Wang Yangming as a Virtue Ethicist

Abstract

Three ideas are implicit in the title of this essay. To begin with, it is constructive to view Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529), widely acknowledged as the most influential Confucian thinker of the Ming dynasty, as a virtue ethicist. Second, because Wang has much in common with many other Neo-Confucian philosophers, the Neo-Confucian approach to ethics quite generally can be fruitfully understood as a type of virtue ethics. If this is true, then a third idea also follows, namely that Western virtue ethicists should pay attention to Wang and to Neo-Confucian philosophy, because here is a new (to the Western philosophers) source of thinking about ethics from which they may well have things to learn.