Moral Emotions in Chinese and Greek Philosophy: About

The topic of moral emotions is significant for the work of the DKU lab because we have been assessing the value of the Confucian concept of “family feeling” (qinqing 亲情) in relation to filial piety (xiao 孝) as foundational for Confucian moral thought. Rather than understanding the family first and foremost as a social structure, the Confucian project seeks to understand the family principally as a set of reciprocal feelings that are natural in origin, but which are shaped and expressed through ritual propriety. A key question for Confucian ethics therefore is the extent to which the traditional concept of the family is foundational for all morality, or whether it is possible to ground Confucian morality in relationships more broadly.