Abstract

According to Mencius, human nature is good because human beings are endowed with four sprouts of virtues, namely benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom, and humans can become fully virtuous by growing these four ethical sprouts. Mencius believed that these four sprouts exist in the human mind mainly in the form of emotion or emotional sensibility, and they are sometimes translated in English as compassion, sense of honor, respect, and feeling of approval and disapproval. What I want to do in this paper is to delineate Mencius’s view of emotion by analyzing his first sprout, which is often referred to by the Chinese term “cèyǐn zhī xīn” 惻隱之心. Previous scholars usually translate “cèyǐn zhī xīn” as “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “commiseration,” in the sense of thepainful feeling one feels at the misfortune of others. My goal in this paper is to clarify the nature of this painful feeling, and specifically I will show that 1) cèyǐn zhī xīn is primarily construing another being’s misfortune with sympathetic concern, and that 2) the painfulness of cèyǐn zhī xīn comes from this concern-based construal of the object of one’s compassion. Toward the end of my paper, I will also show the connection between Mencius’s view of cèyǐn zhī xīn and thecontemporary ethical discourse on emotions, by arguing that in Mencius emotions like compassion provide an important but only partial basis for all-things-considered ethical judgment.