When political philosophy meets moral psychology: Expressivism in theMencius

Abstract

A casual survey of the backgrounds of the contributors to this journal, as well as to our sister journals such as Philosophy East & West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Asian Philosophy, shows that most of the contributors are university teachers in departments of philosophy or religious studies. This partly explains why, in our studies of classical Chinese philosophy, we have a characteristically analytic approach to texts. The strength of this approach is that our passion for rigorous arguments leads to thorough analysis of early Chinese philosophical texts that focuses on how an author states his or her theory and argues for it. However, this approach does have its weaknesses. When we focus on the arguments in the texts, we tend to see these early Chinese philosophers only as scholars; we easily forget that many of them were also political advisors or consultants, and the audience of their arguments was often a powerful ruler. One of the main goals of this article is to show that we cannot study Mencius’ moral psychology without studying his political philosophy at the same time. More specifically, this article shows that Mencius’ expressivist moral psychology is the result of his responding to certain questions and debates in the political philosophy of his time. I believe that our study can also shed light on a debate among contemporary scholars who study philosophical psychology or philosophy of action in early China. Herbert Fingarette is probably the first to claim that Confucius did not have the concepts of “choice,” “choosing,” “deciding,” or “inner life” (Fingarette: 18-56). Chad Hansen claims that classical Chinese thinkers made no distinction between human actions and the natural course of events, nor did they have the distinction between “agent causation” and “event causation” (Hansen: 378). According to Henry Rosemont, classical Chinese thinkers did not have concepts of (or words for) “action,” “rational agent,” or “choice”