On Responsibility in China: Understanding and Practice

Xiaohe Lu () and Daryl Koehn

Journal of Business Ethics, 2015, vol. 127, issue 3, 607-622

Abstract: “Responsibility” in Chinese consists of two words: “ze” (责, charge) and “ren” (任, office). In modern Chinese, although the two words “ze” and “ren” are mostly used as one word, people can still discern the close relationship between ze and right and between ren and the duty associated with a position or a power. In modern life, however, there is a serious problem with these historically close, key relationships. This paper raises the crucial question: how should we understand and deal with the separation of freedom from responsibility, right from obligation, and duty from power, particularly within China? The first part of the paper investigates the understanding of responsibility and concepts of duty, obligation, right, and power in the Chinese context. The second part analyzes the key issues of responsibility associated with the expansion of rights and powers in today’s China. The concluding part explores agents’ responsibilities on different levels and offers suggestions on how to cultivate responsibility as part of a systematic moral education. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Responsibility; Freedom; Obligation; Right; Duty; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-014-2063-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:127:y:2015:i:3:p:607-622

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-014-2063-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().