맹자와 순자의 인간이해, 그 윤리적 변별성

Abstract

Mencius had taken a step to analysis on the innate emotional mind(良心) for understanding human nature at first. That mind have a moral characteristic of human connected with the goodness. Mencius had thought that human nature is intrinsically good, the moral doing is the ability to do get the four moral value like the inherent morality of human being which driven by the moral mind. In this paper, I have presented Mencius' moral theory firstly based on the moral universe. Humans are situated in this moral universe, from which we drive our own morality. Mencius insisted that morality is merely determined by human conventions and that there are no moral truths independent of human judgments and beliefs. And in the Mencius' moral theory our human society is a combined intellectual quest. The understanding of one’s moral essence and the understanding of the moral essence of the universe can complement each other. Xunzi develops this point when he questions Mencius' assumption that the moral resources are ready-made or inborn. First, he adopts a deflationary strategy by saying that birth is in itself a process of moving away from any original, simple organic state. In other words, there is no such state. He also reminds us of certain ugly aspects of human nature such as self-interested tendencies and feelings of envy and hatred. Second, Xunzi goes on to expand on the rationale of morality in terms of the necessary regulation of people's desires so as to bring about social order and the effective allocation of scarce resources. Xunzi argues that both the original raw material of nature (xing) and human artifice (wei) are mutually necessary to bring about morality. As we shall see, this passage fits very nicely into a certain section of the "Xing e pian," where Xunzi goes on to argue that ritual is required to curb certain desires. At the same time, however, such rituals give rise to the expression of, say, acts of deference. Xunzi describes the rationale of morality in terms of constitutive processes that give rise to ritual behavior. In spelling out these processes, Xunzi in effect denies that the development of morality is an organic process of nurturing certain original sprouts, even though he may admit that people have feelings of love and righteousness. Constitutive processes are not just regulatory; they transform raw capacities into refined sensibilities, feelings, and emotions. Mencius' underlying belief in a simple organic state is therefore insufficient to account for the nature of morality, described in terms of the constitutive rationale of the rites.