Acquiring 'feelings that do not err': Moral deliberation and the sympathetic point of view in the ethics of Dai Zhen

This work is about the 18th Century Chinese Confucian philosopher Dai Zhen (1724-1777), a sophisticated advocate for the use of sympathy in moral deliberation and a staunch critic of orthodox Neo-Confucianism, which he regarded as responsible for a crisis in moral thought. I focus on Dai's elegant conception of the proper relationship between desire, sympathetic concern, and moral reasoning, and show that his better-known views on metaphysics and intellectual history are best understood as supporting his fundamental concerns about the place of the feelings and desires in moral deliberation. In so doing, I contend that Dai offers an appealing account of moral deliberation as sympathy-based, over and against accounts that are based fundamentally on moral principles or non-sympathetic faculties. I also show that Dai had a nuanced understanding of the relationship between desire and well-being, responsive both to the view that human welfare independent upon the desires, but also to the widespread desire-skepticism found in the philosophical and religious thought of his era. I conclude that Dai's central philosophical project in moral deliberation theory forces us to reconsider the precise way in which we value the good of another person through sympathetic concern, the relationship between desire and well-being (where Dai has a more successful view than modern informed desire theories), and the importance of self-interest for moral reasoning.