Abstract

This chapter develops an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of Mencius’s moral psychology from the perspective of cognitive science. The chapter has three major objectives. First, the author explains Mencius’s moral philosophy in the broad moral psychological context of the Confucian heart-mind as an intriguing combination of reason and emotion. Second, the author surveys major approaches to moral cognition currently discussed and debated in many areas of psychology and neuroscience and compares them with Mencius’s approach to affective empathy and other-concerning emotions. Specifically, Mencius’s discussion of ceyin zhi xin (惻隱之心 the heart-mind of pity and compassion) is analyzed on the basis of recent psychological studies of empathy as perspective taking, affective sharing, and emphatic concern. Third, Mencius’s moral psychology is characterized as a theory of other-regarding, developmental, and embodied moral emotions and its uniqueness is explained by the Mencian creature (a prototypical moral agent in Mencius’s moral psychology). The distinctive characteristics of the Mencian creature are listed, analyzed, and compared against the psychological properties of the Kantian, Humean, and Rawlsian creatures in Western moral psychology. By drawing from psychological theories of affective empathy and other-concerning emotions, this chapter provides a stimulating opportunity for us to deepen our understanding of Mencius’s moral psychology and the Confucian heart-mind.