• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Han Feizi

Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

21st century, democracy, Donald Trump, Han Feizi, Korea, law, Liz Truss, Republican Party, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Yoon-Suk Yeol

When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?

Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)

But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?

Continue reading →

On civic virtue and unwritten constitutions

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Human Nature, Morality, Politics, Virtue

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brad Raffensperger, Confucius, Donald Trump, Frans de Waal, Han Feizi, James Doull, law, nonhuman animals, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Xunzi

One of the more pressing questions in political philosophy is how to prevent the arbitrary use of power. I think Thomas Hobbes and Xunzi were sadly right to diagnose an abiding darkness in human nature: left to our own devices, human beings can easily degenerate into disastrous crimes. Primatology suggests a confirmation: among our closest (or nearly closest) living relatives, the chimpanzees, a jockeying for power and status can lead to vicious rivalries and even murder – even in the idyllic situation where all their material needs are provided for. The evidence of existing human history does nothing to suggest that language or other human capacities have made us better than that.

But Hobbes, as far as I can tell, offers the worst possible solution to this problem: to concentrate power in a single sovereign person. Then that one person becomes able to tyrannize everyone else in a way completely unrestrained, just as he pleases. (It is rarely a she.) The twentieth century gives us too many chilling examples of mass murder and terror from a sovereign given arbitrary power.

A more reasonable approach to the problem asks how we can contain the dark impulses of all people – and of the sovereign leader most of all. It is likely no mystery why I’m asking this question living in 2020 in the United States.

Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Paul D. Van Pelt on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on What should we call the movement?
  • Amod Lele on Where race and gender overrode everything
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on What should we call the movement?
  • Nathan on Where race and gender overrode everything

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity music mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (14)
  • Applied Phil (342)
    • Death (42)
    • Family (50)
    • Food (19)
    • Friends (18)
    • Health (28)
    • Place (31)
    • Play (16)
    • Politics (209)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (44)
  • Asian Thought (438)
    • Buddhism (315)
      • Early and Theravāda (133)
      • Mahāyāna (129)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (95)
      • Confucianism (59)
      • Daoism (19)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (140)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (42)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (15)
      • Vedānta (39)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (7)
  • Method (262)
    • M.T.S.R. (148)
    • Metaphilosophy (170)
  • Practical Philosophy (405)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (50)
    • Emotion (178)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (30)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (12)
      • Grief (7)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (33)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (96)
    • Foundations of Ethics (119)
    • Karma (43)
    • Morality (75)
    • Virtue (170)
      • Courage (6)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (11)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (24)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (35)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (135)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (41)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (374)
    • Consciousness (19)
    • Deity (73)
    • Epistemology (131)
      • Certainty and Doubt (15)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (29)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (32)
    • Metaphysics (107)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (71)
    • Supernatural (52)
    • Truth (60)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (480)
    • Analytic Tradition (97)
    • Christianity (155)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (56)
    • French Tradition (49)
    • German Tradition (90)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (119)
      • Epicureanism (25)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (22)
    • Islam (41)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (10)
    • Judaism (35)
    • Natural Science (97)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (172)
      • Economics (42)
      • Psychology (70)

Recent Posts

  • Where race and gender overrode everything
  • What should we call the movement?
  • Yes, there is a movement
  • Why we sometimes need to deadname
  • Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2009-2024 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2009-2024 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.