ABSTRACT
Honesty is the behavior of having the intent to convey true information, and it is thus the basic bond that maintains interpersonal cooperation and guarantees the existence and development of society and the most important moral rule of how to treat others with goodness. On the contrary, the most important moral rule of treating oneself with goodness is cherishing-life: life is undoubtedly the most important thing for a human. However, cherishing-life is not the highest moral rule to treat oneself with goodness. The highest moral rule to treat oneself with goodness is self-respect. Cherishing-life, the love of life itself, can only trigger egoistic behaviors of lower-level purposes: to live. On the contrary, self-respect, the love of the personality of the self, can trigger egoistic behaviors of higher-level purposes: to live a productive, successful, and valuable life. Self-respect seems to be the opposite of modesty, but actually it is not. Modesty means conducting oneself with humility to others to learn from others and is based on self-respect: the purpose of behaving with humility and holding others superior is to learn from others to achieve great things and realize self-respect. What is the basic content of achievements and self-respect? It is wisdom. Wisdom is a relatively perfect intellectual ability. If a person has a talent above that of average people, then whether he can acquire wisdom depends entirely on his learning; wisdom is directly proportional to his learning. The significance of wisdom lies entirely in its control and realization of emotional desire: if the emotional desire is controlled by wisdom and reason, it is called continence, otherwise, it is an indulgence. Continence can make people refrain from doing things they know they ought not to do and thus refrain from harming themselves or others, so it is an extremely important good. In an individual’s life, the most important continence to be practiced is the guidance and control of wisdom over courage. Courage means being unafraid in dire situations. If courage deviates from wisdom, it is reckless and unjust courage, which is harmful to society and others as well as to oneself and has negative moral value. Only when combined with wisdom can courage be considered as righteous and heroic courage, which is beneficial to society and others as well as to oneself; thus, courage can have a positive moral value. So, is it correct to say that the more strictly, absolutely, extremely, excessively, and rigidly individuals follow all the moral rules such as courage, continence, wisdom, modesty, self-respect, cherishing-life, and honesty, and all moral principles such as goodness, justice, equality, humanity, liberty, and happiness, the better his life will be? No. Only “the doctrine of the mean” (i.e. proper following of morality) is good; both “the above” (i.e., excessive following of morality) and “the below” (i.e., no following of morality) are bad.
