 One debate that arises within the comparative perspective, however, is whether the Confucians had anything that fits the Western notion of morality. The words ’ethics’ and ‘ethical’ have been used to in this piece to remain neutral on this matter. Some contemporary thinkers (most prominently, Williams, 1985) have tended to confine the ‘moral’ to a relatively narrow set of characteristics associated with Kant’s moral philosophy – a belief in universal laws validated by pure reason, a belief that responsibility for one’s actions requires a freedom from determination from external causes – and on this view of the moral, it could be argued that there is no equivalent in Chinese philosophy (see Rosemont, 1988). If such a contrast is made, then Confucians are acknowledged to have an ethics as opposed to a morality, where an ethics does embrace questions about value, how one ought to live one’s life, and what the good life consists in. One question to be debated here is whether Western notions of the moral are so uniform and narrow as to conform to one philosopher’s (even a great one) specific conception of the moral. On the criteria given by Williams, Hume wouldn’t have a morality, even though he used the term. It is true that a dominant strain of modern Western morality makes use of a crucial distinction between a morally significant sphere of life that has to do primarily with one’s relationships with others and a “private” sphere of life in which one has moral “time-off” that is no one’s business but one’s own. If this dominant strain is taken to define morality, then Confucians would have no morality. It also would eliminate certain utilitarians from having a morality: those who insist that there is no purely private sphere because any type of action or omission could have substantial impact on others given the right circumstances.