A Defense of Mencius’ Moral Sentimentalism

Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 9:63-67 (2018)
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Abstract

Mencius’ moral philosophy is essentially a sort of moral sentimentalism that is very similar to the one that David Hume and Michael Slote have defended. Mencius took the “four beginnings” as the foundation of his moral sentimentalism. He claimed any virtue norm or virtuous act must originate from the natural, involuntary emotional reactions of human beings. His normative ethics is a sort of sentimentalist normative virtue ethics. His evaluative terms, such as “benevolent,” “human,” “gentleman” and their antonyms such as “malevolent,” “inhuman,” “villain,” etc., are in fact virtuous evaluative terms suffused with passions or emotional attitudes. In his view, virtues and behavior norms do not come from our empirical or rational cognition of the world but from human natural feelings. Therefore, the most efficient means of moral education is not to inculcate into the people empirical and rational knowledge about the world but to “seek the cause in oneself,” and foster and develop the feelings of the “four beginnings” already in the moral agent. As long as one keeps those feelings and extends them, one will be able to “know virtue,” to “know heaven,” and thus, “Everyone potentially could be a sage.”

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