Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Discussion

Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet

Farhana Akter Fellow
· 5 replies
Meta-ethicsBuddhistChineseConfucianismMencius#compassion#four-sprouts#mencius#moral-realism
Follow

I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times.

Mencius says that anyone who suddenly sees a small child about to fall into a well will feel alarm and compassion. Not to get in good with the child's parents, not to be praised by neighbours, not because the crying is unpleasant. The feeling simply comes. He takes this as a sign that the heart of compassion is part of being human, the first sprout of goodness, along with sprouts of shame, deference and the sense of right and wrong.

I see a version of this every few weeks. When a newborn does not breathe, the room changes. Relatives who were quarrelling a minute ago about who should be allowed in go silent. A grandmother who has said nothing kind all night starts praying out loud for a child she was disappointed was a girl. Nobody calculates.

What I want to know is what this proves. My nephew, who studies biology, says it proves only that we evolved to care about infants, and that this tells you nothing about whether caring is right. Mencius seems to think it shows morality belongs to our nature and is not a convention someone made up.

I also notice the feeling does not last. The same grandmother may be cold to the mother by morning. Is a feeling that comes and goes really evidence of anything about right and wrong? I would be glad to hear how people read this passage.

LikeReply
Follow5 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

5 replies

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Your nephew's worry has a name in the literature: the evolutionary debunking argument. If our moral responses were shaped by selection for reproductive success, then they would have been the same whether or not they tracked any independent moral truth, so their existence is no evidence for such truth.

    Mencius's argument is not really vulnerable to that, though, because he is not a non-natural realist. He is saying goodness is a matter of developing what we already are. For him the evolutionary story, had he known it, would be a description of the sprouts, not a debunking of them.

  2. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Your grandmother is exactly why Mencius talks about sprouts and not full plants. There is another passage where a king spares an ox being led to sacrifice because he could not bear its frightened look, and orders a sheep used instead. Mencius tells him the feeling was real but partial: he pitied the animal he saw and not the one he did not. The task is to extend the response to cases you do not see. So a feeling that comes and goes is exactly what he expected. It is evidence of capacity, not of virtue.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    The Buddhist commentaries make a distinction that might help with the grandmother. Compassion has what Buddhaghosa calls a near enemy: grief, which he ties to worldly, household life. As teachers often explain it, it looks like compassion but is closer to one's own distress, the shock of what one is seeing. The far enemy is cruelty. The near enemy is the harder one to spot because it passes so easily for the real thing.

    I suspect what you see in the delivery room is both, mixed. That would explain why it fades. Distress subsides when the crisis passes. Compassion that has been trained does not.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Kwame Asante

    Fellow

    One caution on universality. That everyone feels alarm at a child falling is very plausible. What varies between societies is the circle of those whose falling counts in the same way: strangers, enemies, outsiders. Mencius knew this; it is why extension is the hard part. So the passage shows a universal starting point rather than a universal morality. Whether that is enough for realism depends on whether the extension is discovered or chosen.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Farhana Akter

    Fellow

    Nirmala's near enemy is something I will think about every shift now. I have felt it myself, the shock that looks like care. And Elif's ox makes sense of the grandmother. She saw the baby not breathing. In the morning she saw a mother who had disappointed her. Same heart, one sprout grown a little, the other not at all.