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In this essay, I argue that Confucian philosophy’s encounter with Western ethical theory is not its defining moment. I try to use the vocabulary of Confucian ethics itself to express its own sui generis vision of the moral life as Confucian role ethics. Given the centrality of family as the entry point for pursuing moral competence, a key term appealed to in the Confucian corpus that expresses this notion of role ethics is nothing less than the prime moral imperative in this tradition, “family reverence” ( xiao). If our goal is to take the Confucian tradition on its own terms and to let it speak with its own voice without overwriting it with our own cultural priorities, we must begin by first self-consciously and critically theorizing the Confucian conception of person as the starting point of Confucian ethics. <br/> I argue that the vocabulary of agents, acts, generic virtues, character traits, autonomy, motivation, reasons, choice, freedom, principles, consequences, and so on, introduces distinctions that assume a foundational individualism as its starting point. Confucian ethics by contrast begins from the wholeness of experience, and is formulated by invoking a radically different focus, a cluster of terms and distinctions with fundamentally different assumptions about how personal identities emerge in our human narratives, and how moral competence is expressed as an achieved virtuosity in the roles and relationships that come to constitute us. To fail to distinguish what I will call individual human “beings” from relationally-constituted “human becomings,” then, would mean that we have willy-nilly insinuated a contemporary and decidedly foreign notion of person into our investigation before it has even begun.