Toward an ethic of solidarity and reciprocity with the marginalized: Catholic and Confucian social ethics in dialogue

This dissertation demonstrates the complementarily of the principles-based human rights approach and virtue ethics approach in achieving the goals of addressing the phenomena of marginalization and guiding the Catholic community in Hong Kong to embrace an ongoing commitment to social justice, in order to actualize the moral vision of sustaining a good and just society in the Catholic social teaching. The human rights approach specifies the minimum standards of what it means to treat people as members of a community with justice and respect. The principles in CST set the direction for people to follow the norms for acting. They illustrate the conditions that a good society should possess. The virtue ethics approach can complement intellectual abstract concepts and principles, attending to the overlooked particularities of human realities, suggesting specific methods and concrete practices of justice, and providing motivation to respond to the marginalized.;An important reason for bringing in the virtue ethics approach is the fact that knowing the principles of CST cognitively not necessarily can bring conversion to Catholics that can lead to moral actions. A key element is to move the hearts and minds of Catholics in order to transform them to embrace a more active commitment to the social mission of the Church and human flourishing. Virtue ethics can play an important role in this with the features of highlighting the role of human agency and continual practice of certain actions, cultivating emotions and imaginations, emulating moral exemplars, and changing perception and bringing transformation through spiritual practices. Virtue cultivation entails threefold dimension: reason or intellect, affection or emotion, and practice or moral action. These three dimensions illuminate the meanings and functions of each virtue, the experiences of encountering suffering and spiritual practices, and the virtuous practices or moral actions respectively. This approach is more holistic in the sense that it entails the conversion of mind, heart, and body of a whole person.;I also integrate the insights of an indigenous ethical resource of a local church---Confucian ethics---in enriching the universal church through contributing to the CST, by comparing the virtue ethics approaches of the Catholic and Confucian traditions. By focusing on the notion of moral self-cultivation in early Confucian texts and the thought of Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming, I found that there are many commensurable insights between them, although there are real differences between Confucian and Catholic social ethics. Some of these insights include attending to the contextual realities rather than abstract principles, emphasizing both rational and emotive approaches rather than primarily cognitive principles, strengthening the emotion and affective dimension of faith formation leads to a more holistic way of formation, offering concrete ways of practice, moving one's heart through experiential learning and inner scrutiny, integrating spirituality and morality, and linking personal ethic with social ethic.;Through the case study of migrant women in Hong Kong, I point out that if we want to become virtuous persons or persons of ren who extend solidarity and reciprocity to the marginalized migrant women, we have to understand the meanings of these virtues, to get to know the realities of the migrants through experiential learning and embodied knowledge with an open heart/mind, to grasp every chance to practice these virtues consistently and persistently in daily life and through joining programs organized by church or social organizations, to learn through role-models, to nurture affection and compassion toward the migrants and to transform our dispositions into authentic virtues through immersing oneself in the lives of the marginalized and through spiritual practices in a community.