Morality Morality refers to inner emotions or beliefs. When used in human relations, it refers to human nature and character. Confucianism believes that "virtue" includes loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, righteousness, gentleness, respect, humility, etc.
Taoists believe that the nature of the so-called heaven, earth and all things is "Tao", and the nature derived from various things is "virtue". For people, it is moral character. Neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming dynasties referred to "virtue" as practicing certain principles and gaining something from the heart.
De
[Edit this paragraph] A brief explanation of morality
Morality is composed of two juxtaposed words: Tao and De.
Tao is a way, a path, a way.
Virtue is the expression of behavior.
When Tao and morality are combined together, the meaning changes, and there is a new meaning of morality.
The word Tao becomes a verb.
Morality is determined by Tao. Virtue produced by having a way evolves into morality.
Nowadays, people focus on expressing the meaning of morality in the word "德".
It means that no matter what way you follow, as long as it can produce good results, people will be happy.
In academic terms, Tao is Tao and virtue is virtue, and they cannot be confused.
In people's lives, morality can be used as the meaning of the word "virtue".
In many things, people only focus on the results and not the process. No matter what path the other party adopts, the virtue shown is intuitive.
So, in most cases, morality means virtue.
[The meaning of morality]
Morality is an important part of developing advanced culture and constituting human civilization, especially spiritual civilization. The ethics we usually talk about refer to the principles and standards that people should follow in their behavior. The definition of morality can be summarized as follows: Morality is a special code of conduct proposed to people by a certain society and a certain class to deal with various relationships between individuals and between individuals and society.
This concept shows that morality is a code of conduct that regulates the relationship between people and between individuals and society based on good and evil.
Morality always promotes good and suppresses evil. Morality is different from law. It judges a person's quality based on social public opinion, traditional culture and living habits. It mainly relies on people's conscious inner concepts to maintain.
The word morality has a long history. As early as more than two thousand years ago, the word "morality" appeared in ancient Chinese writings. "Tao" means the rules of movement and change of things; "De" means that after understanding "Tao", we can properly handle the relationships between people in accordance with its rules. Starting from the founder of Chinese Confucianism, the great thinker and educator Confucius, for thousands of years.
People have always paid attention to moral issues.
Morality is to practice the truth and develop the truth.
Truth is the road. Practicing the Tao means creating conditions, establishing mechanisms, operating objective laws for harmonious development, and everyone wins. Creating objective reality for harmonious development means applying science and practicing truth. Accumulating virtue means constantly creating objective reality of harmonious development, pursuing truth and developing truth. Doing good deeds and accumulating virtue is morality.
It is unethical to benefit oneself at the expense of others, harm the public and enrich private interests, and destroy harmonious development; equality, mutual benefit, integrity and mutual assistance to achieve harmonious development are general ethics; helping others and serving the public for pleasure promote harmonious development are noble ethics; sacrificing oneself to save oneself People and sacrifice for the public reach the pinnacle of virtue and are the highest morality. This class (level) difference in morality is an objective fact. A society in which a noble moral class dominates is naturally a society with a high degree of harmonious development. This is the basic point of view of harmonious ethics.
Three basic conditions need to be met to practice the Tao: 1. Generally accept the concept of the Tao and clarify the direction, goals and guiding ideology of development. This is the spiritual condition. 2. To create a basic guarantee for material living conditions, we must first eliminate the polarization of poverty and monopoly in the economy, and establish a universal social security system for life. This is the material condition.
3. To establish a harmonious restriction and incentive mechanism for individual and group behavior is to establish corresponding legal systems and customs, which are the conditions for social operation. Only when these three conditions are met can the objective law of harmonious development and everyone winning be universally implemented, and the society move closer to the ideal goal of highly harmonious development.
What is morality? Simply put, morality is the standard by which humans distinguish between good and evil. So is morality innate to human beings, or is it acquired through acquired education? Psychologists have found that regardless of race, creed and cultural background, the basic standards of human morality are the same. For example, honesty, integrity, sympathy, and mercy are good, and cheating and killing are evil. Moreover, humans show the ability to distinguish between good and evil in infancy. It seems that this standard of judging good and evil is innate.
The "Three Character Classic" says, "At the beginning of man's nature, he is inherently good." It is very appropriate to understand this sentence as "man is born knowing good and evil." If morality is related to acquired education, then why has China established many moral heroes as role models for the people in the past half century, but they have not necessarily contributed to improving the moral level of the entire nation? Today, we hear people exclaiming about moral decline and a huge integrity crisis. For example, this time the photo of the South China tiger was suspected of being fake, and even the lunar photos taken by the "Chang'e" spacecraft were suspected of being stolen from NASA's early lunar photos. Isn't this strange?
On the other hand, if a society completely destroys its nation's traditional moral system, will it change people's standards for judging good and evil? We know that the "Destroying the Four Olds" movement of the Cultural Revolution was the most thorough negation and destruction of China's entire traditional culture, but we have not seen any change in the inner moral standards of the Chinese people. As the saying goes, "the common people have a scale in their hearts," or "the eyes of the masses are sharp." This "scale" and the "eyes of the masses" are actually morality. This "morality" cannot be used to instill a certain ideology. Or change it by destroying traditional culture.
Scientists believe that morality exists in a certain part of the brain and can even be inherited. Joshua Green, a professor at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University in the United States, designed the "Switch Puzzle" and the "Bridge Puzzle". When the subjects make choices about the questions, they use MRI to test the subjects' brains and see how their brains are. Which area is most active in answering this question.
"Switching Problem" Suppose there are five people lying on one switch, one person lying on the other switch, and a train is coming. Which way will you switch the switch now? Most of the subjects responded by turning the switch to the side where one person was lying, because five people could survive in this way, which was a rational choice.
"Bridge Problem" Suppose there are five people lying on a railway track and a train is approaching. If you push a fat man on the bridge down and block the train, the five people will be saved. Most of the subjects refused to push the fat man off, preferring to let the train crush the five people on the tracks. There are also opportunities to sacrifice one person and save the lives of five people, but the results of the subjects' choices in front of these two "difficulties" are different. In the latter, the subjects made an emotional choice. Psychologists have discovered that rational choices and emotional choices occur in several different areas of the brain, and that morality does have a physiological basis.
In a healthy society, whether it is an individual or a government, their choices for similar "difficulties" are based on the principles given by creation to human beings. When should they choose rationally and when should they choose? Choosing with emotion can basically be just right. Only in this way can society be more harmonious and progressive.
The above two "difficulties" designed by psychologists can be exemplified in real life. For example, one year there was a flood in the Yellow River, and the dams could burst at any time. Now it was necessary to divert the flood, so a small village was chosen as the flood outlet. This was a choice to sacrifice the local area and consider the overall situation.
The government's decision to make such a choice is rational and can be considered reasonable, although emotionally people are very reluctant to do that because it is immoral to the people in that village
Another example, Hundreds of acres of land in one village were favored by developers. The government decided to sell the land to the developers, but the compensation to the farmers was not enough to maintain their future livelihoods, so the farmers organized to demand higher compensation. Now the government is faced with the following choices: First, send special police to suppress, injure, frighten, and defeat the farmers, and finally achieve the purpose of expropriating the land. The second is to provide farmers with reasonable compensation through peaceful negotiations.
The first choice is rational. What the government considers more is that increasing farmers’ compensation will reduce the government’s land sales income, and may harm the interests of developers and cause the project to abort, which will inevitably affect the local area. The government's GDP performance. The second option is emotional. From a moral perspective, the government and businessmen are unwilling to see the tragic experience of landless farmers and realize that the ultimate purpose of politics and business is to benefit people, not to create suffering.
Obviously, in a civilized society, people are willing to see the latter option. However, the reality in China is that rational choices overwhelm emotional choices. Throughout Chinese history, those who win the world are ruthless. According to psychologists, in China, people with lesions in the premedian cortex are more likely to achieve great things, while those with a kind heart tend to accomplish nothing. This cannot be my fault. The misfortune of our country and our people