 What about the priority of filial loyalty over loyalty to the larger community? Mencius’ defense of this priority draws from his theory of human nature as containing not only the beginnings of affective motivations for being moral but also intuitive judgments about what is right and about what deserves the feeling of shame. His question to a Mohist, Yizi, is how Yizi can justify providing his deceased parents a special burial when the Mohist prescriptions are for a plain burial for anyone. Yizi’s reply is to quote from the Book of History: the sage-kings treated all their subjects as if they were their new-born children. Yizi’s interpretation of this saying is that there should be no distinctions in one’s concern for people, though the practice of it may begin with one’s parents (how concern without distinctions is compatible with special burial for one’s parents is unclear, and there is no further clarification in 3A5, but the issue involves the question of what Mohists meant by jian ai, which is addressed in section 3 below). Mencius’s counter-reply is to ask whether Yizi really holds that a person loves his elder brother’s son no more than his neighbor’s baby. This is not just an assertion about what people tend to feel but also an assertion about what people intuitively hold to be right to feel and to do. Then Mencius makes a puzzling remark to the effect that Yizi is singling out a special feature in a certain case: “when a new-born babe creeps toward a well, it is not its fault.” This last part of Mencius’s response is puzzling because Yizi did not say anything about a baby and a well. One possibility is that Yizi may have obliquely referred to Mencius’s claim that all have the original and unlearned feeling of distress at seeing a child about to fall into a well. In other words, Yizi might have been challenging Mencius by asking, “Does not your own postulated unlearned compassion require us to regard that child the same way, regardless of whose child it is?” This way of taking Yizi helps makes sense of Mencius’s reply. First, he points out what he takes to be the indisputably greater affection one feels for elder brother’s son over one’s neighbor’s baby. Mencius grants that we all respond to a child about to fall into the well with alarm and distress, and it doesn’t matter whose child it is. However, one cannot infer from this one particular situation that we ought to have equal concern for everyone in all situations. The case of the child about to fall into the well has a particular feature that makes it relevant to treat it as one would any child. That feature seems to be innocence.