Confucian Moral Intuitions without Moral Intuitionism

This paper defends an expertise-centric account of moral intuition and Confucian sagehood in the Mencius . I argue that we should conceive of sages as moral experts and moral intuitions as intellectual seemings, some of which are expert-like in content and therefore afford prima facie epistemic justification to the moral beliefs that are based on them. Such a proposal rejects an intuition-based moral epistemology in favour of a broadly process reliabilist one. I motivate the proposal by arguing that it allows us to avoid three problems, two of which arise for moral intuitionist readings of Mencius: the problem that such readings posit a mysterious faculty of intuition and that we have difficulty explaining why some but not all relevant moral intuitions epistemically justify beliefs. The third problem arises for both moral intuitionist and connoisseurship readings: the problem that the moral intuitions of Confucian sages are epistemically inaccessible to ordinary people.