 Confucianism offers a rich moral psychology. Among sinologists, Nivison (1996; see especially “Motivation and Moral Action in Mencius,” “Philosophical Voluntarism in Fourth-Century China,” “Two Roots or One?” and “Xunzi on ‘Human Nature’”) was especially influential in mining Confucian texts for insight into moral psychology from a comparative perspective. Van Norden (2017) holds that Confucianism has a decided edge over modern Western philosophy in terms of presenting rich and insightful theories of moral development. On his narrative, early modern Western philosophy abandoned Aristotelian explanations by appeal to actualization of potentiality for quantitative explanations in terms of material objects in motion. While this was a positive development for the natural sciences, it was a disaster for ethics, particularly in the intersection with moral psychology. It is probably not just the early modern turn in the West toward mechanistic quantitative explanations that accounts for the comparative difference. Aristotle’s explanation of the actualization of the potential for virtue was relatively skimpy in gesturing toward habituation as the means, whereby one becomes courageous by acting courageously, and so on (Nichomachean Ethics II.1). Xunzi seems to have a similar problem when he declares on the one hand that human nature is bad, with powerful self-seeking and competitive impulses that threaten to throw human being into destructive conflict with one another, and on the other hand, that the performance of ritual, through following models of virtue, and through a social environment with roles fashioned to be in accordance with standards of rightness (yi), human beings can come to love virtue for its own sake. However, Xunzi at one point in his chapter on ritual observes that all creatures of blood and breath (qi) know to love their own kind and long after others of its group if they become separated. Human beings are most of all like this, which is why rituals such as mourning and grief for loved ones are so powerful and help shape our impulses for the better. Ritual, which most of the time seems to have a restraining, reformative function in Xunzi, now acquires a crucial expressive function that strengthens and enhances motivations that are congenial to morality. It is at this point that Xunzi, however inadvertently, points toward a more complex and pluralistic theory of human nature that becomes a more plausible theory of moral development because it takes just enough from Mencius’s theory that there are natural inclinations that could form a positive basis for the love and development of virtue (Wong, 1996a; 2015a; for a different view of how ritual works in Xunzi’s theory of moral development see Sung, 2015; 2017).