What Do We Owe Each Other? The Philosophy of Dai Zhen

Imagine you’re sitting in class, and the teacher says something that doesn’t feel right. You raise your hand and say, “But that’s not fair.” The teacher asks why. You pause. You know it’s unfair, but putting it into words is harder than you thought.

Now imagine that instead of one teacher, you’re arguing against hundreds of years of very smart people who all agree on what’s right and wrong. And you’re trying to prove them wrong using only old books and your own reasoning. That’s what the philosopher Dai Zhen did, and it got him into a lot of trouble.

Dai Zhen (pronounced “die jen”) lived in China from 1724 to 1777. He grew up poor, couldn’t afford good teachers, and taught himself by reading ancient texts. But here’s the strange thing: the more carefully he read those texts, the more he became convinced that the most famous philosophers of his time had gotten everything backwards. They said that to be good, you had to suppress your desires and feelings. Dai Zhen said that was not only wrong—it was dangerous.

The Big Puzzle

Here’s the puzzle that drove Dai Zhen’s whole life: How do we actually know what’s right and wrong?

This might sound simple. You might think: just look at what the wise people say, or what your religion teaches, or what your conscience tells you. But Dai Zhen noticed something troubling. People in power were using “morality” to justify terrible things. They would say, “It’s just the natural order that some people rule and others serve,” or “Your suffering is necessary for the greater good.” And when challenged, they would say, “Trust me—I understand the principles better than you do.”

Dai Zhen thought: that’s not proof. That’s just someone claiming authority. And if we can’t tell when someone is really telling the truth about right and wrong, then we’re all vulnerable to being manipulated.

So he went looking for a way to test moral claims—something as reliable as a ruler for measuring length or a scale for measuring weight.

How Do You Know What the Sages Meant?

Dai Zhen was a Confucian. That means he believed that ancient sages (wise rulers from thousands of years earlier) had figured out the right way to live, called the dao (the Way). The problem was that the original texts describing the dao were extremely old and hard to understand. Words had changed meaning. Copies had errors. People were reading their own ideas into the texts instead of letting the texts speak for themselves.

This is where Dai Zhen’s method gets interesting. He said: if you want to know what the sages meant, you can’t just guess. You have to do the hard work of figuring out what each word actually meant when they wrote it. You need to understand the tools they used, the rituals they performed, the astronomy they practiced. Only then can you start to understand their philosophy.

One of his favorite metaphors was this: “Song dynasty scholars ridiculed the study of philology, dismissing the importance of language and written characters. This is akin to wanting to cross a river without using a boat and paddle, or to climbing a height without using a ladder.”

In other words: don’t skip the boring stuff. The boring stuff is what keeps you from fooling yourself.

Dai Zhen spent decades doing this painstaking work. He drew diagrams of ancient tools (archaeologists later found one of those tools and confirmed his drawing was correct). He figured out which parts of the Water Classic were the original text and which were later commentary mixed in by mistake. He studied mathematics, phonology, geography, and ritual.

And then, when he had done all that, he made a controversial move. He used his careful reading of the ancient texts to argue that the most influential philosophers of the previous centuries—people like Zhu Xi—had misunderstood the dao. They thought the dao was something abstract and separate from everyday life. Dai Zhen said it was right there in your daily activities: “Dwelling, eating and drinking, speaking and moving, our person and everything we see around us—all of this is appropriately regarded as dao.”

What Makes Something Right?

Here’s where Dai Zhen’s philosophy gets really interesting—and a bit technical, but worth following.

The philosophers he disagreed with believed that the world was made of two different kinds of stuff: li (pattern or principle), which was pure and good, and qi (vital stuff or energy), which was messy and could lead you astray. They thought being moral meant following the li and suppressing the qi—especially your desires and feelings.

Dai Zhen thought this was completely backwards. He argued that li isn’t some separate, pure thing. Li is just the regular pattern you find in the way things naturally work. For example, it’s li for fish to live in water and for birds to live in the air. That doesn’t mean there’s some invisible “fish principle” floating around. It just means that if you pay attention to what fish are like, you’ll see they belong in water.

The same goes for humans. If you want to know what’s right for humans, you have to look at what humans actually are. And humans, Dai Zhen said, are creatures with bodies that have wants and feelings. These aren’t obstacles to morality—they’re the raw material of morality.

This part gets complicated, but here’s what it accomplishes. Dai Zhen is trying to show that moral rules aren’t arbitrary commands from on high. They’re practical guidelines for helping everyone’s wants and feelings get fulfilled together. As he put it, “The flourishing of dao and virtue is simply for none of people’s wants to go unsatisfied and none of their feelings to go unfulfilled.”

The Test: Can Everyone Agree?

So how do you figure out which actions actually fulfill everyone’s wants and feelings? Dai Zhen proposed a method he called “sympathetic consideration.” It works like this:

Before you do something that affects someone else, stop and ask yourself: “If they did this to me, could I accept it?” Before you demand something from someone else, ask: “If they demanded this from me, could I deliver it?”

This might sound like the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). But Dai Zhen added something crucial. He said you shouldn’t just imagine what you would feel in their situation, because your feelings might be different from theirs. Instead, you should use the fact that humans share basic wants and feelings. You know what hunger feels like. You know what it’s like to be embarrassed. You know what it’s like to want something really badly and not get it. Use that knowledge to figure out what they need.

The real test, though, is whether everyone could affirm your choice. Dai Zhen said: “Only what all minds similarly affirm to be so can be called pattern or right.” Not just you. Not just your friends. Not just people with power. Everyone. Even people who haven’t been born yet.

Why This Matters: Against Using Morality as a Weapon

Dai Zhen wasn’t just doing abstract philosophy. He was responding to something he saw happening in the world around him. People in power would claim that their preferences were “heavenly principles” and that anyone who disagreed was selfish or misguided. They would say things like, “This rule is just the natural order of things” or “Your suffering is necessary for the common good.”

Dai Zhen thought this was a terrible abuse of philosophy. He wrote: “What they call li (pattern) is actually just their own opinions.” And because they thought their opinions were universal principles, they felt justified in forcing everyone else to follow them.

Here’s a concrete example. In Dai Zhen’s time, many people believed that it was a woman’s duty to remain loyal to her husband even after his death—and that meant she should never remarry. Some women were pressured into lifelong loneliness because people said it was “the principle of things.” Dai Zhen would have said: whose feelings are being fulfilled here? Not the woman’s. The rule doesn’t help her flourish. So how can it be a genuine principle?

This is why Dai Zhen insisted that morality has to be grounded in shared human experience—in the wants and feelings that everyone can recognize. Otherwise, “morality” just becomes a tool the powerful use to control everyone else.

The Self-So and the Imperative

Dai Zhen had a beautiful way of talking about the relationship between how we naturally are and how we should act. He used two terms: ziran (self-so, or what comes naturally) and biran (imperative, or what we must do).

Here’s the insight: if you understand what something really is—what its nature is—you can figure out what it needs to flourish. A plant’s nature includes reaching toward sunlight, so it’s “imperative” for the plant to get light. A human’s nature includes having wants and feelings, so it’s “imperative” for us to create conditions where everyone’s wants and feelings can be fulfilled.

But here’s the twist: what’s imperative isn’t opposed to what’s natural. It’s what completes the natural. As Dai Zhen put it: “By turning toward what is imperative, one brings what is self-so to completion.”

Think of it this way. If you left a human baby completely alone and just let it do whatever came “naturally,” the baby would die. The baby needs care, food, teaching. Those things aren’t against the baby’s nature—they’re what allow the baby’s nature to actually develop. The “imperative” (you must feed this baby) serves the “self-so” (the baby’s natural need to grow).

For Dai Zhen, living morally isn’t about fighting your nature. It’s about understanding your nature so well that you can see what it truly needs—and then creating the conditions for everyone’s nature to flourish together.

Still Open Questions

Nobody really knows exactly how Dai Zhen’s system would work in practice. Philosophers still argue about several things:

First, how do you handle cases where people’s wants conflict? Dai Zhen seems to think that if you apply sympathetic consideration correctly, everyone’s wants can be harmonized. But is that realistic? What if two people both really want the same thing that only one can have?

Second, is Dai Zhen basically saying that the right action is whatever makes everyone most satisfied? That would make him a kind of utilitarian (someone who judges actions by their results). But other philosophers argue that he’s saying something different—that following the right patterns is good in itself, not just because of the results.

Third, Dai Zhen talks a lot about “flourishing” (shengsheng—literally “life generating life”). But what exactly counts as flourishing? Is it just having your wants and feelings satisfied? Or does it also include being virtuous, being creative, achieving things? The text doesn’t give a clear answer.

What This Means for You

You might be thinking: this is all very historical. What does an 18th-century Chinese philosopher have to do with my life?

Here’s what. Every day, you encounter claims about what’s right and wrong. Some come from adults, some from friends, some from social media, some from inside your own head. “You should work harder.” “That’s not fair.” “Everyone does it.” “It’s just common sense.”

Dai Zhen’s question is still alive: How do you know when these claims are actually true? How do you tell the difference between a real moral principle and someone just pushing their opinion?

His answer: Check it against shared human experience. Does it help people’s genuine wants and feelings get fulfilled together? Could everyone reasonably agree to it? If not, maybe it’s not a principle—maybe it’s just someone’s opinion dressed up to look like one.

And maybe the most important lesson: the people who claim to have all the answers are often the ones you should question the most.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in the debate
Dao (道)	The right way to live; for Dai Zhen, this includes both the regular patterns of nature and the norms humans should follow
Li (理)	Pattern or principle—the regular way things behave, which also tells us how they should behave to flourish
Qi (氣)	The vital, dynamic stuff everything is made of; not separate from li, but the medium in which li is found
Ziran (自然)	“Self-so”—what happens naturally, without forcing; the raw material of human nature
Biran (必然)	“Imperative”—what must be done to complete or fulfill the natural; moral norms
Shu (恕)	Sympathetic consideration—using your own feelings to understand others’ and find fair solutions
Shengsheng (生生)	The flourishing of life; “life generating life”—a foundational value for Dai Zhen

Key People

Dai Zhen (1724–1777) — A Chinese philosopher who argued that morality must be grounded in shared human feelings and wants, not abstract principles; taught himself using ancient texts and became a leading scholar despite poverty
Zhu Xi (1130–1200) — A Song dynasty philosopher whose ideas about li as separate from qi were hugely influential; Dai Zhen disagreed with him strongly
Mencius (4th century BCE) — An ancient Confucian philosopher who argued that humans are naturally good; Dai Zhen used Mencius’s writings as his main source

Things to Think About

Dai Zhen says that to know what’s right, we should ask what everyone could agree to. But what about cases where people are genuinely confused about their own interests—like a kid who wants to eat candy for every meal? Does their “want” count the same as an adult’s more informed want?
If moral rules are supposed to help everyone’s wants and feelings get fulfilled together, what happens when a rule helps most people but hurts a few? Does Dai Zhen have a way to handle that, or does his system break down?
Dai Zhen was very critical of people who claimed to know “heavenly principles” to justify their power. Can you think of modern examples where someone uses moral language (“it’s just natural” or “it’s God’s will”) to get their way? How would Dai Zhen respond?
The “sympathetic consideration” test asks you to imagine how you’d feel if someone did something to you. But what if you’re really bad at imagining other people’s experiences? Does the method still work?

Where This Shows Up

Every time someone says “that’s not fair” — that’s an appeal to a shared standard of fairness, just like Dai Zhen’s appeal to shared feelings
In arguments about what counts as “natural” — politicians and advertisers often say things are “natural” to make them seem right; Dai Zhen would ask “natural for whom, and does it help them flourish?”
In debates about moral education — some people think kids need to have their desires suppressed to learn self-control; Dai Zhen would say that’s missing the point, because desires are the raw material of morality
In modern philosophy — Dai Zhen’s ideas are being rediscovered by philosophers who think Western philosophy has too often ignored the role of the body and feelings in ethics