[Legalism] represents the antithesis of Confucian thinking1
- The core foundation of Confucianism are the ideas of strong personal relations and the advocacy for human values. This would be why Confucian followers would be aghast by Legalism and its strong rejection of those values and what they represent.
- Legalism emphasizes government by law while rejecting traditional ethical values as evident by their scorn for the ideals drawn from the past2.
- In terms of the government, Legalism does not care for the traditional virtues of humanity and rightness that the Confucians had urged upon rulers; quite frankly, Legalists deny that empathy and qualities that contribute to kindness have any practical relationship to the realities of political life.
- Beyond the ethical differences, Confucian view that the written law transition as detrimental to the moral and legal authority of governing. They even warn that as a consequence of writing down laws, the people would be afforded greater legal empowerment. Legalism, on the other hand, improved writing, specifically writing laws throughout their regime2.
Source:
(1) “Legalism in Chinese Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)”, 2014. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-legalism/.
(2) De Bary, Wm Theodore., Irene Bloom, Wing-tsit Chan, Joseph Adler, Richard John Lufrano. 1999. Sources of Chinese Tradition. 2nd ed. Introduction to Asian Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=908711_0.
