Combining Confucianism with Two-level Utilitarianism

Tomosaburo Yamauchi (Osaka University)

Abstract: In newly emerging environmental ethic, it is common parlance that the global environmental crisis was caused by modern Western anthropocentric way of thinkng. And the traditional thoughts in the Eastern countries (where people knew no environmental crisis and where the society was sustainable by symbiotic way of thoughts of humans and nature) are being given new look. Yet there is no philosophy yet that would combine both philosophy of East and West. My trail in this paper is to combine some aspects of traditional Eastern environmental thought and much advanced Western social ethics, hoping to find a way of synthesising both ethics of East and west. I used the traditional Japanese Confucian ethical thoughts as a model that included in it the environmental and social ethics at the same time