Expressivism and early Confucian metaethics

Abstract

Several recent interpretive controversies over Confucian metaethics concern the nature of moral properties. Specifically, they concern whether the early Confucians Mengzi 孟子 and Xunzi 荀子 believed moral properties are objective and mind-independent or constructed, subjective, or otherwise mind-dependent. In this paper, I challenge the cognitivist framework utilized in this debate and offer instead a noncognitivist, expressivist vocabulary for interpreting early Confucian metaethics. The expressivist vocabulary enables interpreters to pay due attention to the conceptual vocabulary of early Confucian ethics, emphasizing concepts such as ways (dao 道), norms, and basic attitudes of endorsement and rejection, and it shifts interpretive focus away from a conceptual framework favored by cognitivism that emphasizes the role of representation, belief, truth, and properties. It also locates new metaethical ambiguities within early Confucian ethics that better reflect the concerns of the early Confucians.