A CHILD NEARLY FALLS INTO A WELL: MENGZI, MCDOWELL AND MORAL CONNOISSEURSHIP A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University As In partial fulfillment of 3 0* the requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In Philosophy by Nicholas Michael Doliber San Francisco, California January 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read A Child Nearly Falls Into A Well: Mengzi McDowell and Moral Connoisseurship by Nicholas Michael Doliber, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Philosophy at San Francisco State University. Justin Tiwald, Ph.D Professor M L_Wkj^~ Mohommad Azadpur, Ph.D. Professor A CHILD NEARLY FALLS INTO A WELL: MENGZI MCDOWELL AND MORALCONNOISSEURSHIP Nicholas Michael Doliber San Francisco, California 2017 I once held the cynical view that the world is valueless, and that our moral evaluations were consequences of our subjective projections onto an indifferent world. A situation is good, or bad, because one deems it so. This position equates moral evaluation to a spook, a figment of our imagination, or a consequence of language, to which we attribute a valueless existence. The metaethical work of John McDowell, and the examples provided by Mengzi, along with the fine tuning work of Eric L. Hutton, firmly situated my ethical worldview away from moral nihilism, and towards moral sense theory which articulates itself through moral connoisseurship. This paper is a celebration of that philosophical turn. My intention is to explore, prod, and disclose the similarities between Mengzi and McDowell, using Eric L. Hutton as a unifying and guiding figure. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Fd like to thank my parents, Yayoko and Richard Doliber, for their endless support these past few years. I would also like to thank my moral exemplars Justin Tiwald, and Mohammad Azadpur, for teaching me to take philosophy, and living, with the utmost seriousness. Finally, Fd like to thank Natalie Anderson, and my daughter Giovanna Doliber, to whom both my heart and my head are eternally grateful. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Table............................................................................................................................... v Introduction.................................................................................................................................1 Section 1.........................................................................................................................2 Section II...................................................................................................................... 14 Section III....................................................................................................................21 Section IV ....................................................................................................................31 Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 33 Reference................................................................................................................................. 34 v 1 Introduction In Eric L. Hutton’s essay “Moral Connoisseurship in Mengzi,” Hutton wants to use contemporary discussions of moral connoisseurship in McDowell’s ethics and epistemology via R. Jay Wallace to shine a contemporary light on Mengzi’s ethics. Hutton hopes to provide ways in which Confucian scholarship can help inform I contemporary issues in philosophy, an aim that I find greatly admirable. He does so by first drawing upon Wallace’s account of moral intuitionism, and juxtaposing that to moral connoisseurship. Through investigations of the reason-giving capacity in moral connoisseurship, Hutton draws a distinction between what he calls elemental connoisseurship and a conclusive connoisseurship. His conclusion is that Mengzi’s account of connoisseurship lies someplace between the two kinds, but ultimately has more affinities with McDowell. My aim is to provide a renewal of this discussion and to expand upon Hutton’s thesis by drawing further readings in McDowellian scholarship and passages from The Mengzi not covered by Hutton, with the hopes of exploring a new framing of moral connoisseurship, which re-situates Mengzi in between a preemptive, and a responsive Moral Connoisseurship represented by McDowell and Wallace’s respective positions. In §1,1 will begin by first outlining Hutton’s main points in “Moral Connoisseurship in Mengzi” to provide a skeletal basis and background for my inquiry. In §111 outline a shift in McDowell’s account of empirical content in McDowell’s later 2 work titled “Avoiding the Myth of the Given” which leads to a new dichotomy between preemptive and responsive moral connoisseurship, of which I attempt to place Mengzi within the pre-emptive camp. In §111 introduce selections from the Dreyfus McDowell Debate in relation to Mengzi’s 2A6, a passage which seems almost suspiciously left out of Hutton’s analysis, and which I believe can provide further insight into McDowell’s metaethics. Finally, in §IV I address McDowell and Mengzi’s metaphysical dimension by drawing on Mengzi 7A1. §1 Moral Connoisseurship is the ethical view that our responses to moral circumstances can be fine-tuned and cultivated in a manner parallel to artistic connoisseurship. Hutton, along with Mengzi and McDowell, rely on an analogy involving color, and then provide an account for how our tastes and recognitional capacity in seeing color, or experiencing fine-art, is akin to our recognitional capacities in the experience of recognizing value and moral circumstances. In other words, develop a mastery towards our tastes in food, sights, and sounds in a similar way as we might cultivate our capacity to recognize the good, and feel the call to act upon it. The Moral Connoisseur uses repeated exposure, stewardship, reflection, and attentiveness, to fine-tune their moral sensibilities to suite a particular circumstance. For Hutton Hutton draws a distinction between two possible forms of moral connoisseurship: 3 1. Wallace & elemental connoisseurship: This is the view, that at the level of perception, all that is revealed to the observer of a moral dilemma are the correct building blocks to make the correct judgment, but not the judgment itself 2. McDowell & conclusive connoisseurship: This view holds that at the level of perception one has all the possible actions available to herself when confronted with a moral dilemma, but that some silence others, calling upon the observer to act along with her perception. He states that, “Mengzi’s own conception of moral judgment places him between these two positions, though his intuitionism ultimately aligns him more with one over the other”1. Hutton begins by referencing Wallace’s essay “Virtue, Reason and Principle” on McDowell. Wallace is interested in a neo-Aristotelian conception of practical reasoning stating that, “McDowell claims that proper moral judgment is uncodifiable and cannot be captured by any set of rules or principles such as Kantianism and Utilitarianism...”2. Instead McDowell wants to sketch a view of practical reason that helps to construct our ability to have discernment, to judge right from wrong in terms of a perceptual model which sees situations in a certain distinctive way. Wallace wants to know how to make sense of this type of reasoning. How could one perceive of practical reasoning such that it button E. Moral Connoisseurship in Mengzi p. 163 2Ibid p. 163 4 does not involve the use of principles? McDowell proposes that we construe it much in the same way as we do. According to this view, as described by Hutton, Her intuitive responses about what it is right to do are constitutively rational responses. That is, McDowell might deny that rational processes are exclusively processes that are controlled by or justifiable in terms of further reasons or justifications; rather, rationality might be said to consist in part in a disposition to offer certain direct, intuitive responses to practical situations, where these responses do not admit of any further justification.... The intuitionist interpretation says that the virtuous agent simply and immediately perceives what is the right thing to do, in each of the circumstances that confront her, without being able to offer any rational support or justification for these intuitive judgments.3 Hutton uses the case of color vision as a helpful analogy to illustrate how rational perception may not include reason or justification. The color purple is not reducible to further parts, which might serve as reasons forjudging the object purple. Even if one knows purple is just a combination of red and blue, one sees purple. On the scheme of rational intuitionism, experiencing the color purple would be akin to our capacity to discern a right decision from a wrong one. “Under rational intuitionism, a person may be able to give an account analogous to the scientific one, namely, that for people brought up correctly, under certain circumstances, particular actions will strike them as right or wrong, though again this does not explain the rightness or wrongness itself.”4 According to Hutton, rational intuitionism is not a very attractive view because typically one would want to be able to provide justifications for their decisions. 3Hutton