Touché Professor! And your translation is ambiguous enough to make for endless centuries of debate too… and how is the love of integrity not “like” the love of a beautiful woman…. 🙂
But yes, Confucius would have been shocked indeed.
(but remember– just to be clear– the orginal discussion was never about breaking the law, right?)

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Jonathan,
re: your students….because they were thinking about sex….

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Sorry, but se 色 really can’t be sex or romance; it’s much broader, even in the 15.13 and 9.18 contexts. I think the “sex” translation is just flat out wrong–there isn’t any independent evidence that sexual license was a temptation Confucius worried over; nor, by the way, was concubinage an option for anyone other than the emperor or possibly a very powerful warlord. This line of translating seems to be a projection of more modern (say, from the 18th century onward) genres of moralizing texts onto the Analects.
In any case, here is an Analects example (2.8) that I think helps to set our understanding of se in the right direction:
子夏問孝。子曰：“色難。有事弟子服其勞，有酒食先生，曾是以為孝乎？”
“Zixia asked about filial piety. The Master said: ‘[Mere] appearances (se) are the difficulty. With matters to be tended, younger brothers or sons offer their service; with drink and food one partakes in order of birth. Can this really be filial piety?’”
Confucius seems much more concerned, throughout the Analects, in the contrast between mere, or rote, behavior that mimics real piety, righteousness, or ritual and genuine possession of those characteristics. I think that transfers also to distractions that form a category of “surface” pleasure. Beauty, in particular, is not a mere surface pleasure for Confucius, so translation of se as ‘love of beauty’ also makes a mistake–the real trouble is not appreciating beauty and instead being led to “cheap” delights.

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Sam,
My pleasure to stop by. I’m still not sure that the sensibility is about one arena or type of activity as opposed to another–e.g. in antiquity, between ritualized life and licentious free-for-all. I think the sensibility in the Analects is between more closely related activities, namely the “real” or “deep” enjoyment/practice/performance of ritual, filial piety, music, beauty of women, and so forth, and the disingenuous or shallow enjoyment/practice/performance of that same range of things. Confucius’s concerns are focused on a declining empire, but not like the Roman decline as represented in “Caligula.” The decline lies in the loss or threatened loss of “coherence”–or, as you put it for de 德, “integrity”–of what he considered to be high culture (in the moral/social/aesthetic mashed-up sense). In effect, it is a type of snobbery but perhaps with less pejorative connotation. It’s like bemoaning the loss of integrity that, say, the ascendence of Kenny G represented for the true jazz aficionado. Kenny G’s performances lack “soul” or something like that, so they are se 色.
I don’t know, maybe there are better examples (though a knock against Kenny G is always a bonus if not gratuitous), but something of that sort is what I think is going on in Confucius’s difficulty with se.

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Manyul,
I agree with you 100%
My only hesitation is this: every single source I have looked at in Japanese, English and very briefly in Chinese have explained this quote vis-a-vis 美人. So, I am guessing that there was some particular context that all the translations are being based on…(and it could be DB’s Confucian Romance context that I linked to in my Post)…
Indeed, I agree that 色 is “illusion”… Not beauty. Not sex. Like so many other ancient concepts, I think 色　had wide possible definitions and semantic usuages. So, how to make a call?
If I were translating this, I would probably not go against the general movement which sees this in terms of female beauty. (I have not found one commentary which interprets it otherwise– which doesn’t mean they all are not wrong, just that I know what I don’t know). With this in mind, then, I think “a beautiful woman” or “romance” are the only possibilities.
In any event, Manyul, while I am sticking to my guns (for now) on romance, I couldn’t agree more with what you said above.
And for what its worth, that is why I had such problems with Sam’s example from the newspaper. I never saw the original 論語 passage as a lament of that sort. I am just not at all convinced that it is sex or beauty or any of these things which is the issue, but rather intergrity (but not in a victorian sense)… consistency or I would wonder if elite commitment is not appropriate description (which I think we can still see in certain societies in East Asia among the highly educated or cultured– お茶、お花in japan etc.).

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