Moral Artisanship in Mengzi 6A7 Dobin CHOI 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract This essay investigates the structure and meaning of the Mengzi’ s 孟子 analogical inferences in Mengzi 6A7. In this chapter, he argues that just as the perceptual masters allowed the discovery of our senses’ uniform preferences, the sages enabled us to recognize our hearts’ universal preferences for “order (li 理) and righteousness (yi 義).” Regarding an unresolved question of how the sages help us understand our hearts’ preferred objects as such, I propose a spectator-based moral artisanship reading as an alternative to an evaluator-focused moral connoisseurship view: the sages are moral artisans who refine their moral achievements, and people’ s uniform approval of their achievements—firmly associated with “order and righteous- ness”—demonstrates our hearts’ same natural preferences for them. Furthermore, I argue that this chapter’ s conclusion—we and the sages are of the same kind with natural moral preferences—implies the necessity of our transition from passive spec- tators to active moral performers for moral self-cultivation. Keywords Righteousness (yi 義) . Moral taste . Moral sentiment . Human nature . Sages 1 Introduction This essay investigates the structure and meaning of Mengzi’ s 孟子 analogical infer- ences in Mengzi 6A7. In this chapter, he argues that the uniform preferences of our eyes, ears, and mouths analogously justify our hearts’ inherent moral preferences. Just as the perceptual masters allowed the discovery of our senses’ uniform preferences, the sages enabled us to recognize our hearts’ universal preferences. At the end, Mengzi Dao https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-018-9613-y * Dobin CHOI dobinphil@gmail.com 1 Ewha Institute for Biomedical Law & Ethics, Ewha Womans University, 52 Ewhayeodae-gil, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 03760, Republic of Korea