A Morality-in-Speech Conception of Reasonableness Unveiled from Confucian Classics

Abstract

As a fundamental issue in the study of argumentation, the conception of reasonableness is still open to discuss under different contexts. This paper attempts to unveil the unique morality-in-speech notion of reasonableness embedded in the Confucian classics. It first exposes the relation between speech and morality conveyed in the two Confucian classics—The Analects of Confucius and Mencius, where speech and morality are supposed to be intertwined with each other in that one’s speech reflects one’s morality and that one with morality should keep away from artful or sophistical speech as well as immoral deeds. Mencius, reputed for his fondness of argumentation in his times—the Warring States period (c. 453 BC—221 BC) of ancient China, proclaimed that he was adept at words (zhiyan), that is, being good at identifying, analyzing, and evaluating words, especially the four types of sophistical words—bici (biased words), yinci (overblown words), xieci (deviant words), and dunci (evasive words). After the moral foundation of Mencius’ argumentation is expounded, especially the normative dimension of Confucian morality—the Confucian virtue and deontic ethic of humaneness and righteousness, his argumentative discourse against those sophistical words is specifically reconstructed and analyzed by employing the pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion. By exclusively summarizing the argumentational strategies used all at the argumentation stages of the corresponding critical discussions, like slippery slope argument, argument by refutational analogy, and argument by dissociation, this paper elaborates in details how Mencius managed to integrate Confucian morality into his argumentation. It is concluded that Confucian morality of humaneness and righteousness is associated both with an individual’s self-cultivation and with benefiting a society, that “morality” in the morality-in-speech conception of reasonableness can be a universal term without a premodifier, and that this newly elaborated morality-in-speech conception of reasonableness is argumentation oriented, which distinguishes itself from the agent-based virtue argumentation theory and the (speech) act-based pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating an agent’s morality into his speech acts. Under the morality-in-speech reasonableness conception, the general criterion for reasonableness is whether argumentative speech acts align with the commonly endorsed morality or virtues under cultural contexts. Accordingly the specific evaluation criteria for reasonableness and fallacies must also be morality-related, where the context-independent codes of conduct for critical discussion proposed in the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation can be resorted to as an important foundation in the future research.