Natural Law in Mencius and Aquinas

The natural law theory of ethics is understood by many scholars as a distinctively Western moral theory, with roots stretching back to Aristotle and the Stoics, finding its culmination in the thoughts of St. Thomas Aquinas. In this chapter I argue that Mencius, arguably the most historically influential thinker in East Asia, also held a form of natural law theory. Despite the variety of divergent interpretations of Mencius—as role-based theorist (Ames), consequentialist (Im), sentimentalist (Liu), and virtue ethicist (Yu, Ivanhoe, Van Norden)—no scholar has, to my knowledge, suggested that Mencius holds a form of natural law theory.¹ In