Mencius and Dewey on Moral Perception, Deliberation, and Imagination
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 11 (2):163-185 (2012)
| Abstract | I argue against interpretations of Mencius by Liu Xiusheng and Eric Hutton that attempt to make sense of a Mencian account of moral judgment and deliberation in light of the moral particularism of John McDowell. These interpretations read Mencius’s account as relying on a faculty of moral perception, which generates moral judgments by directly perceiving moral facts that are immediately intuited with the help of rudimentary and innate moral inclinations. However, I argue that it is a mistake to identify innate moral inclinations as the foundational source of moral judgments and knowledge. Instead, if we understand that for Mencius an individual’s natural dispositions (xing 性) have a relational element, then the normativity of moral judgments can be seen as stemming from the relationships that constitute the dispositions of each individual. Finally, this essay elaborates on John Dewey's account of moral deliberation as moral imagination, an account which also takes the relational quality of natural dispositions as its starting point, in order to suggest the vital role of imagination for Mencius’s own account of moral deliberation. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJames A. Ryan (1997). A Defence of Mencius' Ethical Naturalism. Asian Philosophy 7 (1):23 – 36.
James A. Ryan (1998). Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology in Mencius. Asian Philosophy 8 (1):47 – 64.
Elizabeth Anderson (2005). Moral Heuristics: Rigid Rules or Flexible Inputs in Moral Deliberation? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4):544-545.
Mary Tjiattas (2007). Against Moral Particularism. The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 1:19-24.
Gregory E. Kaebnick (2000). On the Intersection of Casuistry and Particularism. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10 (4):307-322.
Karsten R. Stueber (2011). Imagination, Empathy, and Moral Deliberation: The Case of Imaginative Resistence. Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1):156-180.
Bongrae Seok (2008). Mencius's Vertical Faculties and Moral Nativism. Asian Philosophy 18 (1):51 – 68.
Liangkang Ni (2009). Moral Instinct and Moral Judgment. Frontiers of Philosophy in China 4 (2):238-250.
A. S. Cua (2001). Xin and Moral Failure: Reflections on Mencius' Moral Psychologyand Moral Failure: Reflections on Mencius' Moral Psychology. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1 (1):31-53.
K. Rommetveit, J. L. Scully & R. Porz (2013). The Role of Moral Imagination in Patients' Decision-Making. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (2):160-172.
Manyul Im (1999). Emotional Control and Virtue in the "Mencius". Philosophy East and West 49 (1):1-27.
Kyle Swan (2004). Moral Judgment and Emotions. Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (3).
David Morrow (2009). Moral Psychology and the Mencian Creature. Philosophical Psychology 22 (3):281-304.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2012-04-12Total downloads2 ( #234,778 of 556,840 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,931 of 556,840 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
