On Family Ethics Of Pre-qin Confucians And Its Contemporary Value

Family is the social cell and basic unit of society. The key to live in harmony with other family members is family ethics, a reasonable principle to be followed to deal with family relations. Family ethics is not only the fundamental rule for adjusting family relations and maintaining family harmony, but also an important guarantee of social harmony and stability.In a country with Confucian cultural traditions of more than 2000 years, family ethics designed by pre-Qin Confucians was worshipped in the long traditional community, and there were no fundamental changes neither in its principle nor its core components, despite some alterations or even revisions, due to vicissitude of history and demands of the rulers. Family ethics of pre-Qin Confucian is formed in the Spring and Autumn Period, when the basic system of private ownership is established, the national political life begin to transform from"country of the people"to"country of the emperor as his home", social morality is disordered, and the paternal marriage and family system present strong features of clan departmentalism. The theory of benevolence created by pre-Qin Confucians, with Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi as representatives, is the foundation and core of family ethics, for it is not only"humanity", an important area of ethics, but also the highest ethical standards, personality pursuit and mental outlook. Thus, many guiding ideologies are derived, for instance,"the benevolent loves others","to love our parents first","to treat others with loyalty and reciprocity","to deny self and observe the proprieties", and"priority of the filial piety", etc.Small as it is, family is composed of complex relationships, including marital relations, parent-child relations, intergenerational relations, and relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The other relationships could be attributed to these four main aspects, such as the relationship between uncle and nephew, sisters-in-law, and generations, etc. Pre-Qin Confucians also design ethical system to correspond to the four major family relationships, for example,"husband should be moral and wife should submit to him","father should be kind and child should be filial","brothers should love and respect each other", and "mother-in-law should be gentle and daughter-in-law should be compliant", which are norms and standards to restrict thinking and behavior of family members. According to research, under this circumstance, equality is shown with the coordination of power and obligation to a certain extent. The summative expressions of putting first affections of the husband, father, elder brother and mother-in law, followed by what wife, son, young brother and daughter-in-law should do, logically and factually conform with pre-Qin Confucians'putting the requirements for the superordinate, the noble and the elder before those for the subordinate, the common and the young. Some negative ideas are also analyzed in this dissertation, such as, superiority of men to women in gender relation, parents'orders and matchmaker's words in intermarriage, husband's social role in society and women's family role in marital relation, no altering from the way of his father in parent-child relation, elder brother as the father in seniority relation, etc.Influenced by the social structure and cultural background, pre-Qin Confucian family ethics shows obvious relationship with the blood tie, mainly found in supreme family love, hierarchal arrangement, superiority of men over to women, structural similarity of clan and country, etc. Family-based ethics has played a positive role in maintaining traditional family relationships and social stability as well. However, it has also exerted tremendous passive influences in personality development, for that, personal interests must unconditionally submit to clan interests and personal values were weakened accompanying with strengthened sense of community. Kinship and hierarchal arrangement are partly rational because they are based on natural relationship to a large extent, but they also aroused contradictions and conflicts when taking human sympathy and laws into account, as well as the relationship within people. The concept of male superiority offers reasonable foundations for eliminating the contradiction between loyalty and filial piety, and stands as the theoretical basis for the direct application of family ethics to society.Pre-Qin Confucian family ethics is neither everlasting truth, nor worthless dross. In the contemporary social transformation and reconstruction of family ethics, it is of important value and significance to make a systematic research on pre-Qin family ethics, to excavate rich connotation with humanism by taking the essence and discarding the dregs, to sort out core of modern values and bring new meanings of the times to make it the theoretical basis and ethic reference for construction of a harmonious family and society with scientific attitude to make the past serve the present, according to characteristic of cultural transmission and China's special cultural conditions. Based on this, combining the characteristics of China's contemporary social family ethics relationship tending to be more simple, equal and democratic, and its axis transferring from parent-child to husband-wife, and from parents to children, researchers should understand the contradiction between the burden and filial piety of only children, individual and family responsibilities, freedom of marriage and the high divorce rate, more demand for materials and less spirit pursuit. The positive factors of pre-Qin family ethics should be put forward and justified in order for them to play useful roles in resolving family contradictions and issues, dealing with the impact of"Silver Wave", and building up a harmonious society.