Abstract

Pluralism is an inevitable reality in the contemporary world, posing a challenge for regional cultures as they navigate coexistence with diverse cultures. In this paper, I explore how Confucianism can respond to this challenge. I begin by critically assessing two influential proposals. Joseph Chan’s perfectionist approach grounds state action in universally recognizable goods independent of any comprehensive doctrine, thereby aiming to secure pluralism, but risks severing Confucian values from their cultural roots. Sungmoon Kim’s perfectionist approach, by contrast, although it claims to accommodate pluralism, requires that political values satisfy the Confucian intelligibility condition, and thereby opens itself to charges of sectarianism. To move beyond this impasse, I introduce the framework of explanatory metaphysics, which conceives metaphysics as the ongoing tracking of moral reality through human practices and experiences. On this basis, I argue that a form of Confucian perfectionism developed from Chan’s approach can accommodate pluralism while meeting the intelligibility condition, provided it adopts an explanatory metaphysical orientation. Because different cultural traditions can track the same moral reality through their own explanatory frameworks, pluralism emerges as a structural feature rather than a concession.