The 1AC has isolated an “ethical” response to an anomalous impact, but they cannot create a coherent ethical system that makes us more moral. Only an ethics of ritual propriety teaches us ethical behavior in this debate, which makes us more moral people and gives us a portable system of ethics.

This level of detail illustrates the distinctive character of Confucian ethics and the psychological processes by which ritual propriety guides action. Xúnzǐ’s ethics is formulated not through abstract general principles such as “Promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” nor general rules such as “Don’t lie” or “Thou shalt not kill,” but through guidelines conceptualized as concrete, repeated procedures of ritual etiquette, such as “Remove your hat and bow deeply before ascending the stairs to the hall.” This relatively concrete orientation reflects a conception of moral agency as lying in a commitment to and competent performance of repeated, skill-like patterns of activity, rather than in more abstract processes of reasoning or feeling. The actions of an ethically ideal agent spring not from a capacity for practical reasoning (as in Kant), nor from sentiment (as in Hume and Mill), but from a complex of concrete, repeated habits and skills, whose execution is managed by the heart (xīn 心).24 Action is conceived of as performance of a dào, akin to performing a symphony, dance, or drama. The elements of this dào are ritualized patterns of activity, intelligently and skillfully performed in response to various particular circumstances. These circumstances are understood to be “constant” (cháng 常, see 17/81/1), in the sense that they typically fall under certain regularly recurring general kinds of situations. Of course, similar circumstances display some variation, and anomalous events happen occasionally. But precisely because they are unlikely to recur, such variations and anomalies do not provide a guide to conduct. The proper dào for Xúnzǐ is one grounded in regularities in natural and social circumstances—hence his insistence that the dào is not subject to change over time, the social divisions it institutes being of “the same pattern as heaven and earth.”25 Accordingly, he conceives of the dào as comprising a system of repeated, ritualized patterns of proper conduct. For the agent committed to Xúnzǐ’s vision of dào, nearly all action will be to some degree ritualized, and moral character development amounts to acquiring virtuosity in performing the ritual dào through study and practice, grounded largely in model emulation, much as one acquires competence in music, dance, or sport. Xúnzǐ has three interrelated justifications for this elaborate system of ritual propriety. His central justification is the consequentialist claim mentioned earlier: the system is supposedly the most effective way of “patterning” or “organizing” (lǐ 理) the natural world—including human beings, in their innate, uncultured state—so as to achieve social order (zhì), and, as a result, provide for people’s material welfare. The system is effective, he claims, because it is uniquely successful in “aligning” (cān 參) with natural conditions (9/39/3, 17/80/2–3). So a second justification he could offer is that the dào of ritual propriety aligns with constant or regular natural patterns better than any alternative dào. A third justification has a teleological flavor. Xúnzǐ claims that the cultural and ethical norms manifested in such a system of ritual propriety are what make us fully human; our capacity to live by such norms is what distinguishes us from lower creatures and enables us to dominate them (9/39/9–16, 5/18/13–17). To live according to ritual propriety is to fulfill our human capacities. These claims are deeply insightful on an abstract level. If we read Xúnzǐ as a theorist of ritual, making general, descriptive claims about the role or functions of ritualized activity in human societies, he is surely correct to claim that humans create their own cultural dào by imposing an organizing pattern onto natural conditions, and that such a dào is feasible only if it meets some minimum standard of alignment with nature. He may also be correct that a system for social coordination and cooperation can be justified only if it helps to secure people’s basic material welfare. This consequentialist criterion need not be a sufficient condition for justifying a social dào, but it is at least plausible to suggest it is a necessary one. Particularly interesting, and again highly credible, is Xúnzǐ’s claim that ritual propriety is distinctive of human life. It does seem that, as Xúnzǐ insists, human societies inevitably establish some scheme of social divisions, along with a code of ritual performances that institute and express them. Weddings, graduations, coronations, and funerals are examples of such performances found across a wide range of cultures. A descriptive construal of several of Xúnzǐ’s other claims about ritual propriety is equally insightful and plausible. Ritual propriety may indeed guide much of our conduct; much of our daily activity probably proceeds according ritualized or ritual-like patterns. Ritual propriety does provide outward form and ornamentation for our attitudes and social statuses and channels the expression of emotion. In some circumstances, at least, it mediates interpersonal relations and facilitates pursuit of tasks. But of course Xúnzǐ is not engaged primarily in descriptive theorizing. He is propounding the normative stance that a certain dào—the tradition of ritual propriety stemming from the Zhōu sage-kings—is justified above all others because it fulfills the various functions of ritual he identifies in an especially effective way. The problem is that even if we affirm the value of these functions, the considerations he offers probably justify no particular code of ritual propriety.26 Even if we allow that his favored code secures order, provides for material welfare, aligns with natural conditions, and enables a distinctively human form of life, numerous alternative systems—most notably, a system with less rigid, complex, and costly ritual practices, or one less authoritarian and hierarchical, more liberal and egalitarian—might do so as well or better. Despite the challenge of contemporaneous philosophical opponents such as the Mohists, Xúnzǐ never addresses this point satisfactorily. Nor, for that matter, do the considerations he advances necessarily justify an especially central or fundamental role for ritual propriety as a means of social organization—particularly a code of ritual propriety as extensive and elaborate as his. Perhaps the functions of ritual he identifies could be fulfilled without actively promulgating or enforcing any specific regimen of ritual propriety, simply by allowing people to find their own ways of interacting with each other Given the absence of a compelling justification for it, why is Xúnzǐ so deeply devoted to the Zhōu tradition of ritual propriety? One factor may be that he personally identifies so profoundly with this cultural tradition that he cannot seriously imagine living by alternative norms. He may also hold the skeptical conservative view that, whatever the merits or demerits of the prevailing social system, we have little reason to believe any alternative system could do better. But a more penetrating explanation may be that Xúnzǐ’s devotion to the Zhōu tradition stems from an even deeper attachment to—verging on an obsession with—his ideal of “order” (zhì). Indeed, he seems almost to equate the two: conduct that diverges from traditional ritual propriety is, for that very reason, disorderly. Social order was a common concern among Warring States thinkers; it ranks among the Mohists’ core values, for instance. But Xúnzǐ’s emphasis on it goes beyond even the Mohists’. For them it is one basic good among several, and its components are simpler—primarily the absence of crime, conflict, and injury, the virtuous performance of core social roles, and the habit of reciprocally benefiting each other. To understand Xúnzǐ’s devotion to his elaborate, ritualized conception of order, I suggest, we must extrapolate beyond the explicit statements in the text. My hypothesis is that for Xúnzǐ the order achieved through ritualization provides a profound sense of confidence, security, and satisfaction—a comforting sense of belonging or being at home in the world—because it embeds natural events and human affairs within a comprehensible, authoritative normative structure—authoritative insofar as he insists its inventors were brilliant cultural heroes who designed it to correlate uniquely well with nature. By virtue of our place in this traditional dào, our lives take on significance, authority, and beauty. The more elaborate and comprehensive the degree of ritualization, the greater is the agent’s sense that even routine daily activities belong to a familiar, coherent, controlled normative order. This metaphorical function of ritual propriety for Xúnzǐ is illustrated by his discussion of the ritual response to death, arguably the most “disorderly” of all natural events. Xúnzǐ devotes much of his lengthy “Discourse on Ritual Propriety” to funeral and mourning rituals, which he says manifest the ethical significance of death and life (19/95/16–17). The key to proper ritual handling of death and mourning, he emphasizes, is to maintain “unity” between the deceased’s life and death, thus bringing the human dào to a fitting completion (19/93/6–7). To achieve this unity, the deceased must be treated with the “ornamentation” or “adornment” appropriate for expressing reverence commensurate with their station in life. Specifically, they must be treated in a way analogous to how we treated them while alive. In funeral rituals, we adorn the dead on the basis of the living. We send them off to their death by symbolizing their life. So we serve the dead as if they were alive, serve the absent as if they were present, and the end and beginning are unified. (19/95/6–7) By insisting on continuity in our treatment of the deceased, Xúnzǐ preserves their status within the ritualized web of human interaction even though their own participation has been irreversibly broken off. He thus reaffirms the continuity of the normative cultural order even in the face of a distressing, disruptive natural event.27 His account of death rituals is paradigmatic of how he sees ritual propriety as “patterning” nature and thus placing even uncanny, uncontrollable natural events within a regimented, stable cultural framework. Rather than acknowledging even in the slightest that death fractures the human cultural order—that the deceased in effect exit that order to be reclaimed by nature—he waxes lyrical about the unity and wholeness achieved through ritual propriety: “We serve the dead as we serve the living, serve the absent as we serve those present, give shape to the formless, and thus complete the proper cultural forms” (19/98/9–10).