On Franklin Perkins’s “Doing What You Really Want”

Abstract

What do you really want? What is the right thing to do? These two questions are not the same. Many things I want to do I probably should not. However, the classical Confucian philosopher Mengzi thought otherwise—at least as Franklin Perkins explains him. In his lecture “On ‘Doing What You Really Want,’” Perkins evaluates Mengzi’s view of human desires and what is moral. The talk illuminates how Mengzi’s teachings can be understood as a philosophy promoting social activism: In insisting that we see prosocial feelings such as honesty, compassion, and benevolence as our true, overriding motives, Mengzi offers an ethic that drives proactive and positive communal engagement. He pushes us to pay greater attention to our natural prosocial inclinations in hopes that we find they carry greater weight than we often give them. We may discover that they are, in fact, what we really want to do.

Notes

1 The recording of Franklin Perkins’s lecture is available at: https://www.sihaiweixue.org/recordings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert A. Carleo

Robert A. Carleo III teaches in the international graduate program in Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University and in the Philosophy Department at Baruch College, City University of New York. He has a master’s in Chinese philosophy from Fudan University and a PhD in philosophy from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is editor and translator of Li Zehou’s The Origins of Chinese Thought (2018) and The Humanist Ethics of Li Zehou (2023), as well as co-editor, with Yong Huang, of Confucian Political Philosophy: Dialogues in the State of the Field (2021).