Anaect 13.3 raises an interesting paradox: Moral truth vs. Legal justice. What Confucius seems to be saying here is that being “true” isn’t the same thing as just following the law. The Governor of She treats reporting the father as a moral good, but Confucius pushes back by grounding truth in family relationships instead. For Confucius, morality isn’t mainly about rules or punishment; it’s about acting properly within your roles, especially as a son or father. From that perspective, turning in your own parent misses what really matters morally.

Analect 8.14 provides a good, brief summary of Confucius’s view on the political hierarchy. This seems like Confucius is emphasizing respecting boundaries and roles. He isn’t saying you should avoid thinking or caring about politics entirely, but rather that you shouldn’t interfere in matters outside your authority.

This connects nicely with Analects 4.14, where he tells people to focus on being worthy of a position rather than obsessing over the position itself. Both passages emphasize focusing on self-cultivation and emphasizes staying out of matters that isn’t a part of your business.

It makes me wonder: is this advice primarily practical (to avoid chaos in governance) or moral (to cultivate humility and propriety)? Tentatively, I think it’s both: Confucius blends ethical behavior with practical wisdom here.

I am very intrigued by Confucius’s take on music as a moral instrument, shown in Analect 3.25. Confucius’s emphasis on music here seems less about aesthetic enjoyment and more about moral psychology. Music is treated as a way of ordering emotions, not suppressing them. Proper music cultivates harmony within the person, aligning emotions with ritual and virtue, whereas disordered music reflects or produces moral disorder. This suggests that for Confucius, emotions are not morally neutral; they need shaping. Music functions almost like ethical training for the emotions, analogous to how ritual (li) trains outward behavior. If this is right, then music is not optional cultural decoration but a core tool of moral cultivation.

If Confucius is right that music both reflects and shapes emotional order, then he might interpret Modern hip-hop involving drugs and self indulgence as evidence of deeper moral disorder rather than merely changing tastes. Confucius often links cultural decay to the shortcomings of rulers; so one might ask whether he would see modern music as reflecting ethical failures at the level of institutions, elites, or cultural authorities rather than blaming individuals alone. Does his framework risk dismissing new forms of expression too quickly?

Analect 1.2 highlights Confucius’s view on the role of (civil) education in society, which takes a bottom-up structure beginning in the smaller units of individual families which collectively form the greater society. By behaving according to Li and Xiao in one’s family, he/she develops habits that slowly becomes virtue in society. In other words, if you learn to respect and care for parents and siblings, you are less likely to be a rebellious threat to social order and more likely to grow into ren.

I think Confucius’s claims regarding strong filial piety are built on assumptions of healthy, ordered families in an ideal world. I can’t help but wonder: Does this ‘bottom‑up’ model still make sense today, when many people distrust both family and state authority? I’m tempted to say he underestimates how unjust families or governments can be, but his point that character starts in small, close relationships still feels powerful.