When looking for “the objectively correct” answer to the question of why we should be moral, we also should look to what the ancient Chinese had to say on the matter. Not because it is any more likely to be correct than Western answers; but because ancient China (especially the Chin to Han dynasties) was reasoning about this completely independently of Western philosophers—and yet (unlike the West) was more focused on the analytical study of moral theory than any other branches of philosophy, and hence taking these questions as seriously (and empirically) as their Western counterparts. Even though their philosophy wasn’t as sophisticated, if they came to similar conclusions, this would constitute independent corroborating evidence of what the truth really is on the point.

One might look into other traditions for the same kind of evidence (India, perhaps), but I doubt they’ll bear as much fruit for this purpose. Those are complicated by poor access to texts that predate Western and Chinese influence, and having an even less analytical philosophical practice than China; and are rarely as secular. Buddhism, for example, did not develop any of its extant texts independently of Western and Chinese influence; and though some of its texts are properly analytical (in epistemology, for example), their solutions are too frequently supernatural, and therefore unlikely to be lighting on the truth of anything (particularly in moral theory, where Buddhism proceeds from some very improbable, unempirical, even anti-empirical assumptions). By contrast, Chinese Confucianism almost never relied on premises of the supernatural; and even Taoism and Mohism drew their supernatural axioms so closely from observations of nature and society that in their most philosophical texts (e.g. the Tao Te Ching and Mengzi) there is barely a distinction in practice.

So what did ancient Chinese philosophers have to say about this?

Taoist Tradition

Taoist philosophy was never analytical. Indeed, it was almost deliberately anti-analytical; the Tao Te Ching (e.g 18-20) frequently side-eyes the analytical trend of its opposition, the Confucians. It preferred holistic, poetic discourse. And their output in such began impressive. But as a method of doing philosophy it is not very productive or reliable—or adequately clear (and as a religion, it subsequently devolved into base and irrational superstitions). Nevertheless, we can glean the thinking Taoists advanced as to the question of why we should be moral—because almost the entirety of Taoist philosophy consists of that (and what being moral looks like), because it equated human contentment as the ultimate goal of every human being aware of the truth, and the moral action required to produce it. In fact, for Taoists, there simply was no distinction: the answer to the question “What is moral?” simply is the answer to the question “What will content us?” Which simply provides the answer to the question “Why be moral?” That many Western philosophers (myself included) have come to the same conclusion is a corroboration of this revelation.

A typical example (Tao Te Ching 9, Henricks; likewise, e.g., 12, 30, 42, 44, 46, etc.):

When gold and jade fill your rooms, [e.g. Chase after money and security]
you’ll never be able to protect them. [e.g. your heart will never unclench].
Arrogance and pride with wealth and rank, [e.g. Care about people’s approval]
On their own bring on disaster. [e.g. you will be their prisoner].

When the deed is accomplished, you retire. [e.g. Do your work, then step back].
Such is Heaven’s Way [e.g. the only path to serenity].

Notice the focus on the reasons to be moral here are psycho-social: pursuing questionable aims (greed, status, power) leads to personal and psychological disquiet. It will only make your life worse (even by your own metrics, e.g. trapping yourself in dissatisfying prisons of your own making), and hinder your acquisition of contentment—which presumes everyone prefers to be content than rich or famous or powerful; or that everyone would who realized why this is the case. Hence an analytical philosopher would break this down to the point that indeed, the only reason anyone wants to be rich or famous or powerful is so that they may thereby become content. So the empirical observation that that actually isn’t likely to be what happens is relevant to moral motivation.

This is almost Aristotle in a nutshell, who also taught a principle of balanced virtues, The Golden Mean, just as the Tao Te Ching did: too much in one direction on any spectrum, is going to end up materially bad for you, contrary to what you might think (too generous, and thus exploitable into impoverishment vs. too stingy, and thus closed off from all the joys and benefits of sharing and helping others). The Tao Te Ching, like Aristotle, always appeals to empirical observations that the reader can independently verify (though sometimes, made-up-myths), and always relates the motivation to be moral to the individual’s own wellbeing. Things just go better for you when you are moral. And this can be confirmed by observing what happens to people, and to you, not just materially, but psychologically—your inner state of contentment, vs. rage, emptiness, and disappointment.

And yet, unlike Buddhism, Taoism makes fewer (not none; but fewer) hyperbolic claims of supernatural forces ensuring a just world. Though Taoism imagines “the Tao” ensures that something like Buddha’s “karma” operates in the universe (and bases conclusions on false empirical claims, such as that wild animals won’t eat human babies), what the core Taoist texts at least have in mind is more the observable causal reality of human psychology and society, rather than magic. In this respect it is more like Stoicism, which held that one’s attitude toward the injustices that befall you is more important than expecting the world to be just. One common theme across the entire Tao Te Ching is that expectation is the origin of all disappointment. Contentment, satisfaction—Aristotle’s eudaimonia—literally consists of reducing disappointment; and thus, reducing expectations; or moving them toward eminently more achievable things (e.g. it’s easier to change your attitude toward the world than to change the world itself; easier to choose your friends than to expect just anyone to be friendly; etc.). By contrast, Buddhism starts with a similar insight, but then tries to instruct people to have no expectations at all, which is actually self-destructive if actually realized; and impossible anyway.

Hektor Yan in “A Paradox of Virtue: The Daodejing on Virtue and Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 59.2 (2009), argues that Taoism, like Confucianism, simply assumes a baseline goodness in human beings that people should just sit back and “let happen,” like being childlike in one’s interactions, such that you will be a good person without thinking about it, because the idea of acting any other way doesn’t even occur to you. As Stanza 38 of the Tao Te Ching famously has it (Henricks):

The highest virtue is not [being] virtuous; therefore it truly [exhibits] virtue.
The lowest virtue never loses sight of of its virtue; therefore it has no true virtue.

The highest virtue takes no action; yet it has no reason for acting this way.
The highest humanity takes action; yet it has no reason for acting this way.
The highest righteousness takes action; and it has its reasons for acting this way.
The highest propriety takes action, and when no one responds to it, then it angrily rolls up its sleeves and forces people to comply.

Therefore, when the Way [i.e. the Tao] is lost, only then do we have “virtue.”
When virtue is lost, only then do we have “humanity.”
When humanity is lost, only then do we have “righteousness.”
And when [even] righteousness is lost, only then do we have “propriety.”

As for “propriety,” it’s but the thin edge of loyalty and sincerity, and the beginning of disorder.
And foreknowledge [i.e. thinking ahead] is but the flower of the Way, and the beginning of stupidity.

Therefore the Great Man
Dwells in the thick, [not] the thin;
Dwells in the fruit, not the flower.
Therefore, he rejects that, and takes this.

The idea Yan thinks this conveys is some sense of innate virtue in people, that they would enact if they stopped “trying to be virtuous” and just acted naturally. I don’t think so. Not quite anyway. Personally, I think what the text means to convey here is that it is better to obtain the habituation needed to act well without thinking; exactly the same idea had by Aristotle. This is why the whole Tao Te Ching repeatedly speaks of effort, the effort to find one’s way to the Tao and act in accord with it. It is clear the author sees acting out of convention or social expectation as the “natural” way of people; but does agree that this is “unnatural” insofar as people still have to learn to be this way. The mission of the sage, therefore, is to un-learn all this, and realign themselves with the Tao (the “Way”). That still takes effort and guidance; which is itself its own kind of “learning.”

As with the common metaphor that Taoist texts use of acting like water (e.g. bending around and wearing down obstacles rather than trying to punch through them), this is still something that has to be learned. The Taoist does imagine this as learning to get back in touch with a universal, ultimately natural truth of the world (a supernatural component); but it pragmatically understands that it takes a while to get back there. Which still leaves the question of, “Why do you even want to?” And the reason, always, is, “You’ll achieve all your own goals better that way,” and when one asks how that can be when acting this way often entails outright abandoning some of those goals, the answer, always, is, “When you think about all the goals you could achieve, when you have to pick one over another, the ones that bring you more contentment will win out over those that bring you less.” The rest (supposedly) follows.

The idea is that everyone who really thinks about it, really understands the truth about themselves and the world, if they must choose, will rather be poor and content than rich and discontent. What, after all, is even the point of wealth if it brings you less joy, and more psychological ills, than being of more modest means, but making wiser choices? Taoists may have had many wrong ideas about what actually works, what actually contents, and so on. Their radical communism, pacifism, holism, praise of ignorance. But their underlying idea is shared across much of Western and Eastern philosophy: the reason you care is ultimately going to be because life is better for you—more meaningful, more satisfying—than taking some other path instead. Which means you can ascertain what is moral by ascertaining what behaviors do indeed have that statistically improved effect over the course of a life.

Thus, Stanza 38 we can tell shows awareness that mere propriety (trying to force people to follow some arbitrary cultural rule “just because”) is the beginning of disorder, of discontent, of the unraveling of family, friends, society. Propriety is bad because it produces a bad outcome. But more particularly, it fails to procure the outcome the enactor of propriety thinks it will. They think this is how you produce an orderly society. In fact, it produces rebellion and chaos. It multiples dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction, the thing everyone really would want the most if they thought enough about it. Up the ladder away from this brink of chaos we meet with “righteousness,” which is only barely better than propriety, insofar as it thinks it is acting for good reasons, that what it is doing is “right” in some sense more substantive than merely “following the rules,” that what it does can be philosophically justified. But it still acts in disregard of humanity, of empathy and compassion—like the “rational” man who feels “justified” in whatever they do, but still isn’t doing it out of any sense of empathy for others. Above that is the one who does indeed act out of a natural empathy and compassion, and doesn’t have to think about it, doesn’t have to justify it to themselves; but is still acting on rough impulse and perhaps not always as they ought. Next up is the person who can do that but also understand there is more to right action than mere empathy, that there are many virtues that have to be blended into a harmonious action, and acts accordingly. But at the top is someone who also has a full grasp of what the virtuous thing to do is, but doesn’t have to think about it. They just know.

This is the concept of wu-wei and it’s hard to explain to Western minds, because it doesn’t literally mean “doing nothing.” It more correctly means something like unthinking action, effortless or intuitive action. Taoism is a form of noncognitive moral intuitionism in this respect. An example often given is someone trying to ride a bicycle; and someone riding a bicycle. The latter just intuitively knows the right things to do, does them effortlessly, and the bicycle becomes an extension of their body. They are not “doing nothing,” but at the same time they are not “trying to do something.” The moral exemplar, then, is someone who doesn’t have to run some virtue calculations to determine the right thing to do; they just automatically know what the right thing to do is, and just do it, without angst, doubt, or difficulty. The goal, then, is to get to that state. Why? Because it’s easier and less self-defeating.

As Aristotle put it, you can’t just “choose” to be virtuous; someone who is trying to “act virtuously” is not really virtuous and as such will inevitably stumble, fail, succumb to corruption, get it wrong—and never be properly content. Whereas once you have habituated virtues within yourself (which takes time and effort), then they no longer have to “try” to be virtuous. They just are. Because they like being that way. It makes them feel good about themselves; it is fulfilling. It’s not something they have to grumble about, or treat like a duty or a sacrifice. It’s simply acting as they want the world to act; being the world they want to live in. The Tao Te Ching has a notion that even if someone is no longer “trying to be virtuous,” they might at least act on natural compassion, ignorantly but at least out of a concern for others. But someone who has fallen even farther than that becomes the “righteous” person, who is just one step above the worst a person can be; and all because, as you descend this ladder (as many other stanzas explain), you will be fucking things up more than making them better. You will be acting against your own real interests, leading your life (and the world) into trouble, disorder, and discontent.

Taoism is also aware of social reciprocity (your own bad decisions can lead to wars and conflicts and crime, and thus a worse environment for you to live in) as a moral motivation; but it still emphasizes inner conscience as the greatest moral motivator. You will be a more contented person, with whatever life throws at you, if you cultivate yourself to habitually be a moral person—not someone who “reasons out” what the moral thing to do is, but who simply just enjoys doing the moral thing, like someone enjoying the harmony of simply riding a bicycle without having to think about it. This person will be the best off of all possible persons any one person can be in the same circumstances. So one should want to become that person; and therefore take the steps and efforts to get there. This probably will involve questioning and abandoning many cultural assumptions (“propriety”); will definitely require abandoning any desire to be moral out of arrogance or pride (“righteousness”); and will even require building something more than (but still including) just “natural empathy” as your guide to what’s best. But ultimately, it will require changing your attitudes, about yourself and the world and your wants and needs—until being virtuous literally is like riding a bike: easy to do, and a source of joy.

In the end, this means “Why be moral?” is answered by the Taoist with “Because, cereris paribus, you’ll be happier when you are.” How that comes to be involves a lot more than just “forcing yourself” to be moral or just trying to transactionally trade “moral behavior” for “better outcomes” like some sort of vending machine. Because it doesn’t work that way. The closer you get to being moral because you like it—and like it for reasons of humanity and love of virtue, and not arrogance or pride or station or praise—the more it will be true that “being moral” leads you to greater contentment with yourself and life. Add to this the social-reciprocal effects as well, and the rationale is complete: the world will respond to you better, and become a better, easier, less vexing place for you to live in; and even more so, the more who emulate you. Good people enjoy being who they are. They then enjoy being where they are, when in the company of good people.

The Confucian Tradition

Confucians taught much the same thing. Yong Huang in “Confucius and Mencius on the Motivation to Be Moral,” Philosophy East and West 60.1 (2010), points out that “for Confucians, one should be moral because it is a joyful thing to be moral” (p. 66); but since one can obtain “joy” doing immoral things as well, this leaves a question still to be answered:

[W]hy should I seek joy in doing moral things rather than in doing non-moral or even immoral things as well as in doing moral things. The Confucian answer to this question is surprisingly simple: to be moral is a distinctive mark of being human. In other words, if one seeks joy in doing immoral things, one is no longer distinguishable from beasts. Of course, if the person is still not motivated to be moral and prefers being a beast to being a human, then Confucianism indeed does not have any further answer, except to say, as Mencius does, that this person must be stupid.

I think it’s important to clarify that what Confucius meant by, and Huang translates into English as, “joy” won’t necessarily correspond to how you understand and employ that word. Just as Aristotle’s complex notion of eudaimonia gets translated often as “happiness,” leading to all manner of misunderstandings of what he actually said and meant and the merits of his entire resulting moral philosophy (see Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). That Greek word means something more like “of good spirit” or “well-souled,” and in practice more closely corresponds to the English word “satisfaction” (or “contentment,” “fulfillment”) than “happiness.” It has an emotional component (feeling emotionally well; feeling right with yourself), but doesn’t correspond simply with what we usually mean by pleasure or “joy.” The word Confucius used was similarly valenced. And this is important to the last point cited from Mencius: why it is stupid to not want this.

The Confucian insight is similar to that of many Western philosophers, including Immanuel Kant: that even the most hardened scoundrel, in moments of self-candor, secretly wishes he could be a man of better spirit. This is not quite true; but it is close to true. Those committed to being monsters rather than human beings definitely have been established to have some of the most disturbed and discontented minds—paranoid, angry, mean, disappointed, dissatisfied, bitter—or just empty, devoid of the more satisfying and profound joys available to people (of real love, true friendship, and genuine, not deluded, self-respect). This is what Confucius means by the “joy” of being a genuinely virtuous person; which is the same thing meant by the Taoists by their notion of righted-mind or tranquility. Once you’ve journeyed down that road and reached that destination, becoming such a person in heart and character, then being moral becomes its own reward. You like yourself, genuinely and honestly and informedly, in a way you shall never have known before. You are content with who you are as a person. You have escaped cognitive dissonance not by taking the path of delusion, but the path of accepting what’s true, and changing what you don’t like, rather than pretending you don’t need to.

As Mencius wrote (Mengzi 2A6):

Imagine now a person who, all of a sudden, sees a small child on the verge of falling down into a well. Any such person would experience a sudden sense of fright and dismay. This feeling would not be something he summoned up in order to establish good relations with the child’s parents. He would not purposefully feel this way in order to win the praise of their friends and neighbors. Nor would he feel this way because the screams of the child would be unpleasant.

Thus describing a normal person; but we well know many a sociopath exists for whom the reverse would be true. Mencius regarded any such persons, who lack innate compassion for others, as fundamentally “inhuman.” As he puts it:

[I]magining this situation we can see that one who lacked a sense of dismayed commiseration in such a case simply could not be a person. Moreover, anyone who lacks the sense of shame cannot be a person; anyone who lacks a sense of deference cannot be a person; anyone who lacks a sense of right and wrong cannot be a person.

The sense of commiseration is the seed of humanity, the sense of shame is the seed of righteousness, the sense of deference is the seed of ritual, and the sense of right and wrong is the seed of wisdom. Everyone possesses these four moral senses just as they possess their four limbs; … if only we realize that we need to extend and fulfill them, then the force of these senses will burst through us like a wildfire first catching or a spring first bursting forth through the ground. If a person can bring these impulses to fulfillment, they will be adequate to bring all the four quarters under his protection. But if a person fails to develop these senses, he will fail even to serve his own.

As we can see, there are already some obvious disagreements with the Taoists as to what the moral thing is (e.g. here, righteousness is a virtue rather than a vice); but there is agreement as to why we ought to be moral: one “will fail even to serve his own” interests otherwise. Mencius thinks these seeds are in everyone and can be cultivated, grown out, with habituation (a la Aristotle); though we now know there are some exceptions (sociopaths appear to be incurably insane). But even those exceptions could have been drawn out to prove the rule. Not only because it remains true that the sociopath is actually at war with their community; and really, it is only a matter of time before their community figures that out—and responds accordingly. But on top of that as well is the Confucian psychological point: the sociopath is depriving themselves of the joy of a moral life. Which some psychologists have gotten sociopaths to admit to, in unusual moments of candor. They, too, wish they could experience the joys of compassion—and instead become resentful of good persons, for all the goods they enjoy that the sociopath’s insanity deprives them of. This is why they often remain empty monsters.

When Confucius says “to know it is not as good as to like it; and to like it is not as good as to find joy in it” (Analects 6.20) he is clarifying that it is possible to know what is moral but not yet even like it (the person who finds morality constraining; it gets in their way), and also it is possible to like it (for example, to realize the world would be better if everyone acted that way, and to appreciate and “like” people who so act) but not yet fully realize it in oneself. Once one gets to that place, then the moral is not merely something someone merely “likes,” but something they genuinely love. They feel good being moral. And not only because of its external benefits (people like you more; you get better treatment; you get to live in a better social environment), though those obtain as well, but because you like yourself, the person you become when you act that way. You become the sort of person you like. This is the Confucian “joy” of which they speak. We might call it a genuinely realized (as opposed to delusional) self-respect.

And this is realized by Aristotelian habituation, just as we saw for Taoism: as Huang explains, in his metaethical system Confucius likens moral virtue, once fully cultivated, to dancing to music, such that “one performs moral actions in the same way as one dances to music: everything is natural and spontaneous, and one does not feel the slightest bit of force or hesitation” (p. 70). This actually accords with what modern science has found (see The Moral Development of the Child: An Integrated Model by Hing Keung Ma and Why Be Moral? A Conceptual Model from Developmental Psychology by Roger Bergman): as one matures, from the mind of a child to the mind of an adult (though some, we now know, get frozen at a childish stage), one’s understanding of morality moves from selfish reactionism (you are good only when people punish you or don’t reward you), to reciprocal altruism (you are good because it gets you things you want, like love, companionship, and conflict-reduction), to self-realization (you are good because it is the sort of person you want to be; you build your self-identity on your conception of what is good and why).

As Hing Keung Ma found in his studies, typical thinking at that final stage produces statements like, “To maintain the family harmony depends on mutual respect. Otherwise if we don’t have affection, we won’t be happy and we won’t have sense of belonging.” Here we have a direct reference to contentment as the ultimate overriding goal that supersedes all other interests: the moral is that which will more likely make us “happy” and meet psychological needs such as a “sense of belonging,” the direct implication of which is that it would be painfully dissatisfying to lack a sense of belonging; that is why it is so important. One might debate the causal claim (does “maintaining family harmony” actually reliably have that effect?); but the relevant observation here is the axial claim: it’s the same as philosophers East and West have found fundamental to answering the question “Why be moral?” People see the moral agent’s own self-contentment, feeling right by themselves—satisfaction with oneself and with life—as the most important goal overriding all others, and thus entailing imperatives overriding all others, which is by definition “morality” (that which we ought to do “above all else”).

And a typically-matured mind will see satisfying their own empathy as fundamental to this measure: real contentment with ourselves cannot be achieved if we know we are the unnecessary cause of others’ suffering. For example, as Ma records, we get statements like, “Seeing relatives, friends, and strangers die, you would feel sorrowful and miserable in your heart. But seeing relatives die is the most sorrowful; friends, less so; strangers, just a little bit uncomfortable,” and therefore if we have to choose whom to save, we ought to act along that same hierarchy (even more so at even more mature stages of moral reasoning, when “one’s esteem is derived from an individualistic and autonomous self, independent of one’s primary group,” i.e. how you feel about yourself, and not just in light of your social in-group). Again, one can debate the causal claim (is that hierarchy of moral concern valid?); but the fundamental claim is the same: how it feels owing to one’s empathic relationships with others affects how we manage threats to our contentment and satisfaction-states. Moral intuitions arise therefrom.

It is thus that Confucius argues that the fully-realized moral reasoner—the “fully-wise”—will “seek to do good as if there is no time left, and avoid doing evil as avoiding touching boiling water” (Analects 16.11). It would be repugnant to their person to become the sort of person who would do evil at all; whereas it is joyously natural to them to do good, as they want nothing more. Not everyone reaches this stage, which is why we have “law” and “moral rules” and rely on “innate humanity” in others to motivate them to do the right thing. But the same reasons as warrant “following the rules” (if such they should be followed) and “acting out of your basic humanity” (if such is what you’d be doing) also warrant cultivating yourself into becoming a naturally moral person, someone who is honest, compassionate, and reasonable to the very core of their being, their very sense of who they are and want to be. Because the best benefits of being moral (the greatest levels of contentment and life satisfaction) accrue to someone in that state. It’s the best place to be. So why not endeavor to get yourself there?

Of course, famously, Confucius taught that he himself didn’t get there until he was seventy years old (Analects 2.4). But that even illustrates the adage, “It’s never too late to start.” Because, as Mencius explains, this represents a state of enlightenment everyone will benefit from achieving. “Life is what I want. But there is something I want more than life. Death is what I hate. But there is something I hate more than death.” (Mengzi 6A10) Anyone who thinks otherwise is in some measure craven, blind to a full grasp of reality, and cut off from much of what makes life worth living, like the victims chained to face the wall all their lives in Plato’s Cave. Life cannot be lived, if you cannot live with yourself; and death is nothing, if surviving would be worse. Notice the entirely secular logic. There is no appeal here to imaginary rewards in heaven or some imagined punishment in hell; there is no notion that doing right will help you live forever. To the contrary, in those extreme of cases, doing right is even more important than living at all. Christians have a lot to learn from these guys.

As Yong Huang describes ancient Confucian moral theory (p. 80):

[A] virtuous person acts entirely for the sake of one’s true self and so is completely egoistic; however, this is only because the virtuous person defines his or her true self as one concerned with the interests of others and so is entirely altruistic. It is [therefore] not correct to say that the virtuous person is primarily an “egoist” because he or she takes care of the interests of others only as a means to serve the interest of his or her own true self, just as it is not correct to say that the virtuous person is primarily an altruist because he or she takes care of his or her true self only as a way to serve others.

In this “Confucian altruistic egoism” one “can fully develop one’s great ego or self only by overcoming one’s small ego or self” (p. 81). But the reason one would want to do this—and do it above all else even—is that if you knew what, ceteris paribus, you would be like, and what your life would be like, and what your emotional state would more often become, as a genuinely moral person (e.g. compassionate, honest, reasonable), you would agree no better path is available to you. You would obtain Confucian joy—Aristotelian eudaimonia—in greater measure; and this would make life better and more meaningful for you, in a way not having this, but instead obtaining only money or power, won’t. Yes, it is your own self-interest here; but it is a self-interest that requires you to become unselfish in your attitude toward life and the world, and to build something out of yourself that you can actually respect sans delusion—to become, and enjoy being, fully human, rather than a beast, pest, or monster.

Not all Confucians assumed human nature was naturally good (so that sociopaths had to be just “stupid”). Hsün Tzu famously wrote an essay that “Human Nature Is Evil” (Watson). But he then argues moral norms are discovered over centuries through hypothesis and experiment until those behaviors are found that best conduce to a good society; and humans are then taught it. And all that comes from the fact that everyone can observe what world they’d rather live in and thus easily ascertain that “that which is upright [i.e. “just and fair”], reasonable, and orderly” is good and “that which is prejudiced, irresponsible, and chaotic [i.e. dysfunctional]” is bad. And so one aspires to overcome one’s bad nature to become good, so as to establish themselves as people to be liked rather than loathed, especially by themselves. Though human nature is innately evil, “Any man on the street has the essential faculties needed to understand benevolence, righteousness, and proper standards, and the potential ability to put them into practice.” Hsün then elaborates a theory of habituated virtue similar to Aristotle’s.

Hsün Tzu concludes that essay with the sociological observation that men will long to be good when presented with historical examples of good men, and associate and interact with such men; implying they will aspire to their standard through admiration and acquaintance. But we have a more explicit declaration of this moral psychological concept in his essay “Improving Yourself,” which describes a Golden Mean standard of virtue again similar to Aristotle’s, and even opens with a statement of how seeing good and evil in others spurs self-reflection, resulting in self-approval or self-loathing accordingly. He also mentions social reciprocity (e.g. cultivating yourself as a bad man will lead to bad ends; whereas good men will find friends the world over), and describes immoral men as therefore fundamentally “stupid.” But his overall practice is to illustrate why bad behavior is disreputable, and thus remind his readers how they already have a distaste for such people, disinclining them to become one.

The Mohist Tradition

One of the lesser known schools competing with the Confucians and Taoists were the Mohists, begun by Mo Tzu in the 5th century B.C., who wrote of what I’m talking about in his essay on “Universal Love” (Watson), opening with the very point that when we look at what makes the world awful (when such it is), it tends to be humans acting on partiality, hatred, and a desire to harm; rather than universality, love, and a desire to help. “Therefore” we all know what is bad; and what is good. All we need then admit is that if we take up in ourselves what is bad, we ourselves are bad; and anyone who fully realizes this of themselves will be ashamed—because they will loathe themselves as much as any like them. Conversely, if we take up in ourselves what is instead good, we ourselves are then good; and anyone who fully realizes this of themselves will be pleased—because they will love themselves as much as any like them.

In developing this point, Mo Tzu spans his entire essay into an extended treatise on the Golden Rule: why each of us doing unto others as we would have them do unto us actually would end all the evils we loathe in the world; so the path toward that outcome is plain to all but the fool (and immoral people are therefore fools). For example, Mo Tzu taught:

The believer in partiality says, “How could I possibly regard my friend the same as myself, or my friend’s father the same as my own?” Because he views his friend in this way, he will not feed him when he is hungry, clothe him when he is cold, nourish him when he is sick, or bury him when he dies. Such are the words of the partial man, and such his actions. But the words and actions of the universal-minded man are not like these. He will say, “I have heard that the truly superior man of the world regards his friend the same as himself, and his friend’s father the same as his own. Only if he does this can he be considered a truly superior man.” Because he views his friend in this way, he will feed him when he is hungry, clothe him when he is cold, nourish him when he is sick, and bury him when he dies. Such are the words and actions of the universal-minded man.

And Mo Tzu makes clear he does not mean parochially only aiding one’s friends; he imagines a society of truly universal aid and benefit, with public support for the poor, the orphaned, and the disabled as one of its fundamental outcomes. And he does appear to understand the psychological motive, not just the reciprocal motive (though he clearly establishes that as well), for adopting his moral ideals: he argues that everyone depends on and prefers the universal man over the partial man, when they must choose between them as friends, allies, neighbors, citizens, and rulers; thus everyone knows who really is the good and who really is the bad man. His attempts to shame partial men into admitting they really cannot think as well of themselves as they do the universal man illustrate a recognition of internal moral motivation. Though Mohism speaks much of a divine order we ought follow, it always defends the morals it commands independently as good through appeals to the opinion of the people. In other words, per the Stanford Encyclopedia, “What is righteous is not righteous because Heaven intends it. Rather, Heaven intends it because it is righteous.”

The Mohist criterion unified what came to be a principle of Western Utilitarians, insofar as that which is empirically observed to produce a good society we’d all like to live in, is moral, with the principle of the Kantians, insofar as Mohists recommended behaviors that if universalized would produce a good society (and condemned behaviors that if universalized would lead to an undesirable world). And therefore, even though they relied on a fundamentally supernaturalist premise about what God (or “Heaven,” as a kind of vegetable spirit similar to the Tao) “wants” or “teaches” people to do, their approach was thoroughly empirical: only what we observe to work can be what “Heaven” intends us to emulate. We saw this same methodological assumption in the Taoists—and even more so the Confucians.

The Western idea of “Commandments on Tablets” that you are just “supposed to follow” because “God said so” and for no other clear or credible reason simply didn’t exist in ancient China. Morality for them was entirely a humanist project of evidence and reason. This doesn’t mean they didn’t have stubborn traditions and bad ideas about what actually helped or hurt social order. But they did believe you could not critique them or improve on them or even defend them without appeal to reliable evidence as to what ensured a good society—which meant, a society all people were pleased (rather than loathe) to live in, given the choice (and much of their reasoning indeed posits hypothetical alternative social orders in order to argue their inadequacy by this criterion).

Conclusion

The people of ancient China in general appear to have held to Just World views whereby Heaven supposedly always rewarded the good and punished the wicked; but these popular notions were often debunked (most notably in two essays by the most famed Confucian of the Han Dynasty, Wang Ch’ung), and were never a component of the major schools of philosophy. For them moral motivation was always sociological (reciprocal social effects; the role of organizing the law) and psychological (appealing to one’s own personal self-image, self-respect, and emotional life-fulfillment). This tracks exactly the same findings of most Western philosophers.

We see this especially in the Aristotelian tradition, but we’ve seen close parallels to the Stoics as well (with near similarities to the Epicureans, though the major Chinese thinkers never came up with anything as explicit as their social contract theory). Mill, Kant, Hume, Foot all define the most influential influential trends in moral philosophy today, and they all articulated something very similar to the Confucian meta-ethical ideal: Foot, we act on a system of hypothetical imperatives grounded in the management of personal emotional wellbeing (our “natural humanity”); Hume, we act according to how actions make us feel when we realize their total significance (such as, causing distress or harm); Kant, each person acts on their desire to experience a “greater inner worth of [their] own person”; and Mill never clearly articulated a motive to be moral, but implied it was a sympathy for the wellbeing of others, and thus, again, an inner psychological motive.

All of these reflect variations of the Taoist “contentment” and Confucian “joy” and Mohist “universalized feeling of approval” (all in different ways a close parallel to the Aristotelian eudaimonia) as the ultimate reason to be moral: once you achieve a sound moral mindset, then being moral is satisfying and enjoyable in a particular way that those who experience it prefer to all other sustained joys in life, and indeed determining what is moral hinges very much on that very metric. Likewise being immoral is dissatisfying and uncomfortable in a particular way all would prefer to avoid—if they didn’t delusionally convince themselves that they were acting morally or righteously instead. Even the Mohists implied that if “partialists” really realized what they look like in society, they’d prefer to be “universalists” instead.

Likewise all of these schools included social-reciprocal consequences to the category of moral motivation, as did the Confucians, Taoists, and especially Mohists; and in this respect reflecting indirectly the parallel contribution of Thomas Hobbes and other social contract theorists: Foot, our personal emotional wellbeing is partially mediated by the social consequences of our behavior; Hume, our moral sentiments are activated by observing (or hypothetically contemplating) the social consequences of our behavior; Kant, we can only determine to be moral that which we can will to be a universal rule, which can only be determined by reflection on the social consequences of doing that (including back again upon ourselves); and Mill never clearly articulated anything about this either, but often implied support of something like a Hobbesian social-contract (and hence social-consequences) motivation for realizing his utilitarian ethic.

That all philosophy, West and East, has been converging on a common shared understanding of how we answer the “Why be moral?” question (as well as on the “What is moral?” question, as it happens) is evidence they are converging on a correct conclusion in the matter. Especially given that they began doing this even when entirely independent of each other: the ancient Chinese philosophers composed coincidentally around exactly the same time as the Greco-Roman philosophers who laid the foundations for subsequent Western thought; and Chinese knowledge of Western culture only began in the late Han, well after all these texts were written (and there is no evidence that earliest contact consisted of much in the way of philosophy anyway). And even Western philosophy has now built on core contributions by Hobbes, Kant, and Hume that are very unlikely to have had any contact (and thus any influence) from China at the time, and thus were still operating independently of it.

There are slight variations in how all these philosophers, East and West, exactly articulate each of the two components of moral motivation. They all get at the idea of social consequences on the agent as a motivation to be moral from different angles and with different examples, and explain the significance of this in different ways; but it is clear all are feeling their way around the same elephant. Likewise, they all get at the idea of inner psychological motivation (conscience, joy, eudaimonia, self-worth, moral sentimentality) from different angles and with different examples, and explain the significance of this in different ways; but it is again clear all are feeling their way around the same elephant on this matter also.

These philosophers, West and East, all have arrived at the same similar sense that a fully cognizant person will find personal satisfaction in being moral (and dissatisfaction in being immoral) sufficient to motivate them; and that the only reason anyone is immoral is that they have failed to arrive at this cognitive understanding. The foolish, paranoid, and bitter rich man does not comprehend how much more content and fulfilled he’d be in a different attitudinal state, much as Dickens fictionalized for Scrooge. He labors under the false belief in the reverse; or in total ignorance of the fact. And so, too, all other villains—even sociopaths, who but for their incurable mental disorder could realize this as well.