다산 정약용의 윤리론에서 최종 결정권은 어디에 있는가?

Abstract

Tasan Jeong Yagyong claimed that we are not born as good, but born to become good. We are responsible for what we do, since we have free will to choose our course of action. Tasan was one of the very first thinkers to have brought such a notion of free choice in Confucian moral context, and he notion of free will or ‘kwon-hyong’ (lit., scale-balance) undoubtedly plays a vital role in his ethical theories. However, researchers do not have reached consensus as to what kind of scale-balance Tasan has in mind. He sometimes uses the term as denoting the strict weighing and judging the issue at hand; in this sense, it is a cogitative and reflective “reason” to assess the truth and falsity, or goodness or evil of a certain action. On the other hand, Tasan sometimes refers to it in a confined sense of ‘freedom of choice’; that is, you are free to actualize your moral potential, which is a moral emotion or appetite (kiho) that you are endowed at birth. Because researchers overlooked the double play of the term kwonhyong and its dual role as reason and emotion, they either interpreted Tasan’s ethical theories either as a form of moral intellectualism or moral emotivism. The former emphasized too strongly on the cognitive aspect of kwonhyong, while the latter stressed the intuitive aspect of moral inclination. Using the sources such as abridged and translated version of Summa Theologica I argue that in Tasan’s ethical theories, both moral reason and emotions play crucial roles in moral success and failure. Without moral reason, we could be blind as to the real nature of our action. We do not know what is true and what kind of action we should choose to follow. Without moral emotion, nonetheless, we cannot act on what we found out to be morally worthy of action. Tasan’s moral theories could then be summed up as this: We can reject the best judgment of our reason, but we cannot carry out what our emotions do not like. In this sense, it is moral emotion, not the motal reason, that has an upper hand in Tasan’s ethical theories.