Waldemar Brys

This chapter examines various proposed ways of reading Mencius as a moral intuitionist – that is, as holding the view that some moral knowledge is non-inferentially acquired by intuition. In doing so, the chapter critically surveys different accounts of what intuitions are for Mencius: that they are perceptions with moral content, emotions, or products of thinking (sī 思). A close reading of selected key passages, such as 6A7, 2A6, and 7A15, shows that Mencius is probably less of an intuitionist than many take him to be. This casts doubt on the widely accepted thesis that a distinguishing feature of Mencian Confucianism is its intuition-centric moral epistemology.

This paper defends an expertise-centric account of moral intuition and Confucian sagehood in the Mencius. I argue that we should conceive of sages as moral experts and moral intuitions as intellectual seemings, some of which are expert-like in content and therefore afford prima facie epistemic justification to the moral beliefs that are based on them. Such a proposal rejects an intuition-based moral epistemology in favour of a broadly process reliabilist one. I motivate the proposal by arguing that it allows us to avoid three problems, two of which arise for moral intuitionist readings of Mencius: the problem that such readings posit a mysterious faculty of intuition and that we have difficulty explaining why some but not all relevant moral intuitions epistemically justify beliefs. The third problem arises for both moral intuitionist and connoisseurship readings: the problem that the moral intuitions of Confucian sages are epistemically inaccessible to ordinary people.

I argue that, for Mengzi, the kind of knowledge that features in expressions of the form ‘knowing N’, where N is a noun or a noun phrase, is not a kind of belief but is instead a capacity for intelligently performing relevant actions. My argument proceeds by showing that, first, Mengzi is committed to the view that a person knows N iff she is relevantly capable and, second, that the best explanation for this is that the kind of knowledge involved in knowing N is a capacity. Finally, I motivate such a practicalist interpretation by arguing that it offers us a general but informative explanation of what it is that knowing N makes the knower capable of doing.

This paper raises a new problem for the widely held view that, according to the Confucian philosopher Mencius, being a benevolent person necessarily entails being affectively disposed in morally relevant ways. I argue that ascribing such a view to Mencius generates an inconsistent triad with two of his central philosophical commitments on what it means to be a benevolent ruler. I then consider possible ways of resolving the triad and I argue that the most attractive option is to reject the view that a benevolent person must be affectively disposed in morally relevant ways; instead, being disposed to perform benevolent actions is enough.

In this chapter I give an account of the epistemology underlying the concept of “extension” in the Mengzi, an early Confucian text written in the fourth century BCE. Mengzi suggests in a conversation with King Xuan of Qi that a solution to the King’s problem of how one comes to act in a kingly manner is that one engages in “extension”. I argue that a long-standing scholarly debate on the exact nature of Mengzian “extension” can be resolved by closely investigating the epistemological assumptions that must be in place for “extension” to be a viable solution to King Xuan’s problem. More specifically, my argument is that knowledge of a certain kind, namely knowing-to, is both necessary and sufficient for extension to take place. In other words, for a person S to extend X, where X is a capacity for action, S at least needs to have knowing-to.

I examine passages from the Zhuangzi that proponents of interpreting Zhuangzian ethics as "patient moral relativism" (PMR) primarily draw on to support their view. I consider whether in these passages Zhuangzi morally evaluates agents or their actions, and if he does, whether his evaluations support ascribing to him PMR. My argument is that Zhuangzi either fails to make the required moral evaluations or he makes moral evaluations that do not accord with PMR. A PMR-friendly reading is possible only if we accept contested interpretative claims about parts of the Zhuangzi that go beyond the primary textual evidence that is frequently cited in support of such a reading.

I argue that, for Mengzi, the kind of knowledge that features in expressions of the form ‘knowing N’, where N is a noun or a noun phrase, is not a kind of belief but is instead a capacity for intelligently performing relevant actions. My argument proceeds by showing that, first, Mengzi is committed to the view that a person knows N iff she is relevantly capable and, second, that the best explanation for this is that the kind of knowledge involved in knowing N is a capacity. Finally, I motivate such a practicalist interpretation by arguing that it offers us a general but informative explanation of what it is that knowing N makes the knower capable of doing.

Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472 – 1529) is famously associated with the view that knowledge and action are unified (zhī xíng hé yī 知行合一). Call this the Unity Thesis. Given standard assumptions about what it means for a person to know, it may seem that the Unity Thesis is clearly false: I can know that p without currently acting in p-related ways, and I can know how to φ without currently φ-ing. My aims in this paper are, first, to draw on recent work in epistemology to explain and defend the Unity Thesis and, second, to argue that it offers us an attractive conceptual alternative to a standard way of thinking about the nature of intentional action. The first step of my argument draws on the idea that what distinguishes intentional actions from bodily events is the presence of knowing-to – that is, an agent is φ-ing intentionally if and only if she is currently doing something because she knows to do it as a way for her to φ. Such a notion of knowing-to allows us to explain otherwise puzzling features of the Unity Thesis, including the claim that knowing and acting occur simultaneously. In the second step, I argue that the Unity Thesis can help us avoid various long-standing issues in the philosophy of action, including the problem of deviant (formal) causation.

We raise the following problem for so-called target-centred virtue ethics. An important motivation for adopting target-centred virtue ethics over other forms of virtue ethics is its supposedly distinctive account of right action: an action is right if and only if and because it is virtuous, and what makes an action virtuous is that it hits the target of the virtues. We argue that the account is not distinctive of target-centred virtue ethics, because it is an account that is widely endorsed by Neo-Aristotelians. Hence, the argument of this paper undermines a central motivation for adopting target-centred virtue ethics. As a solution, we suggest that there is theoretical room for a target-centred account that is not Neo-Aristotelian, and we draw on the work of Confucian philosopher Wáng Yángmíng to provide one. We defend the resulting account by arguing that it has the advantage of being able to offer us a more plausible response to the self-centredness objection that has long been a problem for Neo-Aristotelians.

This chapter examines Mencius’s views on knowledge and how they might contribute to contemporary debates in epistemology. For this purpose, I focus on three features that I take to be characteristic (although not exhaustive) of Mencian epistemology: first, Mencius’s views on knowing things; second, the role that wisdom or intellectual virtue plays in acquiring knowledge; and third, Mencius’s views on “knowing-to”, a kind of knowledge conceptually distinct from knowing-that and knowing-how. I argue that the views we find in the Mencius on these matters are relevant to contemporary debates on the nature of objectual knowledge, on the role of intellectual virtue in knowing, and on the relation between know-how and intelligent action.

The Confucian philosopher Mengzi believes that ‘extending’ one's kindness facilitates one's moral development and that it is intimately tied to performing morally good actions. Most interpreters have taken Mengzian kindness to be an emotional state, with the extension of kindness to centrally involve feeling kindness towards more people or in a greater number of situations. I argue that kindness cannot do all the theoretical work that Mengzi wants it to do if it is interpreted as an emotion. I submit that Mengzi's notion of extending kindness is best understood as the exercise of a capacity for intelligently performing kind actions.

Many anglophone scholars take the early Confucians to be virtue ethicists of one kind or another. A common virtue ethical reading of one of the most influential early Confucians, namely Mengzi, ascribes to him the view that moral actions are partly (or entirely) moral because of the state from which they are performed, be it the agent’s motives, emotions, or their character traits. I consider whether such a reading of the Mengzi is justified and I argue that it is not. I argue that there is no reason to believe that Mengzi distinguishes the moral value of actions that are performed from virtuous and non-virtuous states. Given this, virtue (as a feature of agents) is normatively posterior to virtuous actions. I conclude, first, that this poses a challenge to a wide range of common interpretations of the Mengzi, be they virtue ethical or otherwise, and second, that there might be conceptual space for an account of virtue ethics that rejects the normative priority of virtue over virtuous actions.

Passages from the recently excavated Guodian manuscripts bear a surprising resemblance to a position ascribed to Gaozi and his followers in the Mengzi at 6A4-5, namely that righteousness is “external.” Although such a resemblance has been noted, the philosophical implications of it for the debate between Gaozi and Mengzi and, by extension, for Mengzian ethics have been largely unexplored. I argue that a Guodian-inspired reading of 6A4-5 is one that takes the debate to be about whether standing in certain family relations makes a difference to whether one’s actions are righteous. Gaozi denies that it does, holding the view that one’s family relations, i.e., relations internal to the household, are irrelevant when it comes to matters of righteousness, while Mengzi disagrees, arguing that all relational properties, including family relations, are just as much reason-giving properties for performing righteous actions as they are in the case of performing benevolent actions. I argue that such a Guodian-based reading provides us a simple, yet explanatorily powerful reading of 6A4-5 that has broader implications for Mengzian ethics and our understanding of the early Chinese intellectual milieu in general.