The Taoists believe that the so-called nature of all things in heaven and earth is "Tao", and the nature of all things is "virtue". For human beings, it is character. The Song and Ming philosophers called "virtue" the practice of a certain principle, which is gained in the heart.
De
[edit]Morality
Morality consists of two words, Dao and De.
Dao is the path, the line, the way.
Deity is the manifestation of behavior.
When Tao and virtue are combined together, the meaning changes and a new meaning of morality is given.
The word Dao becomes a verb.
De is determined by the Tao. There is virtue produced by the Tao, which evolves into morality.
Now people put the meaning of morality emphatically on the word de.
It means that people are happy with whatever Tao you take, as long as it produces good fruits of virtue.
When it comes to academics, Tao is Tao and virtue is virtue, and there is no confusion.
In people's lives, one can apply morality as a meaning of the word de.
In many things, people only look at the result without asking about the process. The other party, no matter what path they take, manifests virtue intuitively.
So, for the most part, morality means virtue.
[Meaning of Morality]
Morality is an important element in the development of advanced culture, which constitutes human civilization, especially spiritual civilization. What we usually mean by morality
is the principles and standards that people's behavior should follow. The definition of morality can be summarized as follows: morality is a special code of conduct proposed by a certain society and a certain class to
people to deal with all kinds of relations between individuals and individuals, and between individuals and society.
This concept suggests that morality is a behavioral norm that regulates the relationship between people and between individuals and society based on the criteria of good and evil
. Morality always promotes good and suppresses evil. Morality is different from the law in that it is based on social opinion, traditional culture and habits of life to judge
judge the quality of a person, and relies mainly on people's conscious inner concepts to maintain.
The word morality has a long history. As early as two thousand years ago, the word "morality" appeared in the ancient writings of China
The term "Tao" denotes the way of life, the way of the world, the way of the world, the way of the world, the way of the world. The word "Tao" denotes the rule of the movement and change of things; the word "morality" denotes the realization of the "Tao" and the proper management of relationships between people according to its rules
. From the founder of Confucianism in China, the great thinker and educator Confucius, for thousands of years...
People have been practicing virtue.
People have always attached importance to morality.
Morality is the practice of virtue - practicing the truth and developing it.
Truth is the Way. To walk the path is to create conditions, establish mechanisms, run the objective law of harmonious development, everyone wins, and create the objective reality of harmonious development, is to use science and practice truth. Accumulation of virtue is to continuously create the objective reality of harmonious development, is the pursuit of truth, the development of truth. To walk the path and accumulate virtue is morality.
It is immoral to destroy the harmonious development at the expense of oneself and others; it is general morality to realize the harmonious development with equality and mutual benefit, honesty and mutual assistance; it is noble morality to promote the harmonious development by helping people and serving the public; it is the highest morality to sacrifice oneself to save the people and the public in order to reach the peak of morality in the practice of morality. This class (hierarchical) difference in morality is an objective fact, and a society in which the noble moral class is dominant is naturally a society of highly harmonious development. This is the basic point of view of harmonious morality.
The practice of the Way requires three basic conditions: First, the universal acceptance of the concept of the Way, and the clear direction, goals and guiding ideology of development, which are spiritual conditions. Second, the creation of a basic guarantee of material living conditions, in the economy, first of all, to eliminate the polarization of poverty and monopoly, the universal establishment of social security system of life, this is the material conditions. Third, the establishment of harmonious constraints and incentives for individual and group behavior, that is, the establishment of the corresponding legal system and customs, which is the social operating conditions. Only with these three conditions, the objective law of universal operation of harmonious development, everyone wins, so that society to a high degree of harmonious development of the ideal goal closer.
What is morality? Simply put, morality is the standard by which human beings distinguish between good and evil. So is morality innate to human beings, or is it acquired through acquired education? Psychologists have found that the basic standards of human morality are the same regardless of race, creed and cultural background, such as honesty, integrity, empathy and compassion are good, and deception and murder are evil. Moreover, humans show the ability to distinguish between good and evil in infancy, and it appears that this standard for judging good and evil is innate.
The Three Character Classic says, "In the beginning of man, nature is good," which is aptly interpreted as "man is born knowing good and evil. If morality is related to education, then why is it that China has set up many moral heroes as role models for the people over the past half century, but has not seen any benefit in raising the moral standard of the whole nation? Today, on the contrary, we can hear people exclaiming that morality has fallen and there is a huge crisis of integrity. For example, is it not strange that the photos of the South China tiger have been questioned as fake, and even the photos of the moon's surface taken by the Chang'e spacecraft have been questioned as having been stolen from NASA's earlier photos of the moon's surface?
On the other hand, if a society completely destroys its own traditional moral system, will it change people's standards for judging good and evil? We know that the "Four Olds" campaign of the Cultural Revolution was the most thorough in its denial and destruction of China's entire traditional culture, but we have not seen any change in the Chinese people's internal moral standards. As the saying goes, "There is a scale in the hearts of the common people" or "The eyes of the masses are discerning", and this "scale" and "eyes of the masses" are in fact morality. This "scale" and "eyes of the people" are in fact morality, which cannot be changed by instilling a certain ideology or by destroying traditional culture.
Scientists believe that morality exists in some part of the brain and can even be inherited. Joshua Green, a professor at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, designed the "wrench puzzle" and the "bridge puzzle" to test a subject's brain with nuclear magnetic **** vibration to see which region of the brain is most active in answering the question when the subject makes a choice. The brain was tested with NMR*** vibrations to see which area of the brain was most active in answering the question.
The "wrenching puzzle" assumes that there are five people lying on one switch, one person lying on another switch, and a train is coming, now which way would you wrench the switch? Most of the subjects answered that it would be the rational choice to pull the switch to the side with the one person lying on it, because that way five people would survive.
The "bridge puzzle" assumes that five people are lying on a railroad track, and a train is coming. If you push a fat man off the bridge to block the train, the five people will be saved. Most of the subjects refused to push the fat man down, preferring to let the train crush the five people on the tracks. The same sacrifice of one person to save the lives of five people the opportunity to choose, but the subjects in the two "difficult" in front of the results are not the same, the latter, the subjects made an emotional choice. Psychologists have found that rational and emotional choices occur in several different areas of the brain, and that there is indeed a physiological basis for morality.
The psychologists further found that some people with lesions in the pre-frontal median cortex, the area of the brain responsible for emotion, lose the ability to make moral judgments and tend to make rational choices in "bridge dilemmas".
In a healthy society, whether it is an individual or a government, their choice of similar "difficult problems" is to follow the guidelines given to human beings by the creation to choose, when it should be rational to choose, when it should be used to choose emotionally, basically can be appropriate, so that the society can more harmonious and progress.
The above two psychologists designed the "problem" can be found in real life examples. For example, when the Yellow River flooded one year, the dike could break at any time, and the flood had to be diverted, so a small village was chosen as the outlet of the flood, which was a choice of sacrificing the local area to take care of the big picture. It is rational for the government to make such a choice, and it can be considered reasonable, although emotionally people are very reluctant to do that because it is immoral for the people of that village
Another example is a village with hundreds of acres of land that developers have been interested in, and the government decides to sell the land to the developers, but the compensation given to the farmers is not enough to maintain their livelihood in the future, and so the farmers organize themselves to demand for higher compensation. Now the government is faced with the following choices: first, to send special police to suppress the farmers, injuring, scaring and defeating them, so as to finally achieve the goal of land expropriation. The second is to give the farmers reasonable compensation through peaceful negotiations.
The first choice is rational, and the government is thinking more about the fact that raising the farmers' compensation will reduce the government's revenue from land sales, and at the same time it may harm the developers' interests and lead to the abortion of the project, which will inevitably affect the local government's performance in terms of GDP. The second option is emotional, from a moral point of view, the government and businessmen do not want to see the misery of the landless farmers, realizing that the ultimate goal of politics and business is to benefit people, not to create suffering.
Obviously, in a civilized society, people would like to see the latter option, yet the reality in China is that rational choices overwhelm emotional ones. Throughout Chinese history, those who have won the world are all cold people, according to psychologists, in China, there are lesions in the anterior frontal median cortex of the people easy to achieve great things, while those who have a kind heart more than nothing, which can not be our country and our people's misfortune