competition, and individual advancement, the background conditions for phronesis dissolve. Deliberation about the common good is displaced by strategic positioning. Even if individuals display situational judgement and emotional intelligence, what is instantiated is not phronesis as Aristotle understood it. It is a different capacity, grounded in different incentives and norms.
My more aggressive conclusion is this. Many contemporary discussions in moral education and political theory assume that Confucian and Aristotelian virtues can be selectively abstracted and re inserted into modern settings. I think careful historical and conceptual work undermines that assumption once read through Fine and Williamson. The virtues in question are essence involving and world dependent. Their identity is tied to particular grounding relations and institutional ecologies. Change those ecologies sufficiently and you do not have the same virtue available for cultivation.
Fine’s metaphysics makes the incompatibility conceptual. The essence of ren and phronesis includes relational and institutional features that are absent in modern surveillance states and neoliberal market societies. Therefore these virtues cannot be instantiated as those virtues. Williamson’s metaphysics makes the incompatibility modal. These virtues may exist in logical space but cannot be concretised in our world because the relevant conditions for their realisation do not obtain.
The implication for contemporary Confucian revivalism and Aristotelian character education is severe. One cannot simply revive ren or phronesis by curricular decree. Without reconstructing the social ontology that grounds these virtues, the project is metaphysically incoherent. At best one produces analogues, hybrid forms adapted to new conditions. At worst one produces rhetorical gestures that mask structural contradictions.
My incompatibilist line does not say we must return to ancient forms of life. It says we must stop pretending that ancient ethical forms are portable technologies. Fine and Williamson together show that virtues are not detachable modules. They are constituted by, and dependent on, specific forms of social being. If those forms no longer exist, the virtues, in their strict sense, cannot exist either.
Clearly apologists for the importation of these virtues into our contemporary educational ecologies and societies generally push back. They might argue that ancient Confucian and Aristotelian ethics arose in hierarchical, authoritarian, slave holding, or rigidly stratified societies. Modern surveillance authoritarianism and neoliberal capitalism also generate hierarchy, obedience, and inequality. Therefore the structural similarities are enough. The virtues can be transplanted because the background social form is not so different after all. If anything, these ancient ethics may even be more at home in modern centralised states than liberal critics admit.
This push back misunderstands both the metaphysics and the history.First, take the metaphysical side. Fine’s account of essence and grounding does not ask whether two societies share superficial structural features. It asks what makes a practice or virtue what it is. These virtues are not constituted by hierarchy as such. It is constituted by a specific pattern of dependence, justification, recognition, and authority. Hierarchy in an Aristotelian polis is not the same kind of thing as hierarchy in a digital surveillance state. Slavery in Aristotle’s time is embedded in a cosmology and a teleology that openly distinguishes natural rulers and natural slaves. Precarious labour in neoliberal capitalism is embedded in a formal doctrine of equal citizenship, contract, and market freedom. Both are unjust by many standards, but they are unjust in different ways, and the dependence relations are differently grounded.
Fine’s framework forces us to ask: in virtue of what was ren ren, and phronesis phronesis. If ren is tied to ritual, filial piety, teacher–student authority, and cultivated trust and Phronesis is tied to deliberation within a polis oriented toward a shared conception of the good then the grounding of these virtues includes explicit normative narratives about cosmic order, natural hierarchy, and teleological fulfilment. Modern surveillance authoritarianism, by contrast, grounds obedience in ideological doctrine, bureaucratic enforcement, and technological monitoring. Neoliberal capitalism grounds social roles in market competition, consumer choice, and performance metrics. The justificatory stories differ, the mechanisms of compliance differ, the experience of agency differs.
To say that both are hierarchical and therefore compatible is metaphysically crude. It treats hierarchy as an abstract form detachable from its grounds. Fine would insist that this abstracts away precisely what makes a social relation what it is. A ritualised deference to a morally cultivated exemplar is not the same as compliance under threat of reputational scoring or algorithmic sanction. Even if the outward posture looks similar, the internal grounding differs. Therefore the virtue constituted within that relation differs.
Williamson sharpens the objection in modal terms. Even if ancient virtues can exist in logical space, they require certain concrete conditions to be instantiated. If those conditions are absent, the virtue cannot be made real. The push back says the conditions are present because hierarchy and inequality persist. But Williamson’s notion of concreteness is not satisfied by any old hierarchy. The relevant institutional supports must be present. For phronesis, that means a relatively coherent shared conception of the good and stable civic practices. For ren, that means trusted ritual and family structures not subsumed under external surveillance.
Modern authoritarianism and neoliberalism often dissolve precisely those supports. In polarised societies, there is no shared conception of the good, only competing narratives amplified by media systems. In surveillance contexts, trust is replaced by compliance. In hyper competitive markets, communal ends are subordinated to individual advancement. These are not small variations on the ancient forms. They are different modal environments. The virtue remains in the space of possibilities but cannot be concretised here.
There is a second, more aggressive metaphysical objection. Suppose for the sake of argument that structural similarities were sufficient. Suppose ancient Confucian and Aristotelian ethics really were ethics of hierarchical, exclusionary, and in some respects authoritarian societies, and suppose modern states share enough of those features in salient ways (I don't think they do, but let's suppose they are as many seem to believe). Then the enthusiasm for transplanting these ethics becomes morally suspect.
The fact that contemporary advocates rarely advertise Confucianism as the ethic of rigid status hierarchies, or Aristotle as the ethic of a slave holding polis, is revealing. If ren and phronesis are inseparable from those social structures, as Fine’s essentialism suggests, then modern attempts to extract their “nice bits” while ignoring their grounding in objectionable institutions amount to conceptual sanitisation. The virtues are being rebranded as universal human goods while their historical essence is disavowed.
This creates a dilemma. Either one accepts that the ancient virtues were grounded in social orders that modern liberal sensibilities rightly find objectionable, in which case one must accept that transplanting them wholesale imports those problematic grounds. Or one insists that the virtues can be purified of those grounds, in which case one has altered their essence and is no longer dealing with the same virtue.
The push back tries to have it both ways. It suggests that ancient and modern hierarchies are similar enough for transplantation, but also that ancient virtues can be presented as benign and culturally rich resources for modern moral education. Fine’s metaphysics exposes the tension. If the similarity is real and grounding preserving, then the moral costs of the original grounding come with the package. If the moral costs are rejected, the grounding is rejected, and the virtue changes its identity.
There is also a political dimension. In some contemporary contexts, appeals to Confucian tradition function rhetorically to legitimise centralised authority or social discipline. The invocation of ren and ritual can make modern power structures appear continuous with a venerable moral heritage. But if the grounding relations are different, this is not genuine continuity. It is ideological appropriation. Fine’s framework helps articulate why. The essence of ren in early Confucian texts includes a specific moral psychology and relational ecology. When ren is redeployed to support bureaucratic compliance or nationalistic unity under surveillance, the grounding relations are transformed. The word persists, the essence shifts.
Similarly, Aristotelian virtue ethics is sometimes invoked in character education programmes within competitive market societies. Phronesis is presented as the ability to navigate complex situations wisely. But if the shared conception of the good has been replaced by market success and institutional reputation, the form of practical reasoning being cultivated is not oriented toward the Aristotelian telos. It is oriented toward optimisation within existing structures. Again, the name persists, the essence shifts.
My aggressive metaphysical critique therefore runs as follows. Structural similarity at the level of hierarchy or inequality is insufficient for genuine transplantation because essence is constituted by specific grounding relations, not by abstract form. And if one insists that the grounding relations are preserved, then one must also accept the morally troubling features of the original social orders. Modern enthusiasm for Confucianism and Aristotelianism often avoids both horns of this dilemma by speaking at a level of abstraction that blurs grounding.
Fine’s essentialism and Williamson’s modal realism strip away that comfort. They force a choice. Either admit that the ancient virtues cannot be instantiated under contemporary social ontologies and that we must develop new ethical forms suited to digital, global, and pluralistic worlds, or admit that if we really want those ancient virtues in their original sense, we must be prepared to reconstruct, in some form, the social conditions that grounded them. The push back that appeals to structural similarity tries to evade this choice. Metaphysical clarity makes the evasion visible and untenable.
A revealing way to frame the contemporary Chinese state’s Confucian revival is to treat it as a stress test for two quite demanding metaphysical pictures, Kit Fine’s essence and grounding framework, and Timothy Williamson’s modal logic plus necessitism. Once you do that, the familiar political story, the Party uses Confucius to bolster legitimacy, becomes only the surface. Underneath is a deeper incoherence. The state is trying to run two ontologies of moral and political life at once, one officially Marxist, one selectively Confucian, while the actual mechanics of governance are increasingly shaped by surveillance, quantified “trust”, and a market order organised under Party control. What looks like a hybrid ideology is, on these metaphysical lenses, a collision of incompatible grounding relations. The result is not merely hypocrisy or propaganda, although it is often those too. The result is something like metaphysical category error, a programme that cannot be made coherent without changing either what “Confucianism” means, what “Marxism” means, or what the state actually is.
To make that claim intelligible, the metaphysics has to be made concrete for non specialists. Start with Williamson. He wants modal talk, talk of what could be the case and what must be the case, to be treated with the same seriousness as any scientific theorising, meaning we should prefer a strong, tidy, powerful formal framework. A key technical idea in modal logic is that when we say “possibly”, we are implicitly ranging over alternative ways the world could have been. Philosophers often call these “possible worlds”. You do not have to believe possible worlds are literal places, you can treat them as a device for modelling possibility, but the modelling has consequences.
In a standard Kripke style semantics, we imagine that each possible world has a “domain”, a set of things that exist at that world. Some logicians let the domain vary from world to world, because they think some things exist in some possibilities but not others. Williamson argues that if you take the simplest and strongest quantified modal logic seriously, especially forms where the Barcan Formula and its converse are valid, the simplest interpretation pushes you toward a constant domain, one big fixed domain of objects across all possible worlds. A consequence is necessitism, the thesis that necessarily everything exists, in the thin sense that everything that exists in any possible world exists in every possible world. Williamson then distinguishes this thin “exists in the domain” from thicker statuses like being concrete, causally active, located, alive, and so on. A table that could have been burnt to ashes still “exists” in those worlds, but it is not concrete there. The practical upshot is that we should stop treating “could have failed to exist” as literally “would not be in the domain” and instead treat it as “would not have been concrete”.
Now shift to Fine. Fine thinks many debates about modality are distorted because necessity and possibility are treated as basic, when in fact they are often explained by deeper facts about essence. Essence is what something is, in virtue of what it is. This is not merely what is true of it in all possible worlds. It is what makes the thing the thing it is. A simple example helps. It is essential to a triangle that it has three sides. That is not an accidental feature. It is part of what triangularity is. Fine also develops the idea of grounding, a relation of dependence that answers “in virtue of what” questions. If a fact holds because of some deeper structure, then that deeper structure grounds the fact. When Fine says essence is prior, one central thought is that a lot of necessity claims are true because of essences, not because of brute modal laws. Triangles must have three sides because triangularity is that way, not because the modal machinery forces it.
Once you import these lenses into ethics, the effect is explosive. Most contemporary moral education talk treats virtues as detachable, like psychological traits, capacities, or competences. You identify the trait, you design pedagogies to cultivate it, you measure behaviours that indicate it. This is already a kind of metaphysical stance, even if no one calls it that. It treats virtues as portable items, the same virtue could be instantiated in very different social worlds because it is primarily “inside” the agent.
Fine’s approach says that for many thick ethical notions, that portability assumption is false. A virtue can be essence involving. That means it is partly constituted by the relations and practices in which it is embedded. Change those relations enough and you are no longer talking about the same virtue, even if you keep the same word. Williamson’s approach says something slightly different but convergent. Even if the virtue remains a coherent item in the space of possibilities, it may not be concretisable in a given world. You can describe it, legislate it, preach it, but you cannot make it real in the thick sense, because the institutional conditions that would make it concrete do not exist.
This is where the modern Chinese case becomes a case study for the horns of a dilemma. The Chinese constitution’s preamble explicitly lists the guiding ideology of the state in Marxist lineage, Marxism Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Three Represents, Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought, and it speaks of developing a “socialist market economy” under Party leadership. The CPC Party Constitution similarly affirms the Party’s guiding ideology in that lineage, again explicitly Marxist. These are not incidental slogans. They are constitutional self descriptions, the state’s official answer to “what makes this order what it is”.
At the same time, there is a visible, well documented revival of Confucianism in public culture and state aligned discourse, especially under Xi, often framed as “excellent traditional Chinese culture” being integrated into governance and national rejuvenation narratives. The push to combine Marxism with traditional Chinese culture is even articulated explicitly in contemporary propaganda and commentary, including what some discussions call a “Second Combine”, pairing Marx with Confucius as if they were complementary civilisational resources. Superficially, one might say, there is no metaphysical problem here. Marxism is the official theory of economic structure and political legitimacy, Confucianism is the cultural and moral vocabulary for social cohesion, family order, and “civilisational” continuity. That is the friendly story. The hard question is whether the two can actually be combined at the level Fine cares about, essence and grounding, and whether they can be concretised in the sense Williamson cares about, thick instantiation within a world.
To see why the combination is unstable, you have to be ruthless about what Marxism is, and what Confucianism is, not as vague labels, but as structures of explanation. Marxism, at least in its classical core, is a theory in which social relations are fundamentally explained by material production, class relations, and historical change driven by contradictions within modes of production. Even when Marxist theory is adapted, nationalised, or bureaucratised, its self image is usually that it offers a scientific account of society, it explains ideology as connected to material interests, it treats moral language suspiciously as potentially masking class domination, and it aims at emancipation through transformation of economic relations. Chinese state Marxism is not identical to nineteenth century Marx, but it still claims to be a form of “Marxism adapted to Chinese conditions”, a guiding theoretical system for governance.
Confucianism, by contrast, is not a theory of historical change driven by economic contradiction. In the early Confucian and related traditions ethical life is grounded in ritual practice, cultivated dispositions, role relations, family hierarchy, moral exemplars, and norms that are justified not by class struggle but by an account of human formation and social harmony. Take for example Xunzi’s moral norms and on the role of qing, often glossed as emotions or affective dispositions, in grounding ethics, including Xunzi’s naturalistic justifications of ritual reshaping human nature. If you take Xunzi seriously, morality is not a thin set of rules, it is a deep remoulding of people through ritualised institutions, a project that is openly formative and disciplinary.
Already there is metaphysical friction. Marxism and Confucianism are not merely two sets of values. They are two different accounts of what grounds moral and political order. Marxism grounds legitimacy, at least in aspiration, in historical necessity and material emancipation. Confucianism grounds legitimacy in cultivated virtue, ritual propriety, and hierarchical role fulfilment. In Fine’s terms, they are competing grounding stories. They offer different “in virtue of what” answers.
The state’s attempt to overlay them tends to oscillate between two strategies. One strategy treats Confucianism as mere cultural heritage, a set of symbols and soft norms that can sit on top of Marxist governance without altering the underlying explanatory base. The other treats Confucianism as a moral foundation for obedience and harmony, a resource for shaping citizens, while Marxism becomes a kind of state science or developmental narrative.
Fine’s framework makes both strategies unstable, because Confucian ethical notions are not detachable ornaments. Consider ren. In much contemporary popular discussion it is translated as benevolence or humaneness, and then presented as a universal moral attitude that can lubricate modern life. But serious scholarship repeatedly ties ren to ritual and role responsiveness, to the cultivation of a certain kind of person through practices that are inherently social and hierarchical. Even specific discussions of ren in Analects scholarship emphasise that ren is not just feeling nice, it can involve strong evaluative stances, including contempt for what is not ren, a moral posture embedded in a certain normative world. The moment you treat ren as a portable “prosocial trait”, you have already altered its essence.
Now consider what the modern Chinese governance environment does to the relevant grounding relations. Here the surveillance and quantified governance layer matters. Contemporary scholarship on China’s social credit systems explicitly analyses the state’s attempt to govern “trustworthiness” through quantification and data driven evaluation, including in corporate social credit systems, as part of what has been called a transition toward “surveillance state capitalism”. The key point is that the state increasingly treats trust, credibility, compliance, and social order as objects of measurement and management through informational infrastructure.
That is metaphysically devastating for Confucianism, because Confucian ethics is centrally about cultivation through relationships of trust, exemplarity, and ritual practice, not about compliance under audit. When trust becomes something administered through numbers, lists, sanctions, and reputational scoring, the dependence relation between persons changes. People relate not primarily as persons who recognise each other’s cultivated character, but as nodes in a governance system where risk is managed and behaviour is incentivised. In Fine’s language, the ground of trust changes. The “in virtue of what” of trust shifts from moral character and relational history to administrative legibility and data traces. A virtue grounded in the former cannot simply survive as the same virtue in the latter environment.
This is exactly why “Confucianism with the Xi face” becomes, on the metaphysical reading, impossible. It is that a leader centred, party centred ideological system tries to appropriate a virtue ethical vocabulary while systematically transforming the social ontology that vocabulary presupposes. You cannot keep the essence while changing the grounds.
Someone might object that Xunzi, in particular, already looks compatible with a strong state. Xunzi is famous for arguing that human nature is bad and requires reshaping through ritual and institutions. Some scholarship highlights Xunzi’s emphasis on “dramatic reshaping”, and on ritual justified naturalistically as a way to cultivate people. If you are looking for a Confucian that can live with authoritarian governance, Xunzi seems the obvious candidate.
But this is where the deeper dilemma bites. If you pick the more disciplinary, hierarchical, and state friendly strand of Confucianism, you are admitting that the essence of the ethical form you are importing is tied to objectionable social relations, including rigid hierarchy and strong mechanisms of conformity. Modern enthusiasts, especially in liberal contexts, rarely advertise Confucianism as an ethics of political subordination. They advertise it as a humane relational ethic, a communitarian corrective to atomised individualism. If you now say, no, its compatibility with surveillance authoritarianism shows it can be transplanted, you have conceded that what you are transplanting is, in essence, an ethic suited to domination. That is not a minor reputational issue. It is a shift in what is being endorsed.
This is the second horn. Either you sanitise Confucianism to make it palatable, in which case you alter its grounding and its essence, so you are not transplanting it, you are inventing a new hybrid moral language. Or you keep its grounding sufficiently intact to claim transplantation, in which case you are endorsing an ethic whose constitutive relations include authoritarian hierarchy, role fixation, and exclusionary structures that modern moral consciousness often rejects.
The Chinese state tries to evade the dilemma by presenting Confucianism as “traditional culture”, a benign civilisational resource, while operationally using it to legitimate obedience, harmony, and nationalism under Party leadership. That manoeuvre is metaphysically confused because it treats Confucianism simultaneously as detachable aesthetic heritage and as deep moral grounding. Fine’s lens forces you to choose. You cannot treat it as a surface without changing what it is. You cannot treat it as a deep ground without owning the kind of social order it grounds.
Now add Marxism back in, because the contradiction is not simply moral, it is explanatory. Marxism, even in its adapted Chinese form, claims that ideology is not innocent. Ideology is shaped by material conditions and class power. If the state deploys Confucian moral language to stabilise a stratified social order, Marxism itself predicts that this moral language is ideology, meaning it is part of the superstructure that helps reproduce material relations. So the state is in the position of endorsing a theory that, at least in its critical edge, should demystify precisely such deployments.
One way the state handles this is by redefining Marxism as a flexible national doctrine, a set of guiding principles compatible with “Chinese characteristics”, including traditional culture. This is the official rhetoric in many places. But Fine’s question is then unavoidable. If Marxism becomes that flexible, what is its essence? If its essence is no longer critique of ideology and class domination, but rather a legitimating vocabulary for Party leadership and national development, then again you have not preserved the original thing, you have altered the essence. You may still call it Marxism, but the grounding has shifted from emancipatory critique to state legitimisation.
Williamson’s framework lets you express the same problem in a different register. Think of “Marxism” and “Confucianism” as theoretical objects that exist in logical space, coherent systems with internal logics. Even if they both exist as possibilities, a world may not be able to make both concrete together, because the institutional conditions required for the thick instantiation of each are incompatible. This is like saying two designs are both coherent on paper, but cannot both be built on the same site because they require incompatible foundations.
Confucianism, in its classical forms, presupposes thick local practices of ritual, family relations, and moral exemplarity that work by shaping the heart and mind through lived patterns. Marxism, in its classical form, presupposes a critical stance toward tradition as potentially mystifying, and a political project oriented around class analysis and transformation of material relations. You can imagine worlds where a Confucian ethical culture is concretely lived, and worlds where Marxist critical politics is concretely lived. The Chinese state wants a world where both are concretely lived, but its actual governance technologies, surveillance, quantified compliance, a “socialist market economy” with strong state involvement, may prevent either from being concretised in the relevant sense. To see why, focus on what surveillance does to the formation of moral agency. Confucian moral education, whether Mencian or Xunzian, depends on a certain kind of interiorisation. The person becomes a certain kind of person through ritual and relational cultivation. If the primary behavioural regulator becomes external monitoring, then the motivational structure of action shifts. People learn to avoid penalties and gain rewards. That is not unique to China, it is a general feature of surveillance governance, but China provides a vivid case because governance of “trustworthiness” is explicitly an administrative project.
Fine’s language for this is that the ground of action changes. The action is no longer grounded in cultivated virtue in the relevant way. Even if the behavioural outcome matches what a Confucian might recommend, the action’s dependence structure is different. It is grounded in compliance incentives and fear of sanctions. Confucianism can try to reinterpret this as ritual discipline, but that reinterpretation is not free. It changes what ritual is. Ritual becomes a technique of state control rather than a practice of moral attunement. The essence changes.
The Marxist side fares no better. Marxism’s claim to be scientific and emancipatory is undercut when the state relies on ideological education and surveillance to stabilise its order. One sees this in education policy environments where ideological content is explicitly embedded into curricula, including in Hong Kong’s recent mandates to teach “Xi Jinping Thought” as part of civic education, framed as patriotic education. It illustrates a concrete governance strategy, ideology is taught as a form of political formation. In classical Marxist terms this looks like superstructural management, not emancipation. The state can reply that it is necessary for stability and national rejuvenation. That reply again shifts the essence of Marxism from critique of ideology to production of ideology.
At this point the state’s project begins to look like a metaphysical impossibility proof, not because of some abstract logical contradiction, but because it tries to treat two different grounding structures as if they could co inhabit without remainder. Confucian ethics, as reconstructed in serious scholarship, is grounded in a moral psychology of formation, ritual, and relational exemplarity. The state’s surveillance capitalism, or surveillance state capitalism, is grounded in data infrastructures, quantification, and administrative evaluation of trustworthiness. Those grounds are not just different, they actively disrupt each other. The more you govern trust by numbers, the less trust can play the role it plays in Confucian ethics. The more you require public ideological conformity, the more you crowd out the kinds of moral deliberation and exemplarity that give Confucian cultivation its point.
A defender of the state might still insist that Confucianism has always been a state ideology, an ethic of hierarchy, obedience, and social harmony, and that therefore it fits naturally with modern authoritarian governance. This exposes a kind of bad faith in much modern enthusiasm for Confucianism, including enthusiasm outside China.
If Confucianism is advertised in global moral education as a benign relational virtue ethics, a source of empathy, moral imagination, and intercultural understanding, then using its compatibility with authoritarian hierarchy as evidence of transplantability destroys that benign picture. It reveals that the ethic’s core may be inseparable from objectionable structures. You cannot have it both ways. Either Confucianism is essentially tied to a hierarchical order where moral excellence is connected to deference, role fixity, and the disciplining of desires for social harmony, in which case modern liberals should be wary of romanticising it as simply humane, or Confucianism is a flexible set of values detachable from those structures, in which case what is being taught is not classical Confucianism but a modern reconstruction.
The Chinese state tries to split the difference by packaging Confucianism as cultural continuity and moral tradition, while keeping tight political control and a Marxist constitutional identity. That packaging is metaphysically unstable because it treats Confucianism as essence preserving when it is politically useful, and as essence free when it is morally awkward. In Fine’s terms, the state wants the authority and legitimacy that come from claiming continuity with the past, without accepting the dependence relations that actually constituted that past. It wants the aura without the grounds.
Now bring in the slogan level phenomenon, Confucius and Marx placed together, or “combining” Marxism with excellent traditional culture. In propaganda this can look like a harmonious synthesis. But at the level of explanatory structure it is almost comic. Marxism’s own intellectual posture, especially in its critical tradition, is to treat invocations of timeless tradition as ideological mystification unless they can be justified by material analysis. Confucianism’s posture, in many strands, is to treat tradition as a vehicle of moral cultivation, not as a mask for class domination. When a state claims both, it is effectively asserting that tradition is both a moral ground and an ideological instrument, and that these can be held together without contradiction.
There is an even sharper way to express the confusion. The state’s Marxist identity commits it, at least rhetorically, to a story about historical development, class relations, and the legitimacy of the Party as the agent of national and socialist modernisation. Its Confucian revival commits it, rhetorically, to a story about moral cultivation, harmony, and cultural continuity. Its actual governance, under conditions of surveillance and state capitalism, commits it practically to administrative techniques of control, measurement, and incentive design. These three stories do not share the same grounding relations. They are not three descriptions of one underlying structure. They are three different structures competing to be the one that explains what is really going on.
Fine’s machinery makes you say, you cannot have three incompatible grounds for the same normative order without either fragmenting the order or changing the essences of the concepts involved. In a fragmented order you get exactly what one sees in many contemporary contexts, a public moral vocabulary that speaks of virtue and harmony, an official ideological vocabulary that speaks of Marxism and Party leadership, and an operational governance vocabulary that speaks of risk, compliance, stability maintenance, and quantified trust. These vocabularies can coexist sociologically because institutions can manage inconsistency. But metaphysically they point to an incoherent account of what makes the order what it is.
This is what “Confucianism with the Xi face is impossible” should mean. It is not a claim about whether people can quote Confucius while praising Xi. They can, and they do, and the state encourages it in various ways. It is a claim about instantiation. The state can instantiate a rhetoric of Confucianism. It cannot instantiate Confucianism as a lived ethical form in the classical sense while simultaneously intensifying surveillance governance and ideological control, because those modern mechanisms destroy the grounds that Confucian cultivation presupposes.
Williamson’s angle makes the same point in terms of concreteness. The classical Confucian ethical form may exist as a coherent possibility. There are possible social worlds in which the relevant relationships of trust, ritual practice, exemplarity, and family life are stable enough to make that ethical form concrete. But a world in which “trustworthiness” is governed by quantification and sanction, and in which political loyalty is a high stakes demand monitored by state security, is a world in which the Confucian ethical form cannot become concrete. You can make certain behaviours concrete, you can enforce civility, you can mandate rituals of respect, you can promote filial language. But you cannot concretise ren as the virtue it was, because the conditions that would make it a virtue rather than a performance are absent.
At this point someone might say, that is too romantic, classical Confucianism was itself often a state ideology, bound up with coercion, hierarchy, and exclusion, so why not see modern surveillance as simply the new ritual. This is a tempting move because it tries to turn the metaphysical argument on its head, saying the grounds have always included discipline, so discipline by data is just continuity.
The move fails for two reasons, one metaphysical, one moral, and they reinforce each other.The metaphysical reason is that forms of discipline differ in what they make agents depend on. Confucian ritual discipline, even in Xunzi, is supposed to reshape desires and perceptions through habituation within meaningful social practices, practices whose intelligibility depends on shared norms and exemplars, and whose success depends on internalisation. Administrative surveillance discipline reshapes behaviour by altering external incentives and risks, and by making legibility to authority the central practical aim. The dependence is not on moral exemplarity but on system compliance. Those are different grounding relations. You cannot simply rename one as the other without changing the essence of the practice.
The moral reason is the horn I identified earlier. If we concede that the classical ethics are essentially the ethics of authoritarian hierarchy, then the contemporary enthusiasm that sells them as humane alternatives to modern alienation is misleading. It becomes a moral laundering operation. It rebrands an ethic suited to domination as a benign resource for flourishing. In China, the laundering can serve state legitimacy, it can make contemporary power structures look traditional and morally continuous. Outside China, the laundering can serve academic or educational desires for a non Western virtue ethic that feels less individualist than modern liberalism. Either way the metaphysical clarity is brutal. You cannot simultaneously treat Confucianism as an attractive ethical resource because it is humane and relational, and treat its compatibility with authoritarianism as evidence of its transplantability, without admitting that what you admire is bound up with domination.
Now add the capitalist layer and surveillance authoritarian capitalism. Here the term “authoritarian capitalism” can be used loosely, but there is a serious scholarly point that certain Chinese governance developments, including corporate social credit systems, blend state control with market activity through technological infrastructure, hence the label “surveillance state capitalism”. Whatever one thinks of the label, it points to a structural reality, market actors are disciplined not only by market competition but by state administered trust and compliance mechanisms.
This complicates the Confucian overlay even more. Confucianism, in many strands, treats the moral formation of persons as prior to rule by law or rule by punishment. It treats shame, ritual, and exemplarity as central levers of order. A governance system that relies heavily on quantified evaluation and sanctioning mechanisms is closer to legalist or technocratic governance than to classical Confucian moral suasion, even if it borrows Confucian words. When “trustworthiness” becomes a score like object, the moral notion of xin, trustworthiness, is transmuted into an administrative category. A recent analysis describes social credit initiatives as governing trust through quantification. That is exactly the kind of transformation that Fine would say changes the essence of the moral notion. The same word continues to be used, but what grounds its application is now different.
It is helpful to see that this is not merely a moral complaint about hypocrisy. It is an argument about semantic and practical identity underwritten by grounding. When you govern moral life through the apparatus of quantification, you replace one kind of reason giving with another. Instead of “this is what a cultivated person does in this relationship”, you get “this is what the system rewards and recognises as trustworthy”. The subject learns to inhabit the system’s categories. That produces a new kind of agent, one whose practical reasoning is formed around being legible and acceptable to governance mechanisms.
This is where Williamson’s distinction between thin existence and concreteness returns with force. The state can keep Confucian virtues “existing” in public discourse. It can teach them, celebrate them, put them on posters, even embed them into education. That is existence in the thin sense, the concept is there, the word is there, the idea is in the domain of discussion. But concretising it would mean producing agents whose actions are grounded in the virtue in the right way, through the right kind of formation. A governance environment that forms agents through surveillance compliance will tend to prevent that concretisation. It creates a different kind of moral psychology.
This also explains why the Marxist Confucian overlay is not simply contradictory but self defeating. Marxism, at least in its aspiration, wants to explain how subjects are formed by material and institutional structures. It is not supposed to be naive about moral talk. When the state uses Confucian moral talk as a stabilising ideology within a surveillance capitalist governance system, it is doing something Marxism should describe as ideology. So either the state’s Marxism becomes a mere legitimating label, losing its critical essence, or it retains critical essence and therefore undermines the Confucian revival as mystification. The state’s official documents insist Marxism is the guiding ideology. The Confucian revival insists traditional culture is foundational. The governance mechanisms insist compliance and stability are administered through modern infrastructures. These three insistences cannot all be true in the same way.
The deepest way to state the conclusion is this. The Chinese state is not merely trying to blend two ideologies. It is trying to occupy two incompatible metaphysical pictures of what grounds moral and political order, while living inside a third picture imposed by contemporary technological and economic governance. Fine’s essence and grounding framework shows that the ethical notions being invoked, ren, li, xin, do not survive intact when their grounding relations are replaced by ideological discipline and quantified compliance. Williamson’s modal framework shows that even if one grants that those ethical forms are coherent in logical space, the modern Chinese world, as currently structured, does not supply the conditions to make them concrete.
This makes the slogan level synthesis, Marx plus Confucius under Xi, look like a metaphysical fantasy. It can function rhetorically and politically, because states can manage incoherence by distributing it across different audiences and institutions. University rhetoric can speak “tradition”, party schools can speak “Marxism”, governance bureaus can speak “trustworthiness scores”. But metaphysically, as an account of what the state is and what kind of moral agents it is forming, it is untenable.
There is a final twist that makes the case even darker. If, under pressure, the state were to insist that it really has concretised Confucianism, meaning it really has produced Confucian moral agents, the only coherent interpretation would be that it has done so by transforming Confucianism into something like an ethic of compliance and loyalty, a virtue vocabulary mapped onto obedience within a party led hierarchy. That would indeed be a kind of concretisation, but it would be concretisation of a different essence, not the essence many contemporary admirers think they are getting. It would confirm the laundering suspicion I raised, the use of a traditional moral language to make unpopular modern structures appear benign, inevitable, even humane.
So the case study does not merely illustrate political instrumentalisation. It illustrates a deeper lesson for moral education and comparative ethics. When we talk about reviving Confucian ren or Aristotelian phronesis in modern conditions, we are not choosing between two teaching methods. We are choosing between metaphysical commitments. Either we accept that virtues are essence involving and grounded in specific social relations, in which case transplant projects will fail unless the social ontology changes, or we treat virtues as modular competences, in which case what we are doing is not revival but invention. The modern Chinese state, because it wants the authority of continuity without accepting the grounds, ends up exemplifying the worst of both worlds, metaphysical confusion dressed up as cultural synthesis.
My second case study is the Aristotelian virtue ethics project. I shall here examine this as it is instantiated in the philosophy of education ecosystem. It often presents itself as the sane alternative to rule fetishism and algorithmic ethics, a return to formation, judgement, flourishing, and practical wisdom. It is also, on a Finean and Williamsonian diagnosis, a deeply confused enterprise that survives by sliding between two incompatible self understandings. When you force it to keep faith with its own metaphysical commitments, it falls onto one of two horns, and neither horn is acceptable. Either virtue ethics is detachable and portable across modern institutional life, in which case it is not Aristotelian virtue ethics at all but a rebranded set of psychological competences and wellbeing dispositions. Or it is not detachable, in which case it is rooted in a form of life whose social and political structure is morally objectionable and, more importantly for the education project, incompossible with neoliberal capitalism, metric governance, and liberal egalitarian wellbeing ideologies. Either way, the project should be abandoned, not because virtue talk is always pointless, but because this particular revival trades on equivocation about essence, grounding, and the conditions of concreteness.
The revival has a clear intellectual genealogy. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is routinely treated as a starting gun for the contemporary return to virtue and eudaimonia, and reputable reference works explicitly frame her essay as marking the beginning of the revival of virtue ethics. The standard story says discontent with mid twentieth century moral theory encouraged a self conscious recovery of virtue and flourishing, which then became one of the big three approaches in ethics. In philosophy of education, the same revival is not merely present, it is institutionally entrenched, often via character education and the rehabilitation of phronesis, practical wisdom, as a professional ideal for teachers. Kristján Kristjánsson’s work is a representative centre of gravity here, explicitly arguing for an Aristotelian concept of phronesis in professional ethics of teaching. David Carr likewise writes in that vein, connecting character formation to Aristotle’s phronesis within contemporary educational debates. There is internal unease about this movement, for example Richard Smith’s “Character education and the instability of virtue,” which argues that the virtues on offer are unstable and function as sites of contestation rather than settled deliverables. That paper is useful because it shows the project feeling its own disjoints.
Fine’s essence first metaphysics insists that what something is cannot be read off from superficial similarity or mere functional role. Identity and necessity are grounded in essences and dependence relations, what holds in virtue of what. That is the tool you need to stop the virtue ethics revival from getting away with soft talk. Williamson’s modal logic apparatus insists on a separation between what is coherent in logical space and what can be made concrete in a world, and his necessitist friendly framework pushes you to stop treating existence as the same thing as being concrete, instantiated, or practically available. Put those together and you get a ruthless test for modern Aristotelianism. What is the essence of phronesis, justice, temperance, courage, in Aristotle’s sense, and what worldly conditions are required to make them concrete rather than rhetorical?
The modern project usually avoids that test by trading on a portability assumption. It quietly assumes that virtues are largely internal traits or capacities, moral perception, balanced judgement, wise deliberation, resilience, empathy, and so on, and that these can be cultivated within whatever social order we happen to inhabit. That is why the project can be sold simultaneously as a humane corrective to neoliberal education and as a programme compatible with existing neoliberal institutions. It can live inside mainstream schooling policy as “character education” while also criticising the narrowness of exam performance culture, because it treats virtue as a detachable supplement. Smith’s complaint about instability in character education can be read as an admission that the supplement is doing too much work, it is being asked to stabilise moral meaning in environments that actively destabilise it. Fine’s lens turns that portability assumption into the first horn of the dilemma. If what you mean by phronesis is a general purpose skill for navigating complex situations in any institutional environment, then you have already stopped doing Aristotelian ethics. You have transformed a thick virtue, constituted by a specific teleological picture of human flourishing and a specific social political ecology, into a thin competence. It becomes something like high quality situational decision making, perhaps with moral vocabulary attached. You can measure it, you can train it, you can align it to organisational aims. That is exactly what modern professional ethics frameworks love, and Kristjánsson’s work is often read in that professionalising register, phronesis as excellence in ethical decision making in professional life. The trouble is that once you have made phronesis into a portable competence, you have drained it of its Aristotelian essence. In Aristotle, practical wisdom is not just making good choices, it is deliberating well about the good life within a shared ethical world that has a determinate conception of human ends. A competence model is not virtue ethics, it is management ethics with a classical accent.
This is why the portability horn is not a moderate concession, it is a conceptual surrender. It creates a pseudo Aristotelianism that is popular precisely because it is metaphysically cheap. It gives modern education systems permission to keep doing what they already do, credential competition, performance metrics, behavioural management, while adding a moralising layer about character. Smith’s remark that virtues become sites of contestation rather than settled aims should, on this reading, be treated not as a minor curricular worry but as evidence that the enterprise has no stable essence to teach, because it has detached its virtue language from any shared grounding relations.
Now take the other horn. Suppose the virtue ethicist refuses this detachment. Suppose they insist that Aristotelian virtues are not mere competences but forms of excellence grounded in a form of life, and that the social political setting is not accidental to their identity. Fine’s metaphysics now presses the point that the virtues have essences partly constituted by the grounds that make them possible. Aristotle’s ethics is historically and structurally entangled with a polis and household order that includes exclusion, hierarchy, and inegalitarian citizenship. Even if you do not want to reduce Aristotle to those facts, you cannot treat them as irrelevant background if you are taking essence and grounding seriously. The ethical life is built around a teleological picture of human function, stable roles, and a conception of the good that is not liberal neutral. Once you admit that, the contemporary project collapses into moral embarrassment. You are now defending an ethical form whose home conditions are objectionable to most modern liberals, and you cannot simply strip those conditions away without altering the essence, which returns you to the first horn.
Worse, once you hold onto the thick grounded essence, you run into incompossibility with contemporary institutions. Modern neoliberal capitalism and modern state schooling are not neutral containers into which you can pour Aristotelian formation. They are social machines that reshape agency, motivations, and practical reasoning. Competitive credentialism, marketised school choice, quantified accountability, surveillance of performance, and the instrumentalisation of learning for economic outcomes, these are not just bad influences on virtue, they are grounding structures that produce a different kind of agent. Under such conditions, what gets concretised is strategic adaptation to metrics, reputational management, and risk avoidance. Williamson gives you the right conceptual contrast. An Aristotelian virtue ideal can remain coherent in logical space, it can be an intelligible possibility, and yet it may fail to be concretisable in our world because the institutional preconditions for its thick instantiation are absent. The world does not supply the right kind of social reality for the virtue to become concrete.
This is exactly the same pattern as the Confucian case. There, one can keep the vocabulary of ren and ritual while the governance environment, surveillance, ideological conformity, and quantified trust, changes the grounds of action so thoroughly that the classical virtue cannot be instantiated as itself. Here, one can keep the vocabulary of phronesis and flourishing while the governance environment, market competition and metric control, changes the grounds of practical reasoning so thoroughly that Aristotelian practical wisdom cannot be instantiated as itself. What you get instead is a simulacrum, a performative virtue rhetoric that helps institutions look humane while they continue to operate on fundamentally non virtuous grounds.
At this point the modern virtue ethics project typically tries a third move, it tries to be thick and liberal at the same time. It says, yes, Aristotle had problematic social commitments, but we can reconstruct the virtues within egalitarian liberalism. We can keep the formation story while endorsing equal moral status, rights, inclusion, and social justice. This is where Fine’s incompossibility apparatus should be used aggressively. You cannot just add egalitarian commitments as a garnish. Egalitarianism changes the grounds of justice, authority, education, and recognition. It changes what practical wisdom must be responsive to. If justice is grounded in equal moral standing and fair terms of cooperation, then the deliberative space is now Rawlsian or Kantian in its basic structure, not Aristotelian in Aristotle’s sense.
Rawls is not a virtue ethicist in the standard sense, his theory is a theory of principles for a just basic structure, not a virtue centred account of character as primary. Kant is likewise not a virtue ethicist in the contemporary sense, he is centrally duty based, even though he has a doctrine of virtue. Nozick is not a virtue ethicist either, his political philosophy is rights based and side constraint driven. In other words, when contemporary virtue ethicists graft liberal egalitarian foundations onto Aristotle, they are not updating Aristotle, they are changing the grounding relations of the theory until it becomes a hybrid whose identity is no longer Aristotelian. That is exactly Fine’s point. If you change the grounds, you change what the thing is.
The project therefore oscillates. In school policy and professional ethics, it tends to go detachable, virtue as portable competence and wellbeing booster, because that is what the system can accommodate. In philosophical rhetoric, it tends to go thick, virtue as formation within a humane shared conception of flourishing, because that is what gives the project its critical and aspirational aura. Smith’s “instability” diagnosis can be read as the trace of this oscillation, virtues cannot stabilise because the project cannot decide what kind of thing a virtue is supposed to be in this institutional world. If you refuse equivocation, the conclusion is harsh. The contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics project in education is either a competence based adaptation that should stop calling itself Aristotelian virtue ethics, or it is a thick ethical form rooted in a form of life that moderns should not want, and that cannot be concretised within neoliberal capitalist schooling and liberal wellbeing ideology anyway. Either way it fails its own promise. It cannot be both a genuine revival and a modern liberal educational programme. It is incompossible.
So what should be abandoned is not every use of virtue language, but the confused ideological package that sells itself as a revival while functioning as a legitimating gloss. If one wants moral education under contemporary conditions, one should be honest that we are dealing with new social ontologies, market driven schooling, surveillance assessment, platform mediated identities, polarised publics, and that any viable ethical project must be built for those conditions rather than cosmetically draped in Aristotle. The metaphysical lesson is that you cannot save yourself with a classical vocabulary if the grounds of agency have already been replaced.