I am deeply grateful to Daniel Bell for his thoughtful and engaging review of Democracy after Virtue, especially for his appraisal of the book’s contribution in light of the ongoing debate between Confucian democrats and Confucian meritocrats. Democracy after Virtue was motivated by the aim of illuminating why democracy is needed in the East Asian societies of Confucian heritage and how the Confucian sense of justice in the areas of criminal punishment, economic distribution, and international relations can be balanced with democratic principles such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation.

One of Bell’s major problems with the book is that it does not provide social scientific evidence to demonstrate that democracy is more effective in social coordination and more legitimate in producing “just” outcomes than other types of political arrangements, including the Chinese model of political meritocracy. Although Bell’s criticism is reasonable, it should be noted that the book’s primary aim was not so much to scientifically demonstrate the superiority of democracy over nondemocratic regimes, which would have made this book a work of comparative political science, but to construct a mode of democracy that is both culturally relevant and politically practicable in a Confucian society that is (increasingly) pluralistic. The specific question that I raised was how can we achieve an effective and legitimate social coordination in East Asia’s Confucian societies in the context of value pluralism and moral disagreement. I argued that pragmatic Confucian democracy can meet this task far better than political meritocracy, which largely sidelines the moral challenges arising from value pluralism, and than market-based economic meritocracy, which attributes distributive justice simply to individual efforts and contributions.

Bell raises two substantive questions. First, he finds my argument in chapter 4—that the Confucian democratic state can justifiably impose heavier punishment on crimes between family members—less compatible with Confucian ethics. According to Bell, “precisely because family relations are supposed to be informed by a strong form of love and affection, there is a case for less legal regulation for family ties.” However, my guiding question in that chapter was how the Confucian democratic state should respond to crimes perpetrated within the family, not about general legal regulation of an ideal family as the haven of love and affection. Central to my argument was that contrary to the ongoing, Confucianism-informed, criminal legal practices in East Asian societies that tend to endorse unequal treatment between lineal ascendants and lineal descendants and between men and women in the case of the family crime, all forms of family crime should be equally subject to heavier punishment than nonfamily crimes, regardless of who the perpetrator is. This is a normative argument, with a view to striking a balance between the Confucian values of filial piety and family harmony and public equality; therefore, it is not intended to defend the existing legal practice of any particular East Asian society.

Second, Bell criticizes my argument in chapter 6 that, as it stands, the Mencian account of punitive expedition cannot be used as the moral ground for humanitarian intervention. Bell wonders whether my argument implies that China has no right to intervene in North Korea, should the latter experience genocide, unless its leadership is elected by one person, one vote. What I intended to argue, however, was purely philosophical: because the Mencian theory of just war appeals to the moral character (or good will) of the intervening state with the assumption of interstate moral hierarchy, for it to justify humanitarian intervention in the modern international context, it must be reconstructed into a democratic theory—at the core of which lie the domestic democratic authorization of war by the intervening state and the further processes of authorization involving the people of the intervened state and international society.

Although I agree with Bell that political theory must be empirically grounded, I must note that there is a danger in collapsing the critical distance between normative political theory and public policy. A move from the former to the latter requires another, equally sophisticated, step of argument, including an empirical argument. Democracy after Virtue is primarily for a normative political theory audience.