The Ultimate Moral Arbiter, Received Tradition or Autonomous Reason? Some Questions Concerning Morality and Development in Confucian Ethics

David Wong’s essay is not only eye-opening, but (at least for me) contains an element of surprise. His topic is ancient Chinese ideas on how to promote moral development. His explicit aim is to describe and interpret various pictures in Confucian thought of “how the given and unlearned interacts with learning in moral cultivation.” Consequently, special attention was given to classical Chinese models, metaphors, and didactic recommendations for promoting growth (craft production, sprout nourishment, adornment). An added bonus of the essay was the invitation to recognize and acknowledge some of the affinities between theories of growth and development in contemporary moral psychology and those much older Confucian reflections, including the common concern then and now with the role of emotions (or “moral sentiments”) in ethics and the distinction between fast, unconscious, automatic, habitual mental processes and slow, self-conscious, reflective, or deliberative processes. I will briefly comment on those topics in a moment. Certain claims do seem to be essentially debatable regardless of century and civilization. David Wong’s exegesis of the variety of ideas in ancient Chinese thought about what is given and what is learned will surely seem familiar to contemporary students of socialization processes, where debates about the relevance of the following five hypothetical processes can always be found somewhere or other in the literature: (1) maturation (practice makes no difference; the competence or skill would have developed without it); (2) facilitation (because of practice, a competence or skill is attained more quickly than otherwise would have been the case); (3) induction (without practice there would have been no competence or skill at all in this domain); (4) attunement (because of practice, a higher Dao (2015) 14:219–224 DOI 10.1007/s11712-015-9436-z