Waldemar Brys

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.

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.