Philosopher Kings and Daoist Wind-Riders: Zhuangzi's Critique, Louis IX's Reign, and the Difference Between Fitness and Entitlement

Christine Abigail Tan argues in 'No One Is Self-Made' that Confucianism is meritocracy's ancient ancestor, and that both systems fail because they root inequality in moral desert. The diagnosis is sharper than the cure. Her reading of Confucian worthiness (xian) conflates two claims that ought to be distinguished: that the virtuous person is best suited to lead a community, and that the virtuous person therefore deserves elevated social and economic status. Catholic anthropology has always held the first. It is skeptical of the second. And it rejects Tan's solution — the Daoist dissolution of moral agency — altogether.

What Confucius actually said, and what he didn't

Tan reads xian primarily through the lens of desert. The worthy, she writes, 'not only need more, they also deserve more.' Xunzi is quoted to this effect. But the concept of worthiness in classical Confucian thought tracks fitness for a role, not entitlement to a reward. A minister governs well because his character has been formed for governance. That formation makes him the right person for the office. It does not follow that he has a claim on honor the way a laborer has a claim on his wage.

Aquinas distinguishes these cases with precision. The laborer who contracts his skills earns a wage in strict justice: the act of justice here presupposes that something is already his by right, established through his work and the prior agreement.[^1] The philosopher-king analogy, by contrast, is not a contractual relationship. Plato's philosopher returns from the sun into the cave not because he deserves the burden, but because he is the one most capable of bearing it. Augustine makes a cognate point about the just man in public office: he governs not to collect what he is owed, but because someone must, and he is the least likely to corrupt the office.

Saint Louis IX of France is the clearest historical test case. Louis was by most measures the most morally serious king of medieval Europe: fasting, caring personally for the sick, administering justice with attention to the poorest plaintiff. He did not understand his throne as a prize for good behavior. He understood it as a vocation, a weight placed on him by God and the political order. His virtue made him fit for that weight. It did not entitle him to anything. The distinction is not subtle once you see it.

The laborer and the leader are not the same case

Tan's article slides between two kinds of inequality without marking the transition. She moves from 'moral inequality justifies political hierarchy' to 'those who rise deserve to rise,' treating these as a single continuous logic. But the economic case and the political case rest on different foundations.

A laborer who develops expertise in a craft — say, joinery or surgery — earns compensation proportionate to that skill. This is commutative justice, the justice of exchange. The joiner has put something into the world (skill, time, reliable work) and the market or the guild owes him something in return. Desert here is real and bounded. The act of justice presupposes that something has already been made 'his' through prior effort, before the question of what he is owed can even arise.[^1]

Political authority is a different structure entirely. A ruler does not contract with society the way a joiner contracts with a client. The common good is not a product that someone manufactures and then exchanges. Leadership is ordered to the welfare of others, not to the compensation of the leader. The virtuous ruler is the person best able to direct the community toward goods it could not secure alone. His virtue is the qualification, not the title deed. To say he 'deserves' authority in the sense Xunzi implies — that it is his fair return — is to misread what authority is for.

Tan treats this conflation as a flaw in Confucianism she has found. It is also a flaw in her own analysis, because she uses it to dismiss the underlying insight along with the error. The insight is that character formation matters for governance. That insight survives the critique.

This is where the classical leadership tradition, which places humility at the foundation of authority, becomes directly relevant.[^2] Teresa of Ávila's definition of humility — to live in the truth of who God is, who others are, and who you are — captures exactly what is missing from the meritocratic frame: the virtuous leader governs rightly not because virtue entitles him to govern, but because he sees reality clearly enough to serve.[^3]

Zhuangzi's diagnosis is useful. His solution is not.

Zhuangzi's parable of Robber Zhi is, as Tan reads it, a genuinely perceptive piece of social criticism. The Robber's monologue forces Confucius to confront whether the names of virtue ('righteousness,' 'propriety') function as moral achievements or as currency for power. The observation that 'a small thief gets arrested; a great thief becomes a ruler' has not aged. The 2008 financial crisis produced approximately one mid-level banker conviction while destroying wealth on a scale that dwarfs any bandit's haul. Zhuangzi is right that power frequently launders itself through the language of virtue.

But Tan's Zhuangzi moves from this observation to a conclusion that does not follow: that because moral distinctions are misused by the powerful, moral distinctions have no stable ground. 'From where I see it,' Zhuangzi writes in Tan's translation, 'all the sproutings of humankindness and responsible conduct, and all the trails of right and wrong, are hopelessly tangled and confused.' Tan does not read this as nihilism — she insists it 'does not mean that nothing is right and therefore anything goes.' But the Robber's monologue, as she presents it, offers no principle by which to distinguish a genuine virtue from a performed one, a legitimate authority from a usurped one. The solution to the misuse of moral language cannot be the abandonment of moral realism. That is the move of a man who, having found counterfeit currency, concludes that money does not exist.

The Catholic tradition takes the corruption of virtue seriously without concluding that virtue is a fiction. Concupiscence — the disordered desire that inclines the will toward self-seeking even in formally virtuous acts — is precisely the mechanism by which Zhuangzi's critique lands. A person can cultivate the appearance of virtue as a strategy for social advancement. The Confucian figures Zhuangzi mocks may, in some cases, have done exactly this. Aquinas and John of the Cross both describe this phenomenon: the soul that mistakes reputation for holiness, that clings to the consolation of being seen as good. This is a real pathology. The cure is not to dissolve moral agency but to purify it — to pursue virtue for God and the neighbor, not for the social position it purchases.

Agency, circumstance, and what Zhuangzi gets wrong about the self

Tan's most ambitious move is her use of Zhuangzi's concept of ziran — the 'so-of-itself' — to undermine moral agency altogether. Because character is shaped by conditions (education, health, family stability, luck), she argues, 'moral agency can never be cleanly separated out and credited or blamed.' Without a fully autonomous self, desert collapses.

This argument proves too much. The Catholic anthropological tradition has never required a self that stands outside all conditions in order to be a genuine agent. The unity of body and soul, as Vitz, Nordling, and Titus develop it in the CCMMP framework, means that the person is always an embodied, situated, relational being. Formation through family, community, ritual, and habit is not an objection to moral agency — it is its normal medium. Grace itself operates through secondary causes, through communities and friendships and the slow work of years. None of this erases the will.

The distinction Tan needs to make is between conditions that shape agency and conditions that negate it. A person formed in poverty with interrupted schooling faces real disadvantages in developing certain virtues and skills. That is a serious argument for structural attention to the conditions of flourishing, an argument Catholic social teaching endorses under the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. It is not an argument that no one ever chooses, or that differences in character reduce entirely to differences in circumstance. The latter claim would make exhortation, education, and accompaniment pointless — precisely the tools Confucius thought could transform a disordered society.

Zhuangzi's Liezi rides the wind. His freedom is real but conditional. Tan draws from this the conclusion that the self is a 'node' in a network, that agency is 'responsiveness rather than imposition.' But the Catholic tradition would say: yes, and. Yes, the person is constituted by relationships and formed by conditions. And the will remains a real cause, not merely an effect. Thomas Aquinas held both: that grace moves the will without compulsion, and that the will genuinely moves. The dissolution of the self into its conditions is not humility — it is the loss of the very subject who could respond to grace, form habits, and take responsibility for others.

The Daoist vision of the leader who leads without imposing — who, like Liezi, is moved by the wind rather than commanding it — is aesthetically compelling. But it cannot ground the accountability that leadership requires. Brandenburg's reading of prudence in the classical tradition captures why: prudence 'immediately guides the judgment of conscience' and applies moral principles to particular cases without error.[^4] That application requires a subject who is genuinely deciding, not merely a node responding to the network.

What Catholic anthropology actually offers

Tan ends her essay with a call to orient society toward the conditions of flourishing rather than toward sorting individuals by desert. On this specific institutional point, Catholic social teaching agrees more than she might expect. The common good, as articulated from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum through John Paul II's Centesimus Annus, is not reducible to the aggregated deserts of competing individuals. The political community exists to create conditions — education, just wages, stable families, accessible healthcare — within which persons can develop toward genuine flourishing. The worker's wage is owed in justice.[^1] The child's education is owed in solidarity. These claims do not depend on the workers or children having first demonstrated their merit.

But the Catholic tradition will not follow Tan and Zhuangzi in abandoning the moral distinction between the person who cultivates virtue and the person who does not, between the leader whose character is formed for service and the leader who uses office for self-enrichment. That distinction is not a fantasy. It is the distinction that made Louis IX's reign recognizably different from his grandfather's. It is the distinction Aquinas is drawing when he argues that the person who has been formed in justice is the right person to hold judicial power — not because justice owes him the bench, but because the bench requires justice.

The real problem Tan identifies is the conversion of that distinction into a currency. When virtue becomes something you accumulate in order to claim reward, it ceases to be virtue. Zhuangzi sees this clearly. His error is to conclude that the cure is the dissolution of moral categories. The cure is what John of the Cross called the passive purification: the stripping away of the self that performs virtue for its own advancement, until what remains is the person who acts rightly because the neighbor genuinely matters.

Suited for the office is not the same as owed the office. Competence in a craft earns a wage. Character fits a person for leadership. Neither claim needs the concept of cosmic desert to stand.

References

[^1]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles: 'al acto de justicia precede el acto por el cual algo se hace de alguien... pues alguno trabajando merece que se haga suyo aquello que el retribuidor por un acto de justicia le da.'

[^2]: Nathaniel Haslam, The Source and Summit of Leadership, ch. 'Humility.'

[^3]: Nathaniel Haslam, The Source and Summit of Leadership, ch. 'Humility,' quoting Teresa of Avila: 'humility is to live in the truth of who God is, who others are, and who you are.'

[^4]: Daniel Brandenburg, Leader Like No Other, ch. 'Prudence': 'It is prudence that immediately guides the judgment of conscience... With the help of this virtue, we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid.'