This is not a topic I am knowledgeable in. Twice today I read claims about the Confucian belief that sentimentalism leads to moral weakness and public disorder. I can intuit a bit of what that means in terms of what else I know about Confucianism, but I am not up on this at all. Googling the topic, the link that included a few perspectives quickly seemed a good place to start. A Summary of three papers from The Rutgers Workshop in Chinese Philosophy in 2018.
I will note that I have an immediate attraction to the concept, but would like some commentary.
2 comments:
What these papers are interested in is whether ethics is "real," in the sense of being embedded in the world instead of being something that arises within the human mind. You're familiar with my arguments that virtue is real in this way, as Aristotle suggests in Nicomachean Ethics I.3: a virtue is something that reliably produces good results, not every time (because chance and fate take a hand), but for the most part. Thus, there's something about the world that makes a quality like moderation a virtue; it doesn't matter what you think about it.
The argument here is that Confucius believes that his virtues are similarly real. That's what this paragraph means:
"Liu argues that naturalistic ethical realism requires that one locate value in the world itself. On the Confucian view, some values do not result from human construction or social convention. There are natural values in the world that can be observed by humans. For example, life is intrinsically valuable, not just for things having subjectivity but for all living things. Instead of using induction to connection human sentiments to these normative facts of nature, the Confucian view is that there is an a priori connection between human nature and normative facts."
That's the part of my commentary you'll find most helpful. Everything that follows this sentence will complicate the problem. That is an important part of a philosopher's duty, however, so I am going to do it.
However, note that they aren't using 'sentimentalism' in the same way that you are. You mean to say that you understand Confucius to think that sentimentalism is a real vice, then, because it reliably produces disorder. The philosophers are just using the term to mean 'how much of this stuff is real, versus a mere sentiment that people have about right-and-wrong?"
The question about 'how much of this is really true of the world outside our minds?' is something Hume's predecessors were wrestling with for quite a while, notably William of Ockham. Hume argued that almost everything we believed to be true of the world was really inside our minds; his 'sentimentalism' argument here is trying to rescue ethics from the logical conclusion that, therefore, ethics is just made-up conventions we could set aside. He tries to argue that yes it's sentimental (which it isn't), but the sentiment is universal to human beings (which it also isn't), and therefore ethics can continue to be binding.
The generation after Hume includes Kant, who tried to rescue us from Hume. On science he ends up making it worse; his Critique of Pure Reason is about how much of science is all in our minds, and finds that really everything is. (This is because our minds are themselves necessary to the process of empirical observation, but our observations are already products of the mind creating them by harmonizing our disparate senses into a single experience, 'transcendental apperception.' Thus, we don't actually know anything at all about the stuff outside our minds, only about the stuff our mind creates for us to experience.)
On ethics, he made it better. He agreed that it's all in our minds, and also that it's still binding because of a universal quality to human minds. However, he shifted that quality from 'a universal sentiment' to 'universal reason,' and tried to show that practical reason could account for all of ethics (which it can't, but he makes a valiant effort). If that were true, then the fact that the order of reason is the same for all of us would enable us to defend a universal ethics, because even though it's all in our minds, on this point our minds all work the same way.
All of these are non-realist views of ethics. Aristotle and Confucius have ethical realist views.
Thank you. Understanding that the word is more connected to "sentiment" than to "sentimental" in modern usage was helpful.
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