A student of mine (thanks Gary!) pointed me toward a talk from a recent TED conference (TED, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a group that brings together thinkers on a variety of topics to expand upon, as its motto goes, "ideas worth spreading"). The talk my student noticed was by Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College. He spoke on the topic of "practical wisdom," (embedded below) which he derived from Aristotle, and he applied that notion to a variety of contemporary issues about work and morality.
The resonances here with Confucian ethics are notable. "Practical wisdom" he defined as a combination of moral will and moral skill. We have to want to do the right thing and work to discover what the right thing is in particular social settings. Which is precisely the general moral project of Confucius and Mencius. We cannot rely simply on rules or material incentives to orient people toward moral action but, rather, we have to cultivate "character," a sensibility for seeking the right action, as well as a capacity for judgment and discernment. Again, very Confucian.
Schwartz said that "a wise person knows: when and how to make the exception to every rule." Confucius would say the same thing: proper behavior cannot be reduced to automatically applied rules and incentives but is context-dependent and flexible.
And Schwartz also called us to celebrate moral exemplars, a fundamental Confucian idea.
What we have here, I believe, is a clear contemporary example of how Confucianism can work as a form of virtue ethics, as Van Norden suggests. Schwartz does not mention Confucianism, I suspect it is not part of his intellectual background and academic training, but his extrapolation of Aristotelian notions of "practical wisdom" have a great deal in common with a Confucian outlook.
Perhaps TED needs to plug into ancient Chinese thought – where there are a lot of great "ideas worth spreading."
Here is Schwartz's (20 minute) talk:
The Useless Tree 
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