Abstract

Mencius’ claim that human nature is good is well known among students of classical Confucian thought. It has been taken for granted that underlying Mencius’ deceptively simple thesis is an appeal to intuition. No persuasive argument is offered, except the insistence that the moral propensities, such as the “four germinations” are inherent in human nature. A corollary of this insistence is the unquestioned belief that human beings all have the inner ability to commiserate with others, to feel ashamed of themselves, to have a sense of humbleness, and to differentiate right from wrong. And the only example of an attempt to “prove” the thesis which approximates a kind of empiricist procedure seems no more than a commensense observation