From Li to Law: Confucian Moral Technology and Kant’s Ethics of Autonomy

This paper reconsiders Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy through the lens of early modern European encounters with Chinese ethics. Against the standard view that Kantian ethics excludes ritual and embodied practice, it argues that Kant’s formalism represents a critical transformation of a problem long addressed by Confucian moral philosophy: how stable moral judgment can be cultivated without reliance on revelation or external authority. By tracing the transmission of Confucian ethics through Jesuit mediation and Christian Wolff’s rational reconstruction, the paper situates Kant in a shared problem-space of moral formation, repetition, and regulation. It analyses the abstraction of ritual into form and the role of relational alignment in both Confucian li and Kant’s categorical imperative. The paper concludes by suggesting that Confucian models of cultivated action can illuminate the practical limits of modern moral formalism. This study distinguishes between intellectual history and comparative reconstruction: the former provides the historical context of early modern engagements with Chinese philosophy, while the latter interprets Kant not as an opponent of ritual, but as a philosopher who reformulates its stabilising function under the conditions of modern moral autonomy.