In the English-speaking world, virtue ethics is strongly associated with the ideas of Aristotle, and, to a lesser extent, Hume and Nietzsche; in articulating and defending virtue ethics as a theory, many contemporary philosophers draw on the ideas and theories of these thinkers. However, a number of recent scholars have emphasized reading the early Confucian thinkers, too, as virtue ethicists. P.J. Ivanhoe (2000), Bryan Van Norden (2007), and Eric Hutton (2006), among others (Yu 1998; Slingerland 2000), have all suggested that the early Confucian philosophers can and should be read as articulating a virtue-based approach to ethics. The idea is that if we think of Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi as virtue ethicists, we can tap into some immensely rich sources of material for developing virtue ethics in new directions, and we will have more resources to defend virtue ethics against objections. It should be noted that such an approach has its limitations: decontextualizing Chinese thought in order to make use of those ideas in a Western philosophical debate can constrain or even distort the original ideas.1 However, one must take the bad with the good. Since many scholars are already using Confucian ideas to advance a discussion in Anglophone philosophy, we must look not just at the advantages and attractions that Confucianism brings to virtue ethics, but also at any weaknesses that accompany those strengths (a point made nicely in Hutton 2008). In this paper, I argue that Confucian virtue ethics, or at least a particular strand thereof, does bring one disadvantage with it. In particular, I argue that the Confucian focus on li (ritual), particularly in Xunzi’s version of Confucianism, renders virtue ethics vulnerable to a...