Abstract

Ethics or ethic (“lunli” in Chinese) was a major area of thinking in ancient Chinese thought. Ancient Chinese philosophy was even once referred to as “ethics” by some missionaries and sinologists in the early times of Western contacts with China. Since the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the philosophical themes as expressed in the benchmark classics of Chinese thought—the Four Books (The Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean) and other core Confucian texts—can be roughly classified as “ethics” in terms of modern disciplines. Although the concept of “ethics” is commonly used by ancient and modern Chinese, the Chinese term for “ethics (or ethical studies)” itself emerged in the Chinese context and became gradually accepted only in the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). In order to facilitate the reader’s understanding of the changes in the connotations of “ethics” and “ethical studies” in ancient and modern Chinese discourses, it is necessary for us to review briefly the development of this concept in the history of Chinese thought.