Relevance of Moral Sense to Legal Reasoning

If we admit that judge’s conscience to be employed in judicial decision-making is an integral element of legal reasoning, this should be understood as a kind of moral sense. Moral sense manifests itself in many different forms such as sympathy, resentment, sense of justice and others. If moral sense including sense of justice is to work as a criterion of justice in the process of legal reasoning, it should be reasonable moral sense. We may find this example of reasonable moral sense in a harmonized form of Four Beginnings of Confucian moral ideas, that is, commiseration, shame and disgust, yielding and deference, and discernment.