Re-Reconsidering Confucian Ritual (Li 禮) and Aristotelian Habit (Hexis)

Are Aristotelian virtue ethics and Confucian ethics diametrically opposed to one another? Commenting on Kevin DeLapp’s “Confucian Rituals and Aristotelian Habits,” while acknowledging some similarity between Confucian ritual propriety and Aristotelian habit, I present four noteworthy dissimilarities between these two systems. The distance between Aristotelian ethics and Confucian ethics, though not as absolute as some have previously argued or perceived, remains considerable. In cross-cultural comparative studies, to give equal weight to disanalogy is as important as noting the analogy.