Meng Zhang
Meng Zhang studies Confucian ethics, comparative religious ethics, Hume’s and Humean philosophy, and Confucianism in the contemporary People’s Republic of China. Her research examines the strengths and difficulties in purportedly naturalist forms of ethics and the degree of their reliance on faith as an affectively endorsed representation of reality. Her book project reads the early Confucian thinker Mengzi and David Hume in a mutually illuminating way to delineate a form of virtue ethics grounded in human psychology. Beyond this project, she is interested in the Han-Clothing Movement in the People's Republic of China which exhibits innovative ways to weave Confucian ways of thinking into the postsocialist and post-colonial social context.
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This paper examines the current scholarship on Mengzi’s metaethical thoughts and reconstructs Mengzi’s view to contribute to our understanding of the relation between sensibility and the apparent objectivity of morality. I first overview two features of morality that an adequate metaethical theory needs to account for – the apparent objectivity and the motivational force of moral values, highlighting the potential of Mengzi’s thought to explain both. Then I examine previous reconstructions of Mengzi’s metaethics. Both the naturalism approach and the sensibility theory approach capture important features of Mengzi's view but have defects. I argue that Mengzi's view may help revise a sensibility theory that models moral properties on secondary qualities like colors, and thus, preserves the alleged merit of it – being able to account for the two features of morality.
This paper examines the current scholarship on Mengzi’s metaethical thoughts and reconstructs Mengzi’s view to contribute to our understanding of the relation between sensibility and the apparent objectivity of morality. I first overview two features of morality that an adequate metaethical theory needs to account for – the apparent objectivity and the motivational force of moral values, highlighting the potential of Mengzi’s thought to explain both. Then I examine previous reconstructions of Mengzi’s metaethics. Both the naturalism approach and the sensibility theory approach capture important features of Mengzi's view but have defects. I argue that Mengzi's view may help revise a sensibility theory that models moral properties on secondary qualities like colors, and thus, preserves the alleged merit of it – being able to account for the two features of morality.