I was struck by the parallels with our own times: the Romans, convinced of their own rightness and virtue, exported their version of global capitalism and created "client kings" and puppet regimes, and brought culture, but also exploited their colonial hosts.
So how do we learn about value and rightness and virtue themselves?
One issue that has since concerned philosophers is whether respect for persons is the definitive focus of morality, either in the sense that moral rightness and goodness and hence all specific moral duties, rights, and virtues are explainable in terms of respect or in the sense that the supreme moral principle from which all other principles are derived is a principle of respect for persons.
Some believe that they can all be captured as actions that are creative (Taylor 1987), while others maintain that they are exhibit rightness or virtue and perhaps also involve reward proportionate to morality (Kant 1791, pt. 2; cf. Pogge 1997).
While these views differed among themselves as to what goodness, rightness, virtue and justice might consist in, they shared a commitment to seeing morality as a wholly natural phenomenon and they all saw moral judgment as a matter of thinking that actions, institutions, or characters had some particular natural property or other.
We cannot see, touch, taste, or smell value or rightness or virtue, even as we can see, touch, taste, or smell some of the things that have value or that are right or that manifest virtue.
Like Mencius, Xunzi believed in the perfectibility of all human beings through self-cultivation, in humanity and rightness as cardinal virtues, in humane government as the kingly way, in social harmony, and in education.
It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness and promise.
Normality and abnormality, rightness and wrongness, often run in tandem.
It has to do with determination and the rightness and the truthfulness of the ideas".
