Doing Justice to Others 21
refrain from pursuing defeated enemies who were fl eeing from battle. Th e
right of other states to remain neutral in a confl ict between any two countries
was admitted, although it is not clear how far the interests of neutral states
were actually respected.
Care should be taken not to exaggerate the eff ectiveness of these worthy
principles in practice. Th e rules— if they can even be called that— appear to
have been breached with some frequency, and typically with impunity. In
the seventh century bc, there were at least two instances in which states
were attacked in years in which they had suff ered insurrections. And in the
following century, there were at least three instances in which states were
invaded in the year that their rulers died.
In addition to this body of state practice, the Warring States period of
Chinese history produced an innovation of a quite diff erent character: a body
of systematic writing on international relations. It was very slight in bulk, but
it must be said to mark the beginning of international law as an intellectual
discipline— as opposed to international law as a set of state practices. Th ere
were even several distinct schools of thought in the area, with the Confu-
cian tradition as the dominant one. Th e basis of Confucianism was a system
of interpersonal ethics— with an extrapolation from this to a general theory
of social relations. Some of its key tenets were applicable to relations be-
tween states as well.
Th ere were four particularly noteworthy elements of Confucianism. One
was an insistence on the importance of deference and hierarchy in human
relations: of younger siblings to older ones, of children to parents, of sub-
jects to sovereigns. A second component was a stress on duties rather than
rights— but of duties that were reciprocal in nature, running downward from
above, as well as upward from below. Th e Confucian system was thereby in-
fused with a powerful sense of noblesse oblige or paternalism, and also with
the belief that the key to good government lay in the personal qualities of
the leader. Benevolent rule by a king was expected to generate, more or less
automatically, gratitude, loyalty, obedience, and order on the part of his
subjects.
Th e third key element of Confucianism was the belief that this network of
reciprocal duties made for a harmonious and well- ordered society in general,
in which all persons had appropriate roles to play, what ever their station in
life. Confucianism was, in short, a system suff used by inequality— but also