A Compassionate Perspective toward Public Leadership in Conflict Mediation

The study looks into the perception of intellectuals by focusing on public leadership for conflict mediation and the narrator’s views as described in literature related to legal folktales, also known as 訟事說話 (folktales dealing with trial processes). These folktales depict not only the trial processes of civil or criminal cases but also the complete case-solving process from the initiation of disputes to the investigation process and the final verdict related to the general administrative tasks of local officials. In the legal folktales written in literature, a diverse panorama of human lives unfolds, and the views of narrators consistently are biased. They prioritize Confucian ideology as an absolute value, unilaterally force a patriarchal societal order, and take it for granted to approve the class superiority of the nobility and to sacrifice individuals within family or kinship communities over individual self-realization in the public area. The narrators representing the consciousness of noblemen maintain distorted and biased perspectives towards lower social classes and women. The narrators who depicted the manifestation process of public leadership mediating various conflicts attentively observed the wisdom and judgments of several judges and consistently evaluated based on the values held by noblemen. They assessed the trial processes from their subjective standpoint but showed indifference to the impacts on the common people. They exclusively worried about a collapse of the communal order set by the nobility while ignoring the suffering of the socially disadvantaged who suffocated under such a stringent social order. The narrators evaluated the judges’ decisions by focusing on the defense of the social order that noblemen aspire to. At that time, those who read literary tales were all nobles with proficiency in Chinese like the writers. Those who read the literary tales in the Joseon Dynasty identified their social homogeneity as nobles while solidifying it. Reflecting on the literary utility of reading legal folktales, training for empathy to see from another’s perspective is the purpose of reading literature. In the legal scenes illustrated in legal folktales, there are plaintiffs and defendants, judges, and mediators as well as narrators who consistently observe and narrate. Readers can have an opportunity to interpret the ongoing dispute process from various angles through the perspectives of these diverse characters. Those who read also contemplate the fairest judgment, putting themselves in the shoes of a mediator. This process demands legal folktale readers for psychological tasks of empathy and self-reflection towards others. At that moment, moral imagination is required.