 It would be a mistake to ask which of these readings of the Analects or the early Confucians in general is the correct one. In the first place, we must note that all of the ethical theories save one are Western, and the questions focus on which one best fits with early Confucian writings. Even more basically, the concept of ethics as a delimitable field of philosophy is itself Western, not Chinese, which problematizes even more the question of “correctness”. Consequently the translator/exegete must constantly guard against reading out of the text simply what he or she has read into it. Rather obviously Confucius and his successors could not hold all these ethical positions, and perhaps they didn’t hold any of them, or any ethical theory at all. Thus all these interpretations can’t possibly be right, and more probably they are all of them wrong in at least some respects.