Justice and Confucianism

This article surveys contemporary scholarship on justice and early Confucianism and builds upon recent work on justice in the Analects by examining the relationship between justice and moral self‐cultivation in the Mengzi (Mencius) and the Xunzi . It is argued that focusing on early Confucian accounts of how a sense of justice is cultivated offers insights into Confucian views of justice because it shows how remarks on justice in the Analects , Mengzi , and Xunzi are not tangential, but rather are an important part of their accounts of Confucian moral self‐cultivation.