to cultivate them or its exercise. There is no hint that exercising that capacity without
constraint is, for Mencius, even a great apparent good. “Consequently,” according to Van
Norden, “there seems to be no obvious place in Mencius's world view for a desire to
exercise one's will (per se) without constraint” (2001, 334). Absent such an apparent
good and a desire for it, Mencius's psychology will not be able to make sense of or
explain cases of rebellion against the moral law such as the theft of the pears.
One might, of course, doubt that human beings can rebel against the moral law in the way
envisaged in this interpretation of the theft of the pears. If they cannot, then the
explanatory advantage Van Norden attributes to Augustine's psychology would turn out
to be illusory. I think rebellion against morality's constraints is a type of moral evil that
has quite a few real instances, and so I am prepared to grant that Augustine's psychology
has the explanatory power Van Norden ascribes to it. I therefore accept his conclusion
that “Augustine's narrative of his youthful theft of some pears presents a serious, and
direct, challenge to Mencius's explanation of human evil” (2001, 335). However, I see
nothing in his discussion that precludes a neo-Mencian psychology that would
successfully meet this challenge. Van Norden does not claim that Mencius denies value
to the capacity to choose whether to cultivate or to neglect the sprouts of virtue or to its
exercise. Hence, it seems to me that a neo-Mencian psychology in which great value is
attributed to that capacity and to its exercise would be a consistent extension of Mencius's
psychology. Such a psychology could then attribute apparent goodness to the exercise of
the capacity unconstrained by morality and postulate a desire for that apparent good to
help explain the evil of rebellion against morality. In this way, the challenge could at
least provoke debate and might even stimulate progressive theoretical developments
within the Confucian tradition.
end p.413
Lee H. Yearley's Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage
(1990) is perhaps the most impressive specimen of constructive comparison so far
published. He describes his work as a contribution to the comparative philosophy of
religious flourishings. The book develops a large array of comparisons between the
accounts of the virtues offered by Mencius and Aquinas. I focus on just one of them: the
comparison of their understandings of human failures to be virtuous. My selection is
motivated by the obvious connection between Yearley's discussion of Mencius on ethical
failure and Van Norden's reflections on Mencius on wrongdoing.
It might be thought that Mencius and Aquinas are worlds apart on the topic of human
failure because Mencius thinks human nature is good and Aquinas thinks it is sinful.
According to Yearley, however, this sharp contrast is too simple to capture what is
interesting about these two subtle thinkers. Aquinas holds that human nature contains an
inclination to virtue which is diminished but not destroyed by original sin. And though
Mencius holds that the inclinations to or sprouts of virtue present in human nature are
good, he recognizes that many people do not cultivate them and so often do bad things.
So Mencius and Aquinas actually agree that “fundamental inclinations toward the good
remain, even if the force of those inclinations is diminished in almost all people”
(Yearley 1990, 88). More important to Yearley are three more specific differences in
their views on people's propensities toward virtue and vice: “The first concerns their