ABSTRACT
Virtue—a very specific set of virtues—is a necessary condition of an excellent life for Confucians. In classical Confucian sources, there are two methods used to enumerate the virtues required for a morally cultivated person, a gentleperson—junzi. A great deal would need to be said about the specific details of these virtues to give a real sense of the Confucian form of life and how it differs from, say, Buddhist, Aristotelian, Thomist, or secular liberal conceptions. And one might notice that Platonic and Aristotelian virtues such as courage or temperance or secular liberal ones such as fairness do not appear straightforwardly on the Confucian list of the mandatory four virtues. Taken together, the canonical Confucian virtues plus the virtues required by specific social roles mean that goodness is always a relational good—dyadic (parent-child), triadic (mother-child-citizen), quadratic (mother, aunt, daughter, wife), and so on.
