4 Moral luck and moral responsibility* Wang Yangming on the Confucian problem of evil Yong Huang Introduction As I have argued elsewhere, liangzhi Ⰻ▱ (literally “good knowledge” or moral knowledge1), the neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming’s trademark concept, is neither knowing-that nor knowing-how in Gilbert Ryle’s sense but rather knowing-to, the moral knowledge that inclines one to act morally.2 As Wang claims that such knowledge is something everyone is born with, a question arises: Why, then, are there still people who do not do moral things and even do evil things? Against a common view that Wang fails to solve this neo-Confucian problem of evil, I shall argue that he provides a plausible and profound solution. People do evil things because their selfish desires becloud their liangzhi; selfish desires arise because of unfavorable xi ⩦and qi Ề. Here, xi is the environment in which one is born and grows up, while qi is the physical/psychic makeup one is born with. However, what kind of xi one is born to and what kind of qi one is born with are out of one’s control. It is a moral luck, a concept made famous by a pair of papers by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, respectively. Williams recognizes that “moral luck” may be regarded as an oxymoron: Morality should be about things within one’s control, while luck by definition is not something within one’s control; Nagel realizes that it is paradoxical: One is not responsible for what one is responsible for. Despite this, both Williams and Nagel argue that we can rightly continue to hold people morally responsible for what they are or do due to luck, as otherwise, there would not be anyone responsible for anything. In this essay, I shall challenge this dominant view of moral luck by appealing to Wang. In the sense that xi and qi are out of our control and yet affect our moral qualities, Wang does have a concept of moral luck. However, his moral luck has two salient features, which prevent it from being an oxymoron or a paradox and yet allow moral responsibility. First, unfavorable xi and qi can affect one’s moral quality only if one’s will (zhi ᚿ) is lacking, and yet one’s will is something within one’s control.3 Second, even if there is the (somewhat merely theoretical) possibility that one is born to be a sage due to pure luck, Wang emphasizes that what is really valuable (gui ㈗) is not to be born to be faultless (wuguo ↓㐣) but to correct one’s faults (4.172). Moral luck and the problem of evil 69 Origin of evil In Wang’s view, the heart/mind (xin ᚰ) is the master of one’s body, including ears, eyes, mouth, nose, and the four limbs. Without the heart/mind, one’s body cannot see, hear, say, or do anything (3.90). Here, by the heart/mind, Wang does not mean a pile of flesh and blood but what makes it possible for one to see, hear, say, and do things, which “is the human nature and the heavenly principle. Only when there is this human nature can there be life-giving activity (sheng⏕), and this principle of the human nature’s life-giving activity is humanity (ren ோ),” which both constitutes human beings as human beings and is the most fundamental human virtue (1.36). For this sense, Wang states that “the original state of the heart/mind is the ultimate good, and there is nothing in the original state of the mind that is not good” (3.119). This original state of the heart/mind, which is the ultimate good, for Wang, is knowledge, or good knowledge, liangzhi: “the heart/mind naturally knows. Seeing one’s parents, one naturally knows to have filial piety; seeing brothers, one naturally knows to have the brotherly love, and seeing an infant about to fall into a well, one naturally knows to have commiseration” (1.6). Thus, for Wang Yangming, “just as no one’s human nature is not good (shan ၿ), no one’s knowledge (zhi ▱) is not good (liang Ⰻ)” (2.62). However, if everyone has liangzhi, which is the ultimate good, and liangzhi is the master of one’s body, then how is it possible that one may do immoral things? Before we examine Wang’s answer, we first need to see what he means by evil. Wang once claimed that good and evil are really one thing. Questioned by an apparently confused student, Wang explained that “what is called evil is originally not evil; it is nothing but the deficiency and excess in relation to human nature” (3.97). What Wang means is that the originally good human nature has to be embodied in such feelings as happiness, anger, sadness, and joy. When such feelings are all issued out naturally, there is good. However, “if one has some attachment to them, there will be deficiency or excess, which is selfishness” (1.19). So Wang’s idea of evil is not something like good that positively exists. What exists is the good, and evil is merely the absence of, or rather, deviation from, the good. It is in this sense that Wang claims that “the heart/mind of the evil person has lost its original state” (1.15). So a more appropriate question to ask Wang is not how evil arises, but how the heart/mind loses its original good state (although for the sake of convenience, I shall treat them as the same question and use them interchangeably). Wang Yangming states that this happens when the heart/mind is stimulated by and responds to external things. To explain this, Wang Yangming makes the distinction between intention (yi ព) and liangzhi: “intention and liangzhi should be clearly distinguished from each other. Whenever a thought (nian ᛕ) arises in responding to external things, there is intention. Intention may be right or wrong, and what knows the rightness and wrongness of the intention is liangzhi” (6.217). This, of course, does not mean that in order to avoid the evil, one ought to avoid the external things so that the heart/mind is not stimulated by and will not need to respond to them, as Buddhists (according to Wang) would do. After all, being stimulated by and responding to 70 Yong Huang external things is only the occasion on which the evil arises, not the cause of its arising, as it is also the occasion on which the good arises, but not the cause of its arising. While the original state of the heart/mind is the ultimate good, which is without good and evil, good and evil arise both when the heart-mind is stimulated by and responds to external things. Then what is the cause, not merely the occasion, of the arising of the evil? To explain this, Wang states that if the issuing of the liangzhi is not blocked by any selfish desires, one’s commiseration will be fully developed, and the function of humanity (ren ோ) will be inexhaustible. However, “common people cannot not have the selfish desire to cover up the liangzhi, and therefore there is a need to make the effort of extending knowledge and investigating things in order to overcome the selfishness and return to the principle” (1.6). So here, Wang attributes the arising of evil to the existence of selfish desires. It is such selfish desires that act like the cloud that blocks the shining sun and the dust that covers the bright mirror. This, however, does not seem to be a satisfactory answer. Most importantly, Wang Yangming’s liangzhi or heart/mind is not merely cognitive but also affective. In other words, liangzhi not only tells one what is the morally right thing to do but also inclines one to act morally; it is not only moral knowledge but also moral desire. If so, where do the selfish, i.e., immoral desires, which are opposite to liangzhi, i.e., the moral desire, come from? A number of scholars claim that Wang fails to answer this question. In his discussion of Wang Yangming, Chen Lai, for example, points out that the problem of evil is always a difficulty for Confucianism in general and for the school of heart/mind in particular. As Wang Yangming says that evil is either the deficiency or excess of the good, Chen asks from where the excess and deficiency come. As Wang says that it is because the original state of the heart/mind is blocked by selfish desires, Chen asks from where selfish desires come. If innate good knowledge is the original state of the heart/mind, why can’t it prevent excesses and deficiencies as well as the selfish desires by which such excesses and deficiencies are caused? Chen claims that “none of these questions are really answered in Wang Yangming’s philosophy.”4 However, in my view, Wang does attempt to solve this problem, and I think he does it relatively successfully. As Wang states, “evil thoughts come from xi (custom) and qi (vital force), while good thoughts are derived from the original state” (26.983). Here Wang mentions two sources of evil: Xi, the environment in which one is born and grows up, and qi, the physical/psychic makeup that one is born with, and he often mentions them together as xiqi. On the one hand, Wang emphasizes the importance of the environmental influence upon a person’s moral quality by citing an ancient saying: “The bitter fleabane will naturally be upright when growing among hemps, and white sands become black, with no need of dyeing, when put into mud”; similarly, Wang points out, “those people in the past who abandoned their families and betrayed their neighbors, going out to do violent things everywhere, are so not because of their nature being different from others and so to be blamed on themselves. It is caused by the lack of proper political governance and moral cultivation” (17.599). This includes the lack of early moral education within a family, the absence of inducement of Moral luck and the problem of evil 71 good behaviors through rewards, and their being driven further into evil by angry curses. Therefore, Wang claims that the government on the one hand and parents and neighbors on the other should all share the blame for those people gradually falling into evil. While this emphasis by Wang on the environmental effect on a person’s moral quality is common sense, it has now been proven by the recent discovery of mirror neurons in human brains. Mirror neurons are observed to be fired or activated not only when a person acts but also when one sees or hears other people doing the same thing. Thus, experience of other people’s actions repeatedly helps to incline one to do the same action.5 While this confirms the importance of Confucian emphasis on the exemplary function of a virtuous person, particularly virtuous political leaders (since what they do is more widely observed), it also enforces Wang’s claim about the contaminating effect of a bad environment on people. On the other hand, Wang attributes the origin of evil to the physical/psychic stuff, qi or qizhi, that one is endowed with. In his view, the liangzhi by itself is originally bright. In those whose material stuff is not good, there is a great deal of dredges, causing a thick layer of blockage, which makes it difficult for the original bright liangzhi to shine. In those whose material stuff is good, there is little dredge, hardly causing any blockage; thus, with a little effort to reach one’s knowledge (liangzhi), the liangzhi is thoroughly bright. How can the little dredge, which is like the floating snow in hot soup, cause any blockage? (2.68) So it is not qi in general that blocks one’s shining liangzhi and causes one to become evil. Without qi, the good human nature cannot be displayed, for it is “only from the qi that one can see the good human nature; if there is no qi, there is no way to see human nature. [The feelings of] commiseration, shame, deference, and right and wrong are all qi” (2.61). It is in this sense that Wang Yangming speaks very highly of an essay on the goodness of human nature by one of his contemporaries, Wang Wenke ⋤ᩥᜡ, claiming that there are hardly any Confucians who are as profound as Wang Wenke. Wang Yangming cites this essay in the biography he wrote for Wang Wenke. So what does Wang Wenke say about human nature that invites such high praise? Wang Wenke states that “the material stuff is both the home of human nature and what obscures the human nature. Variations occur to human nature when the material stuff varies” (25.946). Here he uses the analogy of a house and its resident to illustrate the relationship between human nature and the material stuff. To further explain how the material stuff affects human nature, Wang Wenke continues with two further analogies. The first is the relationship between a ball (human nature) and a body of water (material stuff) into which the ball falls: “Take human nature as a ball, it is bright when falling into clear water but becomes darkened when falling into turbid water and dirty when falling into dirty water. When in clear water, there are wise people above, when in turbid water, there are common people [in the middle], and 72 Yong Huang when in dirty water, there are stupid people below” (25.946). The second additional analogy is the moon (as human nature) and a body of water (as qi) upon which the moon is reflected: “take the analogy of the moon in the sky, from which various things receive the light according to their natures. Reflected upon the rivers, lakes, and seas is the moon; reflected upon the swamp is the moon; reflected upon the ditch and canal is the moon; and reflected in pit cuts is also the moon” (25.946). In the second analogy, he makes a further distinction: “the heart-mind is like the spirit of the moon, human nature is like the light of the moon, and human emotions are like the reflections of the light upon things [which is the material stuff]” (25.946). Although this is not an essay by Wang Yangming himself, we can safely regard it as a view that Wang Yangming accepts. This is not simply because Wang sings high praise of the essay and cites it in the biography he wrote; it is also because it is fully consistent with his own view as we discussed in the previous paragraphs. Indeed, in another place, Wang’s own analogy of gold is reminiscent of the second analogy used in Wang Wenke’s essay: “the purer a piece of gold is, the less effort to purify it is needed and the easier it is to reach the goal; the less pure a piece of gold is, the more difficult it is to purify it. The material stuff that constitutes human beings is of various degrees of clarity or turbidity and purity or impurity, causing some people above the average and some people below the average [in their moral qualities]” (2.27–28). Moral luck Since Wang, like many other neo-Confucians, attributes the origin of evil to the qi that one is endowed with and xi that one is born to and grows in, and what qi one is endowed with and what xi one is born in are obviously not something that one can choose, it seems that the evil he talks about is really natural evil, excluding the possibility of social evil. An unfortunate result of such a view would be its apparent determinism: A person cannot be held morally responsible for the evil they commit, just as an earthquake cannot be held responsible for the disaster it causes. In an article discussing Zhu Xi’s ᮒ⇘solution to the problem of evil, Lee Minghuei ᮒ⇘ claims that there are a number of theoretical problems with this neo-Confucian solution to the problem of evil: First, such characteristics of qi, as hard and soft, strong and weak, dark and bright, clear and turbid, balanced and one-sided, and thin and thick, are themselves natural characteristics and thus lack any moral significance. Even if we can talk about the good and evil, they can only be “natural good” and “natural evil.” Therefore, in order to see the origin of moral evil, it is not enough to appeal to qi. Second, if Zhu Xi confuses “moral evil” with “natural evil” and attributes both to qi, he will be led to determinism and even fatalism and thus render moral responsibility and moral cultivation meaningless . . . Third, while the characteristics of qi can indeed become the obstacle of moral practice and thus be regarded as “evil,” the very concept of “moral evil” presupposes that of moral responsibility, and yet moral responsibility presupposes the practical agent with freedom. Thus, qi alone cannot fully explain the origin of moral evil.6 Moral luck and the problem of evil 73 Although Lee’s criticism is directed at Zhu Xi, since Wang holds a similar view of the origin of the evil to Zhu’s, he would certainly think it is also applicable to Wang. However, some defense can be made for this neo-Confucian solution to the problem of evil, which, I believe, conveys an insight that is reflected in John Rawls’s discussion of natural and social accidents. Although a Kantian philosopher himself, who puts a great deal of emphasis on rational choice and individual autonomy, Rawls not only argues that how much natural talent we are born with but also, to a great extent, how fully such natural talents are developed are out of our control and thus morally arbitrary: The former is an entirely natural accident, while the latter is significantly a social accident. He even goes so far to say that the moral characters that we actually have are also not something that we can take full credit for. For example, “even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstance.”7 Of course, Rawls does not use qi to explain this inequality, but his idea of natural and social accidents is very much in consistence with Wang’s neo-Confucian insight. Wang’s neo-Confucian insight is also reflected, although in an exaggerated way, in what Moody-Adams calls the “inability thesis”: “sometimes one’s upbringing in a culture simply renders one unable to know that certain actions are wrong.”8 This view is indeed shared by a number of other prominent contemporary philosophers. For example, Michael Slote claims that the ancient Greek slave owners were “unable to see what virtue required in regard to slavery,” and this “was not due to personal limitations (alone) but requires some explanation by social and historical forces, by cultural limitations”; Alan Donagan says that, while “a graduate of Sandhurst or West Point who does not understand his duty to noncombatants as human beings is certainly culpable for his ignorance,” “an officer bred up from childhood in Hitler’s Jugend might not be”; and Susan Wolf argues that the social circumstances of slave-owners in the 1850s, Nazis in the 1930s, and male chauvinists of “our fathers’ generation” made it inevitable for them to hold values we condemn today.9 Dimitrijevic further argues that this inability thesis is a kind of cultural and psychological determinism: “the power of social and cultural context in a criminal regime excludes the perpetrators from the community of assumptively moral persons – in this sense, they do not differ from children or the mentally ill.”10 What Rawls calls accidents may also be called luck, since, for Rawls, such accidents are morally arbitrary in the sense that there is no reason why some people are born with and in such accidents (good luck), and some other people are born with and in other accidents (bad luck), and thus people should not be praised because they have good luck and blamed because they have bad luck. In other words, luck, which is out of one’s control, is irrelevant to morality, which is within one’s control, especially from the Kantian view. It is in this sense that Williams states that “when I introduced the expression moral luck, I expected it to suggest an oxymoron.”11 However, in his view, it is an oxymoron only if one holds the view that morality is entirely immune to luck, which he attempts to debunk. If one insists that morality must be immune to luck, then Williams claims that it is “morality” 74 Yong Huang in a narrow sense, which is not so important and forms only a small part of the broader and more important “ethics,” which allows luck to play its role. Whether luck plays its role in morality in the broad sense or in ethics which includes the narrow sense of morality, what Williams wants to emphasize is that moral (in the narrow sense) or ethical judgments/evaluations of things, events, and agents that arise out of one’s control, i.e., out of luck, are still inevitable. If, out of my control, I caused harm to people, I would still be “shunned, hated, unloved, and despised, not least by myself,” if not morally, then at least ethically.12 Nagel holds a similar view of moral luck, which happens, according to him, “where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment.”13 Why do we make moral judgment of someone doing things out of his control? Nagel’s answer is simple: otherwise we cannot make any moral judgment of anyone doing anything in any way, for “whether we succeeded or fail in what we try to do nearly always depends to some extent on factors beyond our control. This is true of . . . almost any morally important act”;14 and thus “if the condition of control is consistently applied, it threatens to erode most of the moral assessments we find it natural to make.”15 So instead of oxymoron, Nagel claims that, with moral luck, we are really facing a paradox: “A person can be morally responsible only for what he does; but what he does results from a great deal that he does not do; therefore he is not morally responsible for what he is and is not responsible for.”16 In an important sense, we may say that, in explaining the origin of evil in terms of xi and qi, Wang is also talking about moral luck, since what kind of xi one is born to and growing up in and what kind of qi one is born with are out of the person’s control, and yet the type of xi and qi the person has affects his or her moral quality, which is the proper object of moral judgment. More specifically, to use Nagel’s classification, the type of moral luck that Wang is talking about is the constitutive moral luck. In contrast to resultant luck (luck in how the way one’s actions and projects turn out), causal luck (luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstance), and circumstantial luck (luck in the circumstance one happens to be in or not in), which are all related to what a person does, constitutional luck is the luck about what kind a person one is, including the person’s “inclinations, capacities, and temperament.”17 What Wang regards as the origin of evil, xi and qi, does not affect what a person does directly. What it directly affects is the kind a person one is. When the xi and qi are favorable, the person is wise above, when the xi and qi are extremely impure, the person is a stupid below, while most people are somewhere in between. The person who is wise above will characteristically do moral things, while the person who is stupid below will characteristically do immoral things. In this case, since what they do can be attributed to the kind of persons they are, and what kind of persons they are depends upon what kind of xi and qi they are endowed with. Since the latter is out of their control, it seems that it is also out of their control what kind of persons they are, directly, and what kind of things they do, indirectly. Yet, Wang still holds that the wise above as well as what they do are praiseworthy, and the stupid below as well as what they do are blameworthy. Moral luck and the problem of evil 75 However, in an important sense, what Wang has in mind is different from the moral luck that Williams and Nagel discuss. The reason that moral luck sounds like an oxymoron (Williams) or a paradox (Nagel) is that morality is about things within one’s control, while luck is out of one’s control, and yet it seems still inevitable for us to make moral judgments about things out of an agent’s control. For example, Williams claims that “while the good man, the sage, was immune to the impact of incident luck, it was a matter of what may be called constitutive luck that one was a sage, or capable of becoming one: for the many and vulgar this was not (on the prevailing view) an available course.”18 While I’m not entirely convinced by Williams and Nagel that we can make moral judgment of an agent about things out of his or her control, it is indeed the case that for Wang, we can hold people responsible for what they do, even though they do what they do because they are what they are, and they would not be what they are should the xi and qi they have, which is out of their control, be different from what they actually have. The reason is that, although xi and qi are important elements affecting a person’s moral quality, for Wang, one still has control not only of what things one will do, given the xi and qi constitutive of the person’s moral character, but also of what kind of person they want to become. How could this happen? Moral responsibility We have seen Wang claiming that “the evil thoughts originate from the [bad] xi and qi, while the good thoughts originate from the original human nature” (26.983). This may lead us to think that Wang holds a determinist view, thinking that our being good or evil is out of our control. However, immediately following this sentence, Wang states that “the reason that one’s human nature is blocked by the [bad] xi and qi is that one’s will is lacking” (26.983). Here it is clear that, for Wang, to be endowed with impure qi and live in an unfavorable environment, while profoundly serious, does not determine the person to be evil. In other words, if there is no impure qi and unfavorable xi, one will not become evil; their very presence, however, does not necessarily cause one to become evil. So the unfavorable xi and qi for Wang are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the arising of evil. They block one’s human nature or liangzhi and one becomes evil only if one does not have the will to resist them. Here it is apparent that, for Wang, unlike both liangzhi, which is purely good, and the unfavorable xi and qi as well as the resulting selfish desires that block the liangzhi, which are purely bad, the will is morally neutral, in the sense that it is not something that would automatically lead one to do moral or immoral things. It can be either good or evil. It is good if it is the will to do good and refrain from doing evil, and it is bad if it is the will to do evil and resist the good. We need to explore what Wang means when he claims that the xi and qi as well as the resulting selfish desires block one’s heart/mind or liangzhi. If human heart/mind consists of knowledge (zhi ▱), emotion (qing ᝟), and will (yi ព or zhi ᚿ), apparently what Wang Yangming really has in mind is emotion when he says that the heart/ mind is blocked, in the sense that the person no longer has the emotion or feeling or desire to love the good and hate the evil. However, one’s knowledge of ௘what is 76 Yong Huang good and evil and one’s will to choose to do the good or evil are left intact. On the one hand, Wang says that “if one knows what is good but does not do it according to one’s innate moral knowledge (liangzhi) and knows what is not good but does not refrain from doing it according to one’s innate moral knowledge, then this innate moral knowledge is obscured” (3.119). This shows that when one’s innate moral knowledge is obscured, only the inclination to do the good and not to do the evil is affected. The cognitive aspect is still functioning. Moreover, the knowledge in question is not limited to non-moral knowledge, such as “tigers can hurt people,” but also moral knowledge (but not moral knowledge), such as “one ought to love one’s parents.” For example, Wang says that “the liangzhi in a person cannot be extinguished. Even a robber or thief also knows that one ought not to steal or rob. If you call him a thief or robber, he will be reluctant to accept it” (3.93). Obviously, the fact that the person steals or robs shows that this person’s heart/mind or liangzhi is blocked by xi and qi and resulting selfish desires, but Wang affirms that the person still knows it is wrong to steal or rob. It is true that, for Wang, such moral knowledge, or more precisely, knowledge about morality, when it is not accompanied with emotion, feeling, or desire to act morally, is not genuine knowledge. Thus when one of his students says that knowledge and action seem to be two separate things, as there are people who know about filial piety and brotherly love but don’t act accordingly, Wang responds by saying that to know and yet not to act is not really knowing (1.3–4). Thus, he states that “the original heart/mind is as bright as the sun during the day. There is no one who has faults (guo 㐣) and yet is not aware of it. What concerns us is that the person does not do the correction” (4.172). Of course, such knowledge no longer has the affective function; it becomes what Zhang Zai ᙇ㍕ calls knowledge of hearing and seeing (wenjian zhi zhi ⪺ぢஅ▱). Still, there is an obvious distinction between knowing that one ought to love one’s parents and yet failing to love them and not knowing that one ought to love one’s parents and failing to love one’s parents. This is an important distinction for Wang, perhaps as important as the distinction between knowledge that leads to action and the knowledge that does not lead to action. We can see this more clearly in relation to his discussion of the will (zhi ᚿ). On the other hand, just as with knowledge, for Wang, the will is not blocked by the xi and qi and the selfish desires. This is clear in the passage we quoted two paragraphs back, where Wang says that one’s human nature is blocked by the unfavorable xi and qi because one’s will is lacking, which implies that if one’s will is not lacking, the unfavorable xi and qi cannot block one’s human nature, or heart/mind, or liangzhi. However, is the presence of the unfavorable xi and qi the cause of the will’s being lacking for Wang? Clearly it is not, as we can see from the following passage: “as soon as a selfish desire emerges, one only needs to blame the will’s being lacking, and the selfish desire will secede; as soon as the guest qi starts to move, one only needs to blame the will’s being lacking, and the guest qi will dissipate. When lazy, blame the will and one will not be lazy; when negligent, blame the will and one will not be negligent; when anxious, blame the will and one will not be anxious” (and he goes on to talk about envy, anger, greed, arrogance, and stinginess in a similar way) (7.260). Here, Wang blames the will not only for Moral luck and the problem of evil 77 one’s being selfish, lazy, negligent, anxious, envious, angry, greedy, arrogant, and stingy, which may be said to be caused by impure qi, but also for the movement of the impure qi itself. While it is out of one’s control and has nothing to do with one’s will that one is born with and in the impure qi, clearly, for Wang, it is not the functioning of such impure qi that causes the will’s being lacking; rather, it is the will’s being lacking that allows the functioning of the impure qi, and so as soon as one firms up one’s will, the impure qi will not be able to function and one will cease to be selfish. This is because, for Wang, “the will is the commander of qi, the life of a human being, the root of a tree, the source of water. When the source is blocked, the stream will stop; when the root is not cultivated, the tree will wither; when the life is not continued, the human will die, and so when the will is not established, the qi will be dark” (7.260). So it is clear that Wang has a concept of free will, and the will remains free even if one is born with the most turbid qi and in the most adverse xi and even if one has already become evil (one is not necessarily evil if one is born with the alien qi and in the adverse xi).19 That is why he thinks that it is the will, and not the qi or xi, without which evil is impossible, that one should blame for being evil, for it is out of one’s control (one is not free) as to what kind of qi one is to be born with and what kind of qi one is to be born in, while it is within one’s control (one is free) as to the way to deal with such qi and xi. For this reason, one is responsible not only for becoming evil but also for remaining evil, since an evil person still has free will. It is in this connection that we can return to the topic that we discussed above: the importance of the moral knowledge that is not blocked when the heart/mind is obscured by the xi and qi and the selfish desires caused thereby, even though such knowledge is not accompanied by corresponding action and therefore is not moral knowledge. If such knowledge is also blocked to the effect that the person whose heart/mind is obscured by the xi and qi does not know what is right and what is wrong (for example, whether one ought to love one’s parents), then even if one has free will, we still cannot hold that person morally responsible for his or her actions. This is because moral responsibility is not only conditional upon free will but also upon relevant knowledge. Just as we cannot hold a person responsible for an action if the person is forced to do it, we cannot hold a person responsible for it if the person does not know it is wrong to do it. The importance of desire Our discussion above shows that, even when the unfavorable xi and qi obscure one’s heart/mind, the person can still do moral things, and the person should be praised if he or she actually does them and blamed if he or she does not do them, because the person still has the moral knowledge and free will, which are not blocked by the unfavorable xi and qi. What is blocked is “merely” the person’s emotion, feeling, inclination, or desire to do moral things and not to do immoral things. This point raises a question, which, however, if properly answered, throws a significant light on the contemporary debate between Humeanism and antiHumeanism about motivation of action. 78 Yong Huang The question is whether the heart/mind’s being obscured by the unfavorable qi and xi is really insignificant, since what it blocks is merely a desire to do moral things, without which one can still do moral things. To answer this question, we need to return to the idea of the ultimate goodness, zhi shan ⮳ၿ, which is also without good and evil, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. However, there are two senses of the ultimate good. The first refers to the original state of the heart/ mind. About this, Wang states that “the principle in quietude is without good and evil, and good and evil arise from the qi in activity. Without the activation of qi, [the principle] is without the good and evil, which is the ultimate good” (1.29). This sense of the ultimate good may be called the natural ultimate good, which is the original state of the heart/mind or liangzhi, when it is not stimulated by and thus not responding to external things. This is not the state that Wang really emphasizes, since his ideal persons, including sages, are ones who welcome the stimulations from the things and appropriately respond to them. To remain in such an original state means not to do anything, as Buddhists aspire: “Buddhists are attached to this state of being without good and evil, doing nothing and thus unable to govern the world” (1.29). However, there is another, though not entirely separate, sense of the ultimate good for Wang, which is related to the final end of moral cultivation, the sagehood, and displayed in one’s actions. Wang makes this sense of the ultimate good at the very beginning of his preface to the ancient version of the Great Learning, where he states that “the essential of the Great Learning is to make the will sincere; the way to make the will sincere is to get rid of selfish desires (gewu ᱁≀), while the final goal of making the will sincere is nothing but to reach the ultimate good” (7.243). It is here that Wang thinks that Confucianism diverts from Buddhism, which aims to maintain the original state of the heart/mind without engaging oneself with the external world. Sages, who have realized the ultimate good, do not intentionally have likes or dislikes. This, however, does not mean that the sages do not have likes (hao ዲ) or dislikes (wu ᝵), as they would otherwise become senseless persons. By saying that they do not intentionally have likes or dislikes, it is meant that their likes and dislikes all naturally follow the principle, without any forced effort, as if they do not have likes or dislikes at all (1.29). An example of having likes and dislikes as if one does not have them is, as Wang explains repeatedly, one’s liking the beauty and hating the odor (3.97), and so he never fails to call upon us to like the good as we like the beauty and hate the evil as we hate the odor. In contrast to those who freely choose to do evil things, with likes and dislikes that go against the principle, which is bad, those who freely choose to do good without the natural inclination to do good are people who have forced likes and dislikes that are consistent with the principle, which is good. However, this is not the ultimate good. We can understand this not only in terms of the agent but also in terms of the action, the patient, and the function. In terms of the agent, the person who chooses to do the thing he or she does not have the inclination to do or even have the inclination not to do lacks a healthy mental state or, to use Aristotle’s term, eudaimonia, as the person has to fight against himself or herself every time he or she chooses to do the good; in terms of the action, such action is Moral luck and the problem of evil 79 unlikely consistent, as it is difficult for us to expect a person to constantly choose to do the thing he or she does not like to do; in terms of the patient, it is painful for a person to receive help from someone who does not like to provide help even though he or she chooses to help; and, finally, in terms of the function, Confucianism emphasizes the other-transformative function of the morally exemplifying person. However, in Wang’s view, “nothing but the ultimate good can affect and transform the great evil” (22.855). If a person struggles in doing good things, then it is unlikely that such an action can have morally affective functions to immoral people. Such action, to use Michael Slote’s term, is certainly not admirable, even though it may not be deplorable either. This answer to the question about the importance of moral inclination, in addition to knowledge and will, also provides a bonus point for us to look at the debate between Humeanism and anti-Humeanism in contemporary moral philosophy, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of action. According to Humeanism, one is motivated to act only if there is a belief about the action and a desire that will be satisfied by the action. For example, Michael Smith states that “motivation requires the presence of a relevant desire and means-end belief.”20 Anti-Humeans, however, argue that desire is not needed, and belief alone is enough to motivate one to act. For example, Thomas Scanlon argues that “a rational person who judges there to be compelling reason to do A normally forms the intention to do A, and this judgment is sufficient explanation of that intention and of the agent’s acting on it (since this action is part of what such an intention involves). There is no need to invoke an additional form of motivation.”21 To show that desire is not necessary or sufficient for action, Scanlon also mentions situations where we do things we do not have any desire to do or we do not do what we have a desire to do.22 Some Humeans may try to argue that Scanlon has a narrow conception of desire, and, when expanded, desire is really necessary for motivation to action, as long as the action is voluntary and rational, as anti-Humeans mean it to be.23 For example, why do we choose to do things we do not have the desire to do? There must be some stronger desire, for example, the desire to follow the moral principle. However, another way to look at it, the way suggested by Wang, is to see them as talking about two different types of action. Assuming that both are moral, Humeans are talking about the action when one’s liangzhi is not obscured so that one acts naturally, effortlessly, and delightfully, while anti-Humeans are talking about the action when one’s liangzhi is obscured and yet one’s will chooses to do what one does not have the inclination to do. Conclusion In the above, I have examined Wang Yangming’s view of moral luck and moral responsibility by focusing on his neo-Confucian explanation of the problem of evil. Against the scholarly view that Wang fails to provide a non-circular, satisfactory, and plausible explanation of the origin of evil, I argue that Wang is largely successful in attributing human evil to two causes, the environmental xi and the inborn qi, which are roughly equivalent to what John Rawls calls natural accidents 80 Yong Huang and social accidents respectively. Where what kind of environmental xi one is born and grows up in and the qi one is born with are out of one’s control, Wang does think luck plays a role in one’s moral quality. However, unlike Williams and Nagel, who claim morality and luck cannot go together without paradox or oxymoron, Wang can accept the idea of moral luck without any problem. This is because, for him, one’s luck, whether natural or social, while having an impact on one’s moral quality, either positively or negatively, does not determine it. What is crucial here is one’s will. The unfavorable xi and qi can lead one to be (do) evil only because one’s will is not firm; and as soon as one establishes a firm will, one can cease to be (do) evil. By emphasizing the importance of the will, however, Wang does not deny the impact of the unfavorable xi and qi in one’s moral cultivation. Just as it takes more effort to make an impure gold pure, a person with unfavorable xi and qi needs to make a much greater effort than those with more favorable xi and qi to become good (2.28). Yet it is precisely the effort that one makes that should be valued. Notes * Acknowledgment: This essay is part of a research project that is supported by the Hong Kong government Grant Research Council (GRF); the project number is 14615515. 1 In contrast to “moral knowledge,” I use “moral knowledge” to emphasize that it is not merely knowledge about morality, but knowledge that is itself moral in the sense that it inclines one to be moral. 2 See Yong Huang, “Knowing-that, Knowing-how, or Knowing-to? Wang Yangming’s Conception of Moral Knowledge (Liangzhi),” ௘in Journal of Philosophical Research 42 (2017): 65–94. 3 Wang Yangming, The Complete Works of Wang Yangming (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1992), 16.983. (The first set of numbers indicates the number of the volume or juan, while the second set is the page number. Citations from this source will be parenthetically inserted with volume and page number in the main text hereafter.) 4 Chen Lai, The Realm of Being and Non-being: The Spirit of Wang Yangming’s Philosophy (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1991), 81. 5 See Christian Keysers, Jon H. Kaas, and Valeria Gazzola, “Somatosensation in Social Perception,” Neuroscience 11 (2010): 417–28. 6 Lee Minghuei, “Zhu Xi on the Origin of Evil,” in Proceedings From the International Conference on Zhuzi, ed. Zhong Caijun 㚝ᙬ㕙 (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academic Sinica, 1993), 564. 7 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 64. 8 Michelle Moody-Adams, “Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance,” Ethics 104 (1994): 293. 9 See ibid., 292–3. 10 Nenad Dimitrijevic, “Moral Knowledge and Mass Crime: A Critical Reading of Moral Relativism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (2010): 131–56. 11 Bernard Williams, “Postscript,” in Moral Luck, ed. Daniel Statman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 251. 12 Ibid., 254. 13 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 26. 14 Ibid., 25. 15 Ibid., 26. 16 Ibid., 34. Moral luck and the problem of evil 81 17 Ibid., 28. 18 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20. 19 In this sense, I think Chen Lisheng, in his very fine study of Wang Yangming, puts the cart before the horse when he complains that “as to why some people can establish their will and some people cannot, Wang Yangming cannot provide a satisfactory answer other than appealing to the idea of the qi’s being clear and turbid” (Chen Lisheng, Wang Yangming’s Notion of “Ten Thousand Things as in One Body” [Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2005], 99–100). 20 Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 93. 21 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33–4. 22 Ibid., 39. 23 See Steven Arkonovich, “Defending Desire: Scanlon’s Anti-Humeanism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2001): 499–519.