The Trouble with Agent-Focused Moral Realism: On Huang Yong's Construal of ZHU Xi's Moral Realism

The Trouble with Agent-Focused Moral Realism: On Huang Yong’s Construal of ZHU Xi’s Moral Realism JeeLoo Liu In “Agent-Focused Moral Realism: ZHU Xi’s Virtue Ethics Approach to Meta-Ethics,” Yong Huang presents a novel construal of a form of moral realism, which he terms “agent-focused” moral realism. He characterizes ZHU Xi’s virtue ethics as agent-focused moral realism; furthermore, he argues that it is a form of naturalistic moral realism. Huang gives a carefully defended construal of ZHU Xi’s moral realism, arguing that it can defeat four major challenges that other forms of moral realism have difficulty facing: Hume’s IS/OUGHT challenge, Moore’s Open Question challenge, Mackie’s Queer challenge, and Mackie’s argument from relativity. In this response piece, I will walk through Huang’s definition of ‘agent-focused moral realism’ as well as his arguments for this view, to see if such a form of moral realism can truly be successful as a form of naturalistic moral realism. My aim in this paper is not to engage in textual interpretation of ZHU Xi, but to examine whether ZHU Xi’s virtue ethics, as Huang interprets it, could defeat the existing challenges to other versions of moral realism and thereby emerges as a viable form of moral realism. Action-Focused Moral Realism vs. Agent-Focused Moral Realism To begin with, Huang gives a generic depiction of “moral realism”: “Moral realism is normally considered to consist of two theses: (1) (a) moral propositions can be true or false, and (b) at least some of them are true, and (2) their truth depends upon moral properties or facts that are mind-independent in a relevant sense” (p. 1). This description supplements the standard definition of ‘moral realism,’ according to which moral realism is a “metaphysical thesis about the nature and status of morality and moral claims,” and moral realism “is committed to moral facts and truths that are objective in some way” (Brink 1989: 14). The troubling term here is “objectivity”: in what sense is a fact objective? It is generally accepted (even among moral realists) that facts of natural sciences are objective: “these disciplines study real objects and events whose existence and nature are largely independent of our theorizing about them, that they exhibit progress and convergence over time, and that they contain some at least approximate 2 knowledge” (Brink 1989: 6). David Brink surmises that most cognitivist moral realists “believed that ethics does or can possess these marks of objectivity” (Ibid.). However, I think even the most robust moral realists could hardly claim that moral facts can be ascertained in a similarly scientific manner or would want to use the same criteria to establish the objectivity of moral facts. Huang takes the demand for “objectivity” to consist in the request for “mind-independence in a relevant sense.” His aim in defending ZHU Xi’s version of moral realism thus focuses on arguing for the mind-independence of moral facts and moral properties. Huang’s ingenuity is in giving separate considerations for the kinds of properties in question. If, according to him, the relevant moral properties are concerned with “the moral properties of rightness and wrongness of the action,” then it is a form of action-focused moral realism. If, on Huang’s construal if not his own innovative proposal, moral realism takes “moral properties of the goodness and badness of the agent as its primary concern,” then it is a form of agent-focused moral realism. Moreover, to both action-focused and agent-focused moral realism, the distinction between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic camps applies: “Within moral realism, … there are naturalistic moral realism, regarding moral properties and facts as natural properties and facts, and non-naturalistic moral realism, regarding them as non-natural properties and facts” (p.1). ZHU Xi’s moral realism, according to Huang, belongs to the naturalistic agentfocused camp. I wish to begin by unpacking these terms and examine what this “agent-focused moral realism” could bring to the table of the meta-ethical discourse. Consider the following statements: (1) Ethnic cleansing is evil. (2) Adolph Hitler was an evil person. (3) Helping someone in need is a kind act. (4) Mother Theresa was a kind person. For the sake of argument, I will assume that a moral realist would take all four propositions to be indisputably true. However, what are the relevant moral properties or facts that could render these statements “true”? Statements (1) and (3) concern the moral properties of an act or a state of affairs; statements (2) and (4) concern the moral properties of the agent. To assert the truth of (1) or (3), we are positing a moral property “is evil” or “is kind” in varieties of human actions; to 3 assert the truth of (2) or (4), we are positing the moral property “is an evil person” or “is a kind person” among types of human agents. By distinguishing “action-focused” and “agent-focused” moral realism and advocating the latter over the former, Huang seems to assume that there is a clearer and more objective demarcation of the moral reality consisting of good people than the moral reality consisting of moral actions. His defense of agent-focused moral realism does seem to support this interpretation: “When John Mackie claims that moral properties are queer, he directs his criticism mainly to action-focused moral realism, which is primarily concerned with the objectivity of moral properties of right and wrong of an action. Whether moral realists of this brand can show such properties are not queer is not my concern here. As a matter of fact, I think it is very difficult for them to do so, and this is the main reason I turn to the agent-focused moral realism in this essay. The moral properties that this brand of moral realism is concerned with are good and bad of an agent or, rather, of a person. Metaphysically, these two properties are natural properties and thus are not queer” (p. 31). In other words, Huang thinks that whereas we would have genuine moral disagreements on whether an act is right or wrong, we nonetheless do have universal, objective knowledge of whether an agent is good or evil. I do not find this shift of attention away from moral properties of rightness and wrongness of actions to goodness and badness of people helpful. For one thing, this form of moral realism does not have anything to contribute to settling genuine moral disputes. Let us consider the following more contentiously alleged moral truths from a deontologist or a consequentialist perspective: (5) Abortion is immoral. (6) Killing animals to eat their meat is immoral. (7) Torturing enemies to extract useful military information is good. (8) Bombing a building with dangerous terrorists and a handful of kidnapped innocent people inside is morally acceptable. There is no line between moral reality and immoral reality carved at nature’s joints for us to judge whether these statements express moral truths or moral falsehoods. The moral disagreements will remain “intractable,” as Huang puts it, and we will always be struggling with a moral realist’s conviction that our proposition is objectively true. Huang characterizes this 4 difficulty in terms of John Mackie’s “argument from relativity” and Gilbert Harman’s anti-realist challenge against moral realism: “In their view, such disagreements in moral judgments ‘make it very difficult to treat those judgements as apprehensions of objective truths’ (Mackie 1990: 36)” (p. 6). Huang has gladly conceded this point, since this is exactly the reason why he abandons naturalistic action-focused moral realism. He suggests that virtue ethicists could simply embrace these moral dilemmas: “A virtuous person, just like anyone else, can only choose to do one of them, and two equally virtuous persons may make two different choices. Here a virtuous person is virtuous not because of the course of action she takes but because of what Rosalind Hursthouse calls moral residue when they act: their action is accompanied by some feelings of regret, guilt, remorse or some other negative feeling as well as desires to make some compensations afterwards, if possible, for the party harmed or unhelped (see Hursthouse 1999: 75-77)” (p. 33). However, this response of his is turning a “meta-ethical” question about how to assess the objective truth of moral propositions, to a “normative ethical” question about how a moral agent should act. These are different concerns, and the latter cannot help with the former. We still don’t have a way to assess the objectivity of our moral convictions. Furthermore, this muddled distinction between moral and immoral acts in cases of moral dilemma will not stop here. If we do indeed have a clear demarcation between moral agents and immoral agents carved at nature’s joints (to be examined later), are we to place every action that a moral agent does into the moral realm, and every action that an immoral agent does into the immoral realm? If not, then we cannot simply dismiss the call for an objective moral judgment on actions themselves. If a virtuous agent could occasionally make the wrong moral judgment or take the wrong action, then don’t we still need to judge them case-by-case or action-by-action? That is to say, to have goodness established “as a moral property of an agent” does not release moral realists from their continuing quest for ascertaining objective action-focused moral claims. Therefore, agent-focused moral realism simply does not help with the old debate. Another problem I see in Huang’s agent-focused moral realism is how it can meet his second criterion of “moral realism”: “their truth depends upon moral properties or facts that are mind-independent in a relevant sense.” In what sense are these properties “mind-independent”? Being “mind-independent” for a generic moral realist means being “response-independent”: the moral properties are not dependent on the way we think. Earlier we have separated our considerations for (1) moral properties of the rightness and wrongness of actions and (2) moral 5 properties of the goodness and badness of agents. Granted, Huang’s focus is on the second set of moral properties, for whose objectivity he has built a sophisticated argumentation on behalf of Zhu Xi. But here our focus is on the first set of moral properties—the rightness and wrongness of actions. As I see it, Huang has two options: For one, he could throw in his hand, and declares that there is no objectivity in moral judgments on the rightness and wrongness of actions. So his agent-focused moral realist is not a moral realist when it comes to moral judgments on actions or states of affairs. This brand of moral realism is hardly satisfactory. His second option is to build action-focused moral realism on agent-focused moral realism: he can argue that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by virtuous moral agents’ opinions. Huang can claim that virtuous moral agents would make similarly morally warranted judgments, even if they have minor disagreements. Just as virtue ethics defines “good” and “moral” of an action as “what a virtuous moral agent would do under the given circumstances,” virtue meta-ethics (introduced by Huang) could also define “right” and “true” of a moral judgment as “what a virtuous moral agent would endorse as moral properties under the given circumstances.” However, here is the rub: if the truths of moral judgments, or the moral properties that render these statements true, are derived from virtuous moral agents’ approval, then they are dependent of these virtuous moral agents’ “responses.” Even if we could establish a sense of objectivity built on intersubjectivity – unanimous agreement among virtuous agents on what moral properties are, we can hardly profess that these properties are “mind-independent” or “naturalistic.” If moral properties are dependent on humans’ moral sensibility and virtuous agents’ actual responses, then they are not really in the world of nature, just as colors depend partially on our visual structure and our perceptual sensitivity and are not really in the objects themselves. So it is hard to accept Huang’s claim that this agent-focused meta-ethics is still naturalistic. Now I shall turn to Huang’s specific defense of ZHU Xi’s agent-focused virtue-ethical moral realism. The Objectivity of the Moral Property “Goodness in People” Huang writes, “Zhu Xi is also a moral realist, and he also takes a virtue ethics approach to moral realism. In other words, he is primarily concerned with the goodness of a person and not the rightness of action. So the central issue of virtue ethics is how to determine the goodness of a person, and the central issue of moral realism based on virtue ethics is how to determine the 6 objectivity of the goodness as a moral quality” (p. 14). Huang explains ZHU Xi’s view as identifying the evaluative term (“is good”) with the normative term (“what ought to be suodangran zhe 所當然者”). Furthermore, since “a good person is what a person ought to be,” and “one way to determine the objectivity of what a person ought to be is to show the objectivity of why a person ought to be such a person suoyiran zhe 所以然者” (p. 14). In a nutshell, we can formulate these relationships as follows: (i) What a good person is = what a person ought to be (ii) What a person ought to be = why a person ought to be such a person From these two we can derive (iii) What a good person is = why a person ought to be such a person In all three cases, ZHU Xi uses the word ‘li (principle 理)’, and Huang argues that this is how ZHU Xi could establish the objectivity of the goodness in humans. ZHU Xi’s Two Arguments for the Objectivity of Knowledge of the Goodness in Human Nature Huang says, “If Zhu Xi is a moral realist, he has to provide arguments to show that his conception of human nature is objective as well as normative. Indeed, Zhu Xi provides two interrelated and mutually supporting arguments” (p. 26). Huang presents two deductions as ZHU Xi’s “arguments” for the objectivity of our knowledge of the goodness in human nature. The first one is what Shuxian Liu 劉述先 calls “the method of seeking the origin from its current” (you liu suyuan 由流溯源) based on the following quote from ZHU Xi: [E]verything has its root. Although the principle of human nature is formless, what issues from it is perceivable. So from the feeling of commiseration we know that there must be benevolence, from the feeling of shame and dislike we know that there must be rightness, from the feeling of reverence, we know that there must be propriety, and from the feeling of approving and disapproving we know that there must be wisdom. If there is originally no principle inside, how can there be sprouts outside? From the sprouts issued outside, we can indisputably know that there must be principle inside” (Zhu 2002: 23.2779). (p. 19) 7 Here I would like to first point out the difference between ZHU Xi’s view of human nature and that of the founder of this view: Mencius. Even though ZHU Xi starts from the same empirical assumptions that Mencius posited: everyone has the feeling of commiseration, the feeling of shame and dislike, the feeling of reverence, and the feeling of approving and disapproving, he is making a radically different claim on human nature from Mencius’ assertion. Mencius claims that human nature is good, and the goodness lies in these feelings themselves, which Mencius calls “the four sprouts (si-duan 四端)” of virtue. For Mencius, the path of a moral agent is to expand these sprouts into virtues and to extend these feelings (especially of commiseration) from the loved ones to strangers. Mencius never claims that human nature is already endowed with the four virtues themselves. The biological analogy for Mencius would be from the buds (sprouts) to trees and branches. In contrast, the biological analogy for ZHU Xi is from the buds to their roots—from observing that people have these feelings, he deduced that the roots of these feelings must already be present in human nature. That is to say, ZHU Xi is not just reaffirming Mencius’ empirical claim about the sentimental makeup of the human heart. He is actually making a metaphysical claim about the moral essence (xing 性) of human beings: the virtues of humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom are already inherent in human nature as the principle of human nature. Since principle, which is meta-physical (xing-er-shang 形而上), is inherent in human nature, we can only deduce its presence from its manifestations in human feelings. I will reformulate Huang’s explanation of ZHU Xi’s deduction in the following format to examine the validity of this argumentation: 1. We cannot perceive human nature since it is beyond sense perception (meta-physical). 2. The four moral sentiments are “issued out” from human nature’s four virtues. 3. We can observe the four moral sentiments empirically. 4. If we can observe the currents, then we can track back and indirectly know their origin. 5. Therefore, we have indirect knowledge of human nature’s possessing the four virtues. 6. Therefore, we have objective knowledge of human nature’s possessing four virtues. (p. 20-21) 8 Huang appeals to ZHU Xi’s notion of “stimulation and response (ganying 感應)” to explain the feeling’s “being issued out from the human nature” (p. 20). But the connection between human nature and these moral sentiments is not at all clarified by these metaphors. If x logically issues out y, then without y there would be no x; but with y, there is not necessarily x. The deduction is similarly weak if “issuing out” is a causal relation: If x causes y, then y could still happen without x, since y could have been brought about by something else. Huang’s appeal to ZHU Xi’s “stimulation and response” seems to be taking the connection even weaker: “when there are things stimulating outside, there will be response from the inside” (p. 20). In other words, the responses (feelings) are the effects of the joint factors of human nature and external stimulation. In that case, even if x causes y, x could have occurred while y did not occur if the external stimulation z were different or absent. Huang claims, “From the above, we may conclude that, when Zhu Xi says that human nature possesses virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom, he is not merely making a normative claim that human beings ought to have such virtues but is also making an objective claim that there is indeed such a human nature” (p. 21). I do not think that ZHU Xi’s deduction provides any solid proof of the goodness in human nature, let alone an objective claim. ZHU Xi’s second argument introduced by Huang aims to defend the claim that “human nature is completely good or virtuous” (p. 21) against the contrary fact that there are many vile people. As Huang explains, “In Zhu Xi’s view, although all humans are born with virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom, they may still become unvirtuous or vicious for two reasons. One is that they are endowed with turbid qi, and the other is that they have selfish desires. However, they can still be made virtuous” (p. 24). The two possible explanations indicated here are very different in nature: one is about people’s inborn endowment of turbid qi; the other is about people’s developed selfish desires. Huang offers textual support for both explanations. He quotes from ZHU Xi: “Among human beings, those whose qi is clear and pure are sages and worthies, and those whose qi is turbid and impure are stupid and unworthy” (Zhu 2002: 20.693)” (p. 25). Huang thinks that ZHU Xi has provided a satisfactory explanation for “the distinction between virtuous human beings and vicious human beings” (p. 25), because even the vicious people “can be made virtuous,” unlike other animals like birds and beasts that cannot ever acquire human virtues. We can summarize ZHU Xi’s argument as interpreted by Huang as follows: 9 1. It is an empirically observable fact that even the most vicious person can be made virtuous, while animals cannot. 2. Between human beings and animals, only human beings are morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. 3. Therefore, human beings and animals are morally different in kind, not in degrees. 4. The difference lies in human beings’ possession of virtues of humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. 5. It is possible to make a vicious person turn good, but it is not possible to make animals turn good. 6. If vicious people could never be made good, then they would be no different from animals. 7. Therefore, even the most vicious people must also have virtues in their nature. However, this strikes me as a circular argument, or it is simply begging the question. Premise 1 and Premise 6, Premise 2 and Premise 3, all seem to be based on one another. Premise 4 is simply a dogmatic metaphysical claim without any argumentation. The conclusion does not follow from the premises; hence it is not a valid argument. I also don’t find the argument empirically convincing. Premise 1 and Premise 5 make empirical assertions that are not verified. How do we explain the fact that there are “morally deficient” people who were born to be psychopaths, or an idiot with the intelligence of a lower-level animal, who cannot learn about right or wrong? In addition, I find ZHU Xi’s view of the inborn moral inequality among people very problematic. Even if everyone is endowed with the complete goodness in their nature, if some people were born clear and pure and hence “virtuous,” while some others were born stupid and unworthy and hence “vicious,” then what does the “goodness in human nature” amount to? Are we morally determined by birth in virtue of our endowed qi? If vicious people could be “made virtuous” after birth, then could virtuous people also be “made vile” after birth? Between the virtues given at birth (the virtues of humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom inherent in our nature), and the virtues one obtains after one’s life-long conversion, transformation, or self-cultivation in removing one’s selfish desires, shouldn’t we make some distinctions? I shall 10 attempt such a distinction and see where it leads us. We are distinguishing ZHU Xi’s Virtue-bynature and Virtue-by-development as follows: [Virtue-N] The four inborn virtues of humanness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom inherent in human nature. They are universal to human beings— everyone is born with these innate virtues, and no one needs to work at them. [Virtue-D] The collective manifestation in one’s conduct of the virtues, including those of humanness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom, which one acquires with one’s effort as well as with external influences. Of these two kinds of virtues, shouldn’t we praise the latter rather than the former? That is to say, shouldn’t a virtuous agent be praiseworthy because of their Virtues-D rather than their inborn Virtue-N? Shouldn’t an evil agent be blameworthy not because of their lack of Virtue-N, but because they fail to cultivate their Virtue-D? If the answers to both questions are positive, then I would judge the very notion of Virtue-N to be a vacuous concept, and the moral property of “goodness in human nature” would turn out to be an empty property that should play no role in the discourse of meta-ethics. Therefore, I judge ZHU Xi’s proclamation that “human nature is fully good” (Zhu 1986: 90, cited by Huang p. 21) to be a vacuous claim. Finally, I will move on to the question whether these agent-focused moral properties could have “objective prescriptivity,” i.e., being both objective and normative. According to Huang, whether he could show that ZHU Xi was an argent-focused naturalistic moral realist lies in whether he could show that these properties are indeed objective and normative (p. 28). I think he fails to do the latter. Hume’s Is/Ought Challenge and the Objective Prescriptivity of Moral Properties Huang claims that properties about moral agents (such as ‘is good’, ‘is evil’) can make evaluative statements about moral agents true, because they are both “objective” and “normative.” He argues that Hume’s questioning how an ethicist could derive an ought-statement from an isstatement “assumes that all facts are pure facts, and propositions about facts are purely descriptive, while no normative propositions involving values are about facts” (p. 28). In other 11 words, Huang accuses Hume of making the fact/value dichotomy. However, Hume’s own remark is as follows: In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature. section 3.1.1). What Hume demands here is for the ethicist to provide a logically valid deduction from the nonmoral, descriptive statements concerning states of affairs, to statements concerning moral facts with normative properties. We shall see whether ZHU Xi, à la Yong Huang, could provide such a logically valid deduction. In his attempt to show that goodness as a moral property of an agent is both objective and normative, Huang makes an analogy between a doctor’s proclaiming “You are ill” or “You are healthy” to a patient and the moral referee’s verdict “You are a bad person” or “You are a good person” to a moral agent. He argues that both the health conditions of a patient from the doctor’s point of view and the moral conditions of an agent from the moral referee’s point of view are “normative facts”—facts with properties that are both descriptive and normative. The doctor is describing the patient’s being healthy or ill with an implicit norm in mind; the moral referee is describing the state of the agent’s personhood with the naturalized goodness in human agents as the norm. Is this a good analogy? Also, if it is, then has either the doctor or the moral referee provided any logically valid deduction from is to ought? Compare the following statements: 12 (9) You are healthy (by a doctor, after reading the patient’s test result). (10) You are ill (by a doctor, after reading the patient’s test result). (11) You are a good person (by a moral referee). (12) You are a bad person (by a moral referee). I think it is clear that these two sets of evaluative statements are not comparable. The doctor can appeal to objective criteria of health standards and test results to assess the patient’s health condition. Doctors are considered “experts” on these matters, and (9) and (10) are considered scientific statements that can be verified or falsified with external, objective evidence. Even if there might still be disputes among the experts on the truth of these statements, with further evidence and investigation, the disagreements can eventually be settled. In the case of (11) and (12), Huang thinks that we are the moral referees who can make moral evaluation of a moral agent. For (11), Huang says, “If we find that a person always has the appropriate feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in appropriate circumstances, inferring that his virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are not obscured by selfish desires, we can say this is a good person” (p. 28). For (12), Huang says, “Similarly, if we find that a person never or hardly has the feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in situations where such feelings are called for or even has the opposite feelings in such situations, inferring that the person’s virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are obscured by his selfish desires, we say that this person is bad” (p. 29). However, this is where the analogy fails: we cannot perform any standardized test for the moral agent’s having or lacking these moral sentiments; furthermore, we cannot be the experts on human morality as doctors are the experts on human health. Unless we are gods, we cannot possibly make any objective assessment of another person’s goodness or badness on the basis of their “always” or “never” having such “feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in situations where such feelings are called for.” Of course, Huang might retort that this is not his point. He is not trying to compare the utterer’s credibility in making these pronouncements but is focusing on the very nature of these pronounced statements. He argues that statements like (9) – (12) depict “normative facts”; in his words, these statements are “descriptive and normative at once” (p. 28). Huang seems to think 13 that once we see that these descriptive statements are at the same time normative statements, there is no more demand for the logical deduction that Hume thought amiss in most ethical systems. Consider the following deduction implicit in the doctor’s reasoning as Huang explains it: (9) A person’s being healthy =(def) this person’s body is what it ought to be and ought to be maintained as well (p. 28). (9.1) Your body is what it ought to be and ought to be maintained as well. (9.2) Therefore, you are healthy. In Huang’s view, (9) depicts a normative state for a person’s health. The doctor can have an objective standard (the test results) to verify if the person’s body meets this standard, and thus, the doctor can make an objective statement that is also both descriptive and normative. By the same token, Huang thinks that ZHU Xi can give the following deduction on a person’s moral quality: (11) A person’s being good =(def) this person always has the appropriate feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in appropriate circumstances, and thus his virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are not obscured by selfish desires (p. 28). (11.1) You always have the appropriate feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in appropriate circumstances, and your virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are not obscured by selfish desires. (11.2) Therefore, you are a good person. (11) gives the definition of “being a good person.” If we accept this definition, then we might establish the objectivity of (11.2) by verifying (11.1). But this objectivity does not render (11.2) normative, at least not in the sense that Hume intended. Huang takes “normative” to mean “about value.” He says, “This is clearly a normative proposition about value, but it is also a descriptive proposition about fact, a proposition that can be verified by the moral property, the property of goodness, that we can find in the person” (p. 29). However, what Hume questioned was not whether some descriptive statements could at the same time describe an ideal state, a norm, or 14 give a valuation. Think about such statements: “This is the best pizza I have ever eaten.” “This painting has the best composition.” “That nurse has the best bedside manners.” We often make such statements that are both descriptive and evaluative with an implicit standard. Hume was questioning how an ethicist could logically derive normative ethics that one ought to do x from some descriptive statements.1 In other words, how could a doctor or an ethicist give the following prescriptive statements: (9.3) Therefore, you ought to always keep your body healthy (i.e. keep it in the ideal state of health). (11.3) Therefore, you ought to be good (i.e., always have the appropriate feelings of commiseration, shame and dislike, modesty and complaisance, and approving and disapproving in appropriate circumstances, so that your virtues of benevolence, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are not obscured by selfish desires). In the first deduction about health, the doctor is appealing to a standard of health and thereby assesses the patient’s health condition. We can accept Huang’s claim that there is a norm of human health, but I don’t see any prescriptive force in employing such a norm. The patient can fail to be healthy, but there is no reason why he ought to be healthy. Someone can willingly choose to live unhealthily, and even the doctor cannot order them not to do so. Similarly, we can accept ZHU Xi’s definition of a “good person,” but we do not need to embrace the mandate that one ought to be a good person. My disagreement with Huang’s defense of ZHU Xi may simply lie in the verbal disagreement on the conception of normative. In my understanding, “normative” means “establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior”; in contrast, “prescriptive” means “relating to the imposition or enforcement of a rule or method.” In some cases, being prescriptive is derived from being normative, as in the case of “one ought to drive on the left side of the road in the UK.” In the cases that Huang presented, on the other hand, I do not detect any valid deduction from a property’s being normative to its being 1 Hume’s point is about logic and reasoning, and he advocated moral sentimentalism, the view that our ethical judgments are derived from our sentiments (the feelings of approval and disapproval), not from our reasoning from logic. Here I endorse Pidgen’s interpretation: “Hume thought that our moral beliefs are based on feelings rather than reason, namely the feelings of approval and disapproval that we experience at our informed and unbiased best. But the orthodoxy of his day was that the truths of morality are demonstrable, that they can be derived by logic from self-evident axioms, that is, axioms evident to reason. For Hume no (non-trivial) moral claims are self-evident: they are evident only to human beings since only human beings have the right kind of feelings” (Pidgen 2011). 15 prescriptive, such as from “being healthy means x “ to “one ought to be x,” or from “being a good person means y” to “one ought to be y.” Conclusion I conclude that Huang’s construal of ZHU Xi’s virtue ethics as a form of agent-focused naturalistic moral realism is not successful. I do not question his interpretation of ZHU Xi as a moral realist. In Liu (2020) I have construed ZHU Xi’s moral realism as normative realism and internal moral realism, and the connection between these two is his notion of li (principle 理). I argue that “Zhu Xi’s conjoining the two connotations under the same concept ‘principle’ represents his attempt to eliminate the supposed gulf between fact and value” (Liu 2020: 861). With respect to his normative realism, I argue that “principles in particular things represent the norms both for the thing’s existence and for humans’ interaction with the thing” (Liu 2020: 860). With respect to his internal moral realism, I argue that “For ZHU Xi, the moral principle we humans must embrace as absolutely and objectively true is already internal to us—it is within our nature endowed by heaven…. Zhu Xi’s locating Heavenly principle in human nature demonstrates his realist commitment to both the moral principle itself and to our capacity to realize this moral principle” (Liu 2020: 864). This shows that I am largely in agreement with Huang on reading ZHU Xi as a moral realist, as someone who is committed to the goodness of human nature, and as someone who would reject the dichotomy between fact and value. What I question instead, however, is whether there is such a thing as “agent-focused moral realism.” What moral realists want to show is that moral statements can be true or false and their truth or falsehood can be established objectively. Moral statements about actions and states of affairs are where the disputes center on; moral statements about an agent’s being good or bad are not as interesting or as important. ZHU Xi’s virtue ethics is agent-focused normative ethics, and it does have a coherent system on what virtues one ought to cultivate or what kind of moral agents one ought to emulate and become. I just do not think that his virtue ethics can be construed as agent-focused meta-ethics. Postscript 16 Yong Huang’s paper is both challenging and entertaining at the same time. It is not an ordinary feat to write a philosophically engaging article on neo-Confucianism, and one needs the analytic acuity to locate the real issues and to introduce novel solutions. For years I have been investigating the same issues: the nature of Confucian moral realism (Liu 2007), the entanglement of the Is/Ought relation in Confucian realism (Liu 2011), as well as the interpretation of ZHU Xi as a moral realist (Liu 2020). However, I never feel that the quest is over or that my analysis was completely satisfactory. Hence, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this paper and found it thought-provoking. Even though I do not think Huang’s attempt at construing a new form of moral realism, naturalistic agent-focused moral realism, was successful, I nonetheless applaud his effort in reinventing ZHU Xi’s virtue ethics as a discourse in meta-ethics. References Brink, David O. (1989). Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huang, Yong (2022). “Agent-Focused Moral Realism: ZHU Xi’s Virtue Ethics Approach to Meta-Ethics.” In this volume. Hursthouse, Rosalind (1999). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, JeeLoo (2020). “Zhu Xi’s Normative Realism and Internal Moral Realism.” In Yong Huang, et al (eds.) Dao Companion to ZHU Xi’s Philosophy. Chapter 36: 857-872. Liu, JeeLoo (2011). “The Is-Ought Correlation in Neo-Confucian Qi-Naturalism: How Normative Facts Exist in Natural States of Qi.” Contemporary Chinese Philosophy 43 (1): 60-77. Liu, JeeLoo (2007). “Confucian Moral Realism.” Asian Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 2. Pp. 167-184. July 2007. Pigden, Charles (2011). “Hume on Is and Ought.” Philosophy Now, Issue 83.