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In Confucius' time, it was supposed that the sovereign had the mandate of heaven (tianming) to rule. Both Confucius and Mencius speak of a legitimate ruler as someone who has such a mandate and of a deposed ruler as someone who has lost it. Commentators have recently turned their attention to what the reference to the mandate of heaven means, as there are implications for the prospects of democracy in a Confucian state. The result is a wide spectrum of views. In what might be called the liberal interpretation of the "mandate of heaven," Confucianism, or Mencius more specifically, allows for a popular revolt against a despotic ruler (hence for the possibility of democracy). In what might be called the conservative reading, this is denied. The liberal view locates the mandate of heaven in the will of the people whereas the conservative view takes the mandate to rule to lie in a heaven that transcends the people. To subscribe to the latter is to subscribe to what might be called the "Divine Command Theory of political legitimacy," analogous to the Divine Command Theory of morality. Just as the latter says that an action is morally obligatory (or forbidden) because God commands (or forbids) it, the former says that a ruler is legitimate (or illegitimate) because heaven has given to (or withdrawn from) the ruler the mandate to rule. By contrast, the liberal reading of "mandate of heaven" is analogous to the "moral autonomy" position. Just as the latter says that a rational person can autonomously make moral judgments, and that if there is a God He would endorse the correct ones, the former says that the people can judge the legitimacy of a ruler on the basis of the ruler's performance, and their judgment can be called the mandate of heaven.
In what follows I will restrict myself to Mencius' view on political legitimacy. I will discuss this in terms of the Divine Command Theory. One reason for doing so is to permit a comparison with Kant's account of moral judgments. In one interpretation, Kant is a Divine Command theorist, one who holds that something is a duty because God commands it. In another, he is a "moral autonomy"...