Aiming to breathe new life into naturalistic ethics, this essay considers what is, for the West, a new way of grasping the moral significance of "following nature." In doing so, it explores certain unique features in the development of Chinese naturalistic ethics and avoids interpreting this as corresponding to an early stage in the evolution of Western philosophy. The two most important features of Chinese naturalistic ethics that it explores are: (1) the idea that the naturalness of some form

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... of human behavior is a valid criterion of its moral goodness, and (2) the view that harmony with the natural order is characteristic of a high degree of moral cultivation. Each of these corresponds to a trend in Chinese thought lasting from its "formative period" (circa 500-200 B.C.E.) up to Sung times (960-1279 C.E.). Their synthesis in the thought of Sung philosopher Chang Tsaia (1020-1077) is below shown to mark a watershed in the course of Chinese moral philosophy. The article is divided into three sections: the first deals with general problems in the area of comparative East-West studies; the second treats the two previously mentioned trends which emerged during the formative period of Chinese philosophy; and the third deals, specifically, with Chang Tsai. ON THE PRIMITIVITY OF NATURALISTIC ETHICS One form of reductionism that can plague comparative studies occurs when some foreign way of thinking is taken to correspond to an early stage in the development of one's own intellectual tradition. A case of this is evident in Donald Munro's otherwise excellent work The Concept of Man in Early China.' Commenting on the "natural basis of the social" in the thought of late Chou Confucians, he makes the remark: "When philosophical thought is just about to emerge in a society there is a tendency to read the human social order into the structure of the universe."2 In the West, Munro indicates, this occurred when the pre-Socratics assigned each of their four basic elements (earth, air, fire, and water) a sphere of natural influence analogous to one of the inviolate social divisions specified by Greek tribal customs.3 The Chinese, he argues, had an even stronger penchant for reading human social and moral values into nature. Not only was the social idea of proper spheres of influence read into the universe (also as part of a theory of the elements), but so were such important moral concepts as sincerity (ch'engb), humanity (jenc), and propriety (lid). In essence, the idea of cosmic order was itself abstracted from human social experience.4 Munro's assessment of the role given nature in the socioethical views of late Chou philosophers has been challenged, but not due to any heightened sensitivity toward the idea that moral knowledge can be derived from, not Christian Jochim is an Interim Instructor and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Philosophy East and West 31, no. 2 (April, 1981). © by the University Press of Hawaii. All rights reverved. 166 Jochim read into, the natural world. It has been criticized, for example, by Henry Rosemont for emphasizing passages that suggest a natural basis for ethics in the otherwise thoroughly rational and humanistic writings of the early Confucians.5 The revealing thing is Rosemont's feeling that the issue is not of any philosophical significance, "except that it attributes a fairly naive monism to the Confucians."6 Perhaps he feels this way because, like Munro, he takes for granted that there must be something primitive about any ethics which looks to nature for principles to guide human behavior. However, an ethics of this type is only primitive from a particularly modern point of view which assumes a priori that nature is devoid of ethical qualities. The sources of this perspective must be examined before one can render any judgments concerning naturalistic ethics in a Chinese context. Increased urbanization, greater control over the natural world, the emergence of the Darwinian model of nature, and related developments within philosophy and theology have contributed to the view that the natural realm is an amoral one. Characteristic of these developments, and a locus classicus on the subject of nature's irrelevance for the moral life, is John Stuart Mill's essay on "Nature." The following quote is from the conclusion to that essay. The scheme of nature regarded in its whole extent, cannot have had, for its sole or even principal object, the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them, is mostly the result of their own exertions. Whatsoever, in nature, gives indication of beneficent design, proves this beneficence to be armed with only limited power; and the duty of man is to cooperate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating but by perpetually striving to amend the course of nature-bringing that part of it over which we can exert control more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness.7 Within this type of perspective, as Mill argues, the only positive value the term "natural" can denote is the absence of affectation.8 It is foolish from this point of view to consider what is natural to be a criterion for what is moral. Another perhaps even more significant trend that underlies the West's drift away from naturalistic ethics was initiated early in the twentieth century by G. E. Moore, himself a critic of John Stuart Mill. In his Principia Ethica,9 Moore drew attention to an error in logic that he felt was inherent in any attempt to derive an ethical norm (an "ought" statement) from a belief about the nature of things (an "is" statement). The peculiar designation that he used for this error, the "naturalistic fallacy," has become standard in recent moral discourse; and its avoidance has become a commandment of contemporary ethics. "Naturalistic fallacy" is a peculiar term, in the first place, because it can be applied to an ethics in which nature is denied any substantive role, such as that of Mill, who was criticized by Moore for reducing a value term ("goodness") to an empirically determinable property ("desirability").'° It is peculiar, second, because it has led to the perhaps false yet widely held