英文专题

Yin-Yang and Moral Sentimentalism

Michael Slote

1

This conference is focusing to a substantial extent on moral sentimentalism, and I, a Western philosopher, am going to try to convince you, as briefly as I know how, that a fundamental and historical Chinese idea, the idea of Yin-Yang, can provide desirable grounding for the kind of sentimentalism that originated in the West in eighteenth-century Britain and that many claim can be found within certain classics of the Confucian and neo-Confucian traditions. The British sentimentalists knew nothing, of course, about Yin and Yang, but the Confucians（including neo-Confucians）certainly did. Yet they didn't substantially incorporate ideas about Yin and Yang into their ethical sentimentalism in the way I am going to propose here, and there is a reason for that. In ancient China Yin and Yang were contrasted mainly in physical terms as dark and light, wet and dry, cold and hot, female and male, and it is not easy to so how Yin and Yang thus conceived could be relevant to ethics—not just to the explanation of natural phenomena. So senti mentalists like Mengzi and Wang Yangming don't make use of Yin and Yang to ground or even embellish their moral theories, but I am convinced that they missed an opportunity by not doing so, an opportunity I want to explore or sketch in this talk. However, in order for you to see the relevance of Yin and Yang or Yin-Yang to the ultimate justification of normative sentimentalism, I think it will help if I said something first about how I gradually came to understand the normative significance of these notions, and the beginning of it all concerned the concept of receptivity.

Very few Western philosophers have had much to say about receptivity, but Nel Noddings in her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education is a notable exception. She points out the receptivity involved in the kind of empathy（she called it“engrossment”）that takes in or is（in Hume's terms）infused by the feelings and attitudes of others, and she makes much of this in her development of an ethics of caring or care. My own work on or in care ethics also emphasized the receptivity involved in coming to feel what others feel（Bill Clinton's“I feel your pain”）, and like Noddings I recognized that rationalist（normative）ethics played down or ignored receptivity in a way that care ethics sought to remedy. But this doesn't tell you in the audience yet why or how receptivity is so important to ethics or moral philosophy—doesn't it all depend on how well care ethics or other forms of sentimentalism theorize the moral sphere by comparison with rationalist（or other）approaches? Well, it certainly does, and in what follows I want to outline the main case care ethics/sentimentalism wants to make against the latter views.

But right now I would like to show you how, given certain assumptions or arguments, an emphasis on the importance of receptivity can gradually turn into a belief in the normative significance of Yin and Yang. When I first emphasized the normative moral significance of receptive empathy, I didn't recognize the significance of receptivity beyond the confines of the moral, and when I finally did, I came to see that Western philosophy and Western civilization on the whole gratuitously downplay or ignore the value（and virtue）of receptivity. Let me briefly give you a couple of examples.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls（following Aristotle in the Eudemian Ethics）maintains that any rational or intelligent individual should live in accordance with a total life plan, a plan that can be revised later on but that at any given time specifies all the potential good things in one's future life and indicates（often conditionally）how one plans to achieve them. What leaps out at one（I hope）is how much this idea of a life plan expresses a desire to control or take control of one's future life to the greatest extent possible.（Rawls talks about“taking charge”of one's life.）This attitude, as embodied in a total life plan, seems to preclude one's being open to one's future in any kind of spontaneous and receptive way, and it also entails that love and friendship, which are among life's greatest goods, need to be included within any overall plan of life. And that is absurd. One cannot plan to fall or be in love（even if one can plan ways to make it more likely that one will fall in love, e. g. , by joining an Internet dating site）. So Rawls's idea ignores the value of being receptive to what the future may bring one's way, and in the given instance the receptivity concerns how to intelligently or sensibly lead one's life, not anything specifically having to do with morality（moral obligation/duty and moral goodness/virtue）.

In addition, Rawls was a liberal, and the general philosophy of liberalism has a certain tendency to ignore the value of receptivity toward one's past. Many liberals tell us that we should never let relationships or emotions enter or remain in our lives without first subjecting them to serious critical rational scrutiny. So one shouldn't just accept one's relationship with and feelings about one's parents, friends, or children without questioning whether they are good for one and should play a part in one's life. But such an attitude as pushed to the limit shows a lack of gratitude and receptivity to what life has brought one's way. To be sure, if there are specific reasons to question certain feelings or relationships, one should do so, but the idea that on principle every feeling and relationship should automatically be put on rational probation seems hyperbolically rationalistic and ignores the fact that it makes good human sense to be more receptive to what life has brought one's way than the liberal view allows for. Again, this is not a point about moral right and wrong, and it shows that apart from any significance receptivity has for morality, it has an importance for or in life generally that important parts of the Western philosophical tradition tend to ignore. As indicated above, I have elsewhere spent a good deal of time expanding on this point and arguing that the Western philosophical tradition on the whole has downplayed receptivity in favor of an almost total emphasis on activity, control, and rationally directed thought/purpose. But let me tell you here and now how my thinking in this area led toward yin and yang without my knowing it.

When I initially argued against the Western tendency to ignore the value of receptivity, I noted that there is no such tendency in Chinese thought. Chinese philosophy has never developed the kind of ethical rationalism（especially Kantian ethics, but also rational intuitionism）that has prevailed so noticeably in the West, and receptivity as a value seems implicit in much of the Chinese ethical tradition. But in fact there is no precise word for“receptive”in the Chinese language and the concept of Yin has been variously translated into English as“receptivity”，“pliability”and“passivity”，So the role of receptivity in Chinese thought is at best implicit or subtle, and my initial take on both Chinese and Western philosophy was that neither tradition places sufficient emphasis on receptivity.

Then I began to reverse engines. I began to look at the way Chinese thinkers have conceived Yin and Yang and realized that there was a long-standing tendency to treat Yin as inferior to Yang. Yin was identified, among other things, with the female side of things, and Yang with the male side, and in one of the earliest ethical applications of the ideas of Yin and Yang, Dong Zhongshu argued that Yang was benevolent and male and Yin was mean-spirited（or covetous）and female. Yin and Yang were（typically）thought to go together, to be mutually complementary, but one side of the complementarity was conceived as superior to the other. It immediately occurred to me how strange it was to identify benevolence exclusively with the male side of things, as if there were no benevolence involved in mother love or wifely devotion. Rather than fall in with such sexist and bizarre assumptions, it made more sense, I thought, to try to see both male and female, both Yin and Yang, as valuable, equally valuable. And it then occurred to me that of the three standard ways of translating“Yin, ”only one of them, receptivity, had broadly positive evaluative connotations. No one or almost no one values passivity, and pliability or pliancy is of dubious or at least limited value. But receptivity has positive ethical or human significance in a broad way, as the future-oriented and past-oriented examples from Rawls and liberalism that I mentioned earlier only begin to show us, and this led me to the idea that if we wanted to make use of the category of Yin for contemporary ethics-theoretical purposes, we should conceive it as receptivity. If we update Yin in this way, we can then update Yang as representing the complementary idea of directed rational purpose. The latter value has dominated Western thought, but a balance between receptivity and directed purposiveness, both seen as virtuous and valuable, makes more sense of what we truly value in our social and personal lives. But how does this lead us to view moral normativity as essentially a matter of（our updated conceptions of）Yin and Yang?

Well, it can lead us in that direction if we are already moving toward a norm-ative moral sentimentalism that bases virtue and morality on sentiments like com-passion and benevolence, but even in the absence of any commitment to moral sen-timentalism, we can see acknowledged virtues like compassion and benevolence as essentially a matter of Yin and Yang. Let's take compassion as an example. Compassion may be a moral virtue, but it is commonly regarded as a feeling—and also as a motive. How can it be all of those things? Is the term ambiguous? Well, we don't usually think of it as ambiguous, and Yin and Yang can help us understand why. The virtue of compassion contains or encompasses both compassionate feeling and compassionate motivation, and these two sides of compassion are much more closely related than one might initially think.

Let's consider the feeling side first. Standardly or typically, when one feels compassion for someone who is in pain, one empathizes with them. And, a point not really seen in the literature on empathy, empathy involves more than taking in and sharing the positive or negative emotional tone of what some other person is feeling. If I am infected by my daughter's enthusiasm for stamp collecting, I take in, I empathically imbibe, the positive tone of the enthusiasm, but I also take in and imbibe its intentional object, stamp collecting. I start feeling some level of enthusiasm for（her）stamp collecting myself. So empathy involves both emotional tone and intentionality, and this bears immediately on the empathy involved in compassion. If another person is feeling distress at some pain they have, they ipso facto（given what distress is）have some motivation/desire to alleviate or get rid of that pain. And if I empathize with their distress, then I feel distress too, distress with the same intentional object that their distress is directed at. That means that I too feel distress at their pain and, again because of what distress essentially or by definition is, this means that I too have some motivation to alleviate or eliminate that pain. But the desire to lessen someone's pain is a form of compassionate motivation, so empathy as we have described it automatically involves compassion as a motive. To empathically feel someone else's distress is automatically to have some motivation to alleviate the pain that is the focus of their distress, and since empathically feeling someone else's distress is an example of compassion conceived as a feeling, this means that, in the kind of case I just described, compassion as a feeling automatically involves compassion as a motive.

The relation to Yin and Yang conceived, respectively, as receptivity and ac tive directed purpose（for the reasons mentioned in footnote 4, the notion of rationality can drop out here）should now be apparent. To empathically take in someone's distress is a form of receptivity, and the desire to alleviate pain distress is clearly a form of directed purpose, and the fact, as I have just argued, that the receptivity aspect entails the purposive aspect shows Yin and Yang to be relevant in another way to this case. One fairly standard（but not universal）way in which Yin and Yang have been interpreted within the Chinese tradition（Yin and Yang are invoked in the I Ching, long before the advent of Confucianism and Daoism）has been as involving a necessary complementarity: with Yin necessarily involving Yang and vice versa.

The familiar Yin-Yang symbol, which involves two curvy half-circles each of which contains an ingredient from the other half-circle, illustrates the idea of this necessary complementarity, and what we have said so far certainly shows the Yin feeling side of compassion as necessitating the Yang motivational side. What would really clinch the application of Yin and Yang as a necessary complementarity to such cases would, however, be some indication that the Yang side of compassion necessarily involved the Yin side, that one cannot be motivated by compassion if one isn't being receptive to the reality of another's distress or misfortune. I think in fact and have argued elsewhere that compassion can only exist on the basis of empathy with some other person or persons, but short of that potentially controversial conclusion, it does seem as if compassion cannot exist without some significant kind of receptivity to another's distress or misfortune. For example, Kant tells us in the first part of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that someone incapable of sympathetic feeling（because all such feeling has been temporarily deadened in him by the death of a loved one）may still act out of sense of duty and conscience to help alleviate the pain or suffering of others, but to act in this fashion and for such reasons is precisely not to act from a motive of compassion（Kant himself effectively makes this point）, and so most generally it seems reasonable to say that compassion involves some sort of emotional connection with the reality of others. Therefore, the Yang side of compassion necessitates its Yin side, and it then becomes easier to see why we think of compassion as both a feeling and a motive. There is no ambiguity of language here, but rather two sides of one phenomenon are necessarily connected. The virtue of compassion is one thing, one psychological phenomenon, but it consists of a feeling and a motive that are necessarily connected with one another.（A statue is one thing, and its distinguishable form and matter are necessarily connected with each other.）So Yin and Yang as necessarily complementary are instantiated in the virtue of compassion, and the necessary complementarity makes it appropriate to speak of yin/yang in such cases. Compassion is a Yin-Yang virtue.

A parallel case can be made for saying that benevolence is a Yin-Yang virtue, and if time permitted I think I could show you that even Hume's natural virtue of gratitude falls under updated Yin-Yang. But these virtues are arguably not the whole of normative morality. By our common lights morality involves considerations of respect, justice, and deontology that seem independent of the sentimental virtues I have just been talking about, and the burden lies heavily on any moral sentimentalist who would argue that these other concepts can be brought under one or another or some combination of the sentiments as they are commonly conceived. But in previous work I have accepted that burden, and I want to review some of that material in which follows. This means showing or assuming that the whole of morality can be conceived as based in virtues like compassion, gratitude, and benevolence and, more generally, in empathic concern for（or caring about）others. This is a very tall order, but in what follows I shall try to explain why moral sentimentalism offers us a plausible and promising way to understand normative morality on the whole, and since I have just given you some reason to think that Yin-Yang underlies the moral sentiments taken individually and as a whole, I hope you will be see why I think that Yin-Yang is the ultimate basis of morality.

2

So let me sketch for you my main reasons for favoring normative（as distinct from meta ethical）moral sentimentalism. What perhaps most decidedly has moved me in the direction of sentimentalism is an objection to rationalist views that is somewhat akin to Bernard Williams's famous“one thought too many”objection to Kantian ethics. Williams thought there was something wrong with an ethics that allowed one or even told one to consult morality before favoring, say, one's own spouse in one's practical decisions. If your wife and a stranger are both drowning in nearby water, you have one thought to many if you consult morality to see if you are permitted or obligated to save your wife, before you decide to save her（first）. Now Kantians have responded to this example by pointing out that their approach allows one to base decisions on emotional or personal considerations as long as explicitly moral considerations are at the ready in case things become morally complicated. But that is not the only issue or problem Williams's example points toward. Kant holds that it is always morally meritorious to act from a sense of duty, and the issue, for a Williams type case, is not so much whether the husband is permitted to save his wife without consulting morality as whether, if he does consult with morality, there is something ethically criticizable about him.

More generally, Kantian and various other forms of rationalism seem committed to holding that one can never be morally criticized if one always acts rightly from a sense of duty, and this entails that someone can be beyond moral reproach or criticism even if they don't really care about, aren't at all emotionally involved with, other people. And to the sentimentalist this seems absolutely wrong-headed（or wrong-hearted）. Let me now mention some familiar criticisms that have been made of normative sentimentalism and explain why I think they lack force against sentimentalism overall.

Perhaps the most important objection has been that moral sentimentalism lacks the resources to account for and justify our ordinary deontological tendencies. We think it is wrong to kill one innocent person in order to save two or three others, but the refusal to kill the one constitutes a refusal to act according to the“sum of feeling”，our empathic or sympathetic concern for three lives generally being greater or stronger than our concern for one life. And it would seem that we have to say“no”to feeling in the name of rationality or some other putatively non-sentimental factor in order to prefer not killing the one person to saving the two or three. But none of this has been of any help to Kantian rationalism whose attempts at justifying deontology have been notoriously unsuccessful or, at best, inconclusive. In addition, sentimentalism does contain the resources to make sense of deontology if one thinks, not of sums of feeling, but of the perspectives or relationships from which feeling emerges. We are generally more concerned with those whose danger or distress we see than with those whose danger or distress we merely know about, and this difference relates to the operation of empathy. Empathy is more strongly aroused by perceived evils than by evils merely known about, and a normative sentimentalism（like Hume's or my own）that treats empathy（Hume lacked that word and spoke of“sympathy”）as the fulcrum of moral thought and action has the resources to explain why we are more concerned with what we perceive and to justify that moral preference. The same point, essentially, can be made about deontology conceived as involving a greater aversion to causing harm or pain than to allowing harm or pain. We empathically flinch more from causing harm than from allowing harm to occur at the hands of someone or something other than ourselves, and, again, this moral preference is built into our ordinary moral thinking and reactivities in a way that can allow us to see why we prefer and morally should prefer to refrain from killing one person even if that is the only way to save two or three others（with larger numbers the issue changes）. Our empathic perspective on an action, its empathic immediacy for us, makes a difference to how we feel and tend to act, and I have argued at length elsewhere—in at least four previous books—that this allows sentimentalism to give a better explanation and justification of deontology than anything that has proven to be available to ethical rationalists. In the light of all this, I hope I may be excused from giving a more expansive justification for deontology in this talk.

I also need to say something about justice, because sentiments like benevolence seem to exclude certain considerations of justice that seem independent of sentiment and that may actually undercut the force and validity of sentiment in va rious important contexts. However（again in at least four different books）, I have previously argued that sentimentalist accounts of justice have much more promise than one might initially think. For example, something like Rawls's difference principle emerges from the empathic contours of empathic concern for others. We are empathically much more moved by what is bad for people than by what merely prevents them from improving an already satisfactory situation（that is what the notion of compassion is all about）；and this means that special social concern for those worst off in human societies is mandated by a sentimentalist theory of justice.

Justice as conceived in modern times and by Kantian rationalists also depends on respect for the rights of others, e. g. , for their right to worship as they see fit. But sentimentalism has in fact no problem with coming to the same conclusion. The normative sentimentalist can understand respect as consisting in the taking of a fully empathic perspective on the desires, attitudes, and aspirations of other people, and those who persecute people for their religious observances notoriously lack empathy for or with them. So seen from the perspective of sentimentalism, respect understood as empathy can mandate toleration（or perhaps more, perhaps sympathetic understanding）for all religions as a condition of social justice. More can be and has been said about this, but I should also point out that the sentimentalist may be able to turn the tables on the ethical rationalist/Kantian using her or his own empathy-based notion of respect. If respect for autonomy, e. g. , for liberty of movement and association, is understood as applying independently of considerations of empathy, it can lead to results concerning justice that most of us nowadays would find morally repellent. A strictly Rawlsian or Kantian view of respect for people's rights of free movement and assembly would have to argue that when a wife comes to a magistrate and complains that her husband has threatened her and/or her children, she shouldn't be granted a restraining order against him until he has had a chance to challenge what she has said. But of course by that time it may be too late, and most of us would acknowledge that if the wife's record is clean, her say-so should be sufficient for an initial restraining order. However, this puts a limit on the husband's autonomous liberty of movement for the sake of the safety of the wife, and nothing in Rawls or Kant can justify such a limitation—remember that for Rawls the basic liberties trump considerations of welfare. A sentimentalist theory of justice and respect can, however, justify such a limitation. It can hold that although the restrictions on movement that a restraining order imposes can be somewhat burdensome, that burden palls by empathic comparison with the burden of living with danger and the threat of bodily harm（to oneself and/or one's children）. So sentimentalism can justify restraining initial orders, using its empathybased concept of respect（for autonomy and for rights）, in a way rationalism seems unable to do. Moral sentimentalism has nothing to apologize here and may actually be in a better position to understand issues of social and international justice than familiar forms of ethical rationalism are.

Finally, let me further clarify how and why what we have been saying about about Yin and Yang in relation to compassion and more broadly to empathic concern about others seen as the basis for normative morality as a whole really is normative. Sharon Street has recently objected to ethical naturalism on the grounds that the cognition of natural properties cannot provide the motivational oomph that moral claims and realities presumably have for us, and what I have said about Yin and Yang in relation to the moral sentiments doesn't in any way take us outside the realm of natural properties and realities. How can such an approach give us the normativity we most of us find essential to considerations of moral virtue and（especially）rightness?

The answer basically lies in what has already been said about Yin and Yang in relation to positively valued moral sentiments. I have indeed treated benevolence and its virtuousness as entirely a matter of naturalistic psychology, and most forms of naturalism find it difficult or impossible to bridge the gap between the natural recognition of natural realities and the normative force that moral claims and acknowledged moral properties arguably have for us. But the special thing about empathy, and what allows it to give Yin and Yang a foundational place in the moral life, is the fact, as we have seen, that empathy with another's distress is at one at the same time a kind of cognitive contact（by acquaintance, at least）with the other person and a motive for helping them（the motive can be outweighed or preempted by other motives, but that is a long and different story）. Empathy neatly bridges the supposed gap between cognition and motivation, and this one instance shows at the very least that pace Street a naturalistic approach can in some instances account for normativity. Now the normativity I have just been focusing on is motivational normativity; but there is also such a thing as reason-normativity. I discuss this at length in my The Philosophy of Yin and Yang, forthcoming in both Chinese-language and English-language versions from the Commercial Press in Beijing. But there is no time for me to discuss it further here.