 Consider another area of potential interaction: when a tradition as long-lived and as sophisticated as the Confucian tradition brims full with writing on the nature of agency, human motivation, and the problem of developing ethical excellence and commitment, one cannot afford to ignore it (see Ivanhoe, 2000, for portraits of the tradition of Confucian and neo-Confucian thinkers on these subjects). Confucianism and Daoism emphasize the need to to pay attention to the concrete details of the situation at hand and displays healthy skepticism about the power of general principle to reveal what sort of action is suitable to the situation. Confucianism displays an appreciation for the power of community, custom, convention and ceremony for helping to make vivid and concrete and meaningful such ethical abstractions as love, respect, and care (Fingarette, 1972, Shun, 1993, Kupperman, 2004). From these themes, there is much to be learned, especially if one’s home tradition has had a strong focus for a good portion of the modern period on the top-down deduction of specific ethical judgments from extremely abstract principles. At the same time, an appreciation for the concrete and for the culturally specific may obscure the possibility of general and transcultural principles that help to evaluate the concrete and culturally specific, and the Chinese tradition could benefit from interaction with the Western (Cua, 1985). In fact, one’s case for the existence of transcultural principles becomes stronger when one dives into other tradition and finds correlates to important themes in one’s own tradition. 