Moral Sensitivity, Emotion-Based Theory of Ethics, and Confucian Moral Psychology

According to David B. Wong's account of Mengzian extension, the dichotomization of reason and emotion is unwarranted. Reasoning and feeling interact and interweave to the extent that feeling becomes morally intelligent, and reasoning becomes motivationally efficacious. I agree with Wong that cognition certainly plays a role in moral cultivation. However, I remain neutral towards the issue of whether reasoning and emotion are non-dichotomous. Drawing on the phenomenon of moral failure due to moral insensitivity, I argue instead that Mengzian ethics is best characterized as emotion-based. Moral reasoning, without emotion's guidance, runs the risk of going astray. The justification of moral judgments, if not exclusively in terms of the inborn moral feelings, runs the risk of being mistaken. Moral emotion is the measure of reasonableness, not the other way around. Insofar as moral emotion plays so significant a role not only in moral reasoning, but also in moral motivation and moral cultivation, Mengzian ethics is distinctly emotion-based. To show how the Mengzian extension is supposed to proceed, I draw on the idea of moral insensitivity and argue that it begins, negatively, by weeding out various factors that inhibit one from acting out of self-reflectively endorsed moral emotion and, positively, by improving one's moral sensitivity through increasingly enlarging one's sensitivity zone.