Sympathy and Perspective-Taking in Confucian Ethics

Abstract

This article spells out a forgotten debate in Confucian ethics that concerns the finer points of empathy, sympathy, and perspective-taking (sometimes called ‘role-taking’). The debate’s central question is whether sympathy is more virtuous when it is automatic and other-focused – that is, when we engage in perspective-taking without conscious effort and sympathize without significant reference to our selves or our own feelings. The seeds of this debate can be found in classical Confucianism, but the relevant issues come in for more explicit and nuanced analysis in neo-Confucianism broadly construed, especially in the thought of Zhu Xi and Dai Zhen. I unpack the technical distinctions and psychological presuppositions that underlie three of Zhu’s critiques of non-automatic and self-focused perspective-taking, and then reconstruct Dai’s responses to these critiques.