This paper attempts to show the compatibility between Confucianism and human rights, first by revisiting the moral philosophy of Mencius, a key founder of the Confucian tradition, then by reconstructing the Mencian-Confucian idea of human rights from

If perfectionism is understood as the state's non-neutral promotion of a valuable way of life, Confucian political theory, often pursued as a pluralist correction to global monism of liberal democracy, is ineluctably perfectionist. But how can Confucian perfectionism, committed to particular Confucian values, reconcile with the societal fact of value pluralismwithinthe putative Confucian polity? This article argues that a potential tension between Confucian perfectionism and value pluralism can be avoided by making Confucian perfectionist goods the core elements of public reason with which citizens can justify their arguments to one another and by which the state can justifiably exercise its public authority to reasonable citizens who otherwise subscribe to various comprehensive doctrines. By defining a mode of Confucian perfectionism working through Confucian public reason broadly shared by citizens aspublic reason Confucianism, this article attempts to balance the Confucian polity's internal societal pluralism and the people's collective self-determination.

By examining Xunzi's and Mencius's contrary reactions toward royal transmission by individual merit or "abdication" (shanrang 禪讓), this article attempts to reveal the distinctive features of their respective political theories, which I reconstruct in terms of lizhi constitutionalism and dezhi constitutionalism. Resisting the conventional tendency to capture Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories in such dichotomous terms as idealism and realism, this paper draws attention to the complex mixture of idealism and realism found in both thinkers' constitutional political theories and identifies such common ground in terms of "Confucian constitutionalism." This paper presents Mencius's idealistic defense of abdication and his realistic resolution of the constitutional crisis latent in it, then it examines Xunzi's refutation of the three conventional rationalizations of abdication, and it concludes by recapitulating the common Confucian constitutionalist ground that Mencius and Xunzi shared and discussing its implications for the study of constitutional theory.

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