ABSTRACT
Confucian ethics originating in the authoritarian ancient East, and American humanism originating in the democratic modern West, share a number of moral principles because of their common empirical approaches to the ethical situations and ethical doctrines of mankind. A comparative analysis of these two ethical systems can show why the present world, suffering as it does from multiple crises, needs a more empirically directed and operatively stratified ethical science. This ethical humanism, a humanistic ethics based on an empirical or naturalist approach, is the best hope for an ethics universally applicable to all communities despite historical and geographic divergences.
