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The moral compass Essay Introduction According to the definition of the Moral Compass text, moral compass is the reflective, international adoption of values and behaviors as a framework for realizing the good in oneself, in others, and in the social and material environment. My own moral compass is constructed mainly by my parents and the eastern social values and principles of relationships, which are largely influenced by the thoughts and ideas of Buddhism, Taoism and the Confucianism.
Among them, Confucianism affects my country’s social values and furthermore my parents and my moral compass the most. In the contrast of Western culture, Confucianism puts a huge emphasis on the relationships between individuals in family, school, society and the country. The courtesies and hierarchies are defined clear in various kinds of relationships. The harmony of a society and the nation is much more important than the individual interests. Parents tend to have more authorities and family values more than persons.
My parents always taught me to be honest, considerate and self-sacrificed, and at the same time do your best to be competitive in academy and work performance. It is critical to solve the problem by yourself and try not to let it bother others. While making the decisions, you have to not only consider your benefits but also others’. Those are some important parts of my core believing. Moral Vision There is a famous Chinese saying: “Harbor no ill intention against others, but never relax vigilance against evil-doers. This is the most common idiom that used by my mom to tell us. My parents always teaches me and my brother to act upright as a good man and be honest to everyone, yet still have to stay clear and smart to prevent others to have some bad intention toward us. My mom reminds me a lot ” the world is a competitive, sometimes insidious place; it is crucial to the people who do not work hard or trust others too easily. you have to be humble, hard-working and make yourself competitive and intelligent in order to survive in this world and society”.
According to her saying, even you do not try to do any harm to others and be good, there is still someone who will come to you and take advantage of you. So if I am in the working place, simply being good is not enough; I have to be smart and sensitive about people; be aware of their true motivation, or at least put that in your mind. Do not trust people or judge people too fast without a serious consideration and analysis. This has been my core believing that I have to make myself stronger and stronger and be independent without relying too much on any others.
Also, it gives me a thought in my mind that be particularly careful at choosing my friends; some people are just not for me because of their complicated mind efforts. I love to be with friends that are relatively innocent and trustable. Moral Code My moral vision is close to the theory of “Evil nature of humans”. This principle had been mentioned many times by some famous philosophers in West and East world. In ancient China, a famous philosopher and also one student of Confusions, Xunzi, have proposed this idea as the earliest. At 1893, James Legge introduced the first translation of Xunzi’s classic: “That the nature is evil”.
Xunzi’s thoughts have been widely adapted by many emperors in different dynasties of China and had been spread and deeply rooted in ordinary Chinese culture. On the other hand, the law system from the western world also enhances the belief of human evil. Knowing about the spirit and nature of being selfish, the law therefore forces its governed people to stop raising negative intension toward others to make more benefits. The majorities of laws only regulate the negative behavior and the corresponded punishments, but not focus on the incentives to direct people to volunteering doing self-sacrifice.
Based on this foundation, my moral code tells me that every person has his/her own interests and conflicts will always happen; we should not be doing harms to others initiatively, but we should also not forget the complexity of human’s mind. Moral Fitness My moral code and the belief of human nature evil leads me to cultivate the knowledge and the competences of myself. I believe it is my own responsibilities to be sensitive about the interaction between people and learn how to protect myself from being hurt by others, regardless intentionally or unintentionally.
Therefore, I will make observations of people and the environments, to always best understand what situation I am and try to set up some prevention measurements to set myself from falling into a bad situation. Also, I will try to grow myself to be more intelligent and stronger. And the most important thing is, I will never try to do harms to people because I can simultaneously be more sensitive to know whether if there is any harm to others by the measurements I am about to take. Defining the Moment
Talking about the defining moment of personal moral challenge, I had one experience facing challenge related to my moral code before. While I was at my elementary school, I was kind of person that trusted everyone without any other thoughts. I just simply believed what other said to me, and was not dare or dislike to reject other’s request. Once there was a classmate and also friend of mine tried to borrow some money from me. He said that his mom was having some financial problems and he and his sister were in bad condition.
I knew that his family was a single family and I therefore went to the post office to withdraw all my savings in my account to give the money to him. He promised me to return the money to me while they are in better condition. I thought I was doing a good, moral thing by helping him and was very proud of myself. However, the thing was not like that simple. After weeks, I heard from my other friend saying that he lied to me and took this money to buy his wanting-video game. His family was as usual and did not need to borrow the money from others.
I was so shocked and frustrated, and I went to him directly to ask about the situation. He ultimately admitted that he used this money to purchase the video game but he kept saying that he would return the money to me. I was stunned. I thought I helped my friend but ended up to be treated as a fool. After that, I told my mom about the whole thing and she was angry. My mom then told my teacher of class and the teacher informed the mother of my classmate about her son’s cheating behavior. She apologized for her son’s ignorance and returned the money to me.
After that, my mom blamed me for being careless of giving the money to others without seriously consideration. She taught me to be particularly careful while dealing with money. She said,” now there is only an affordable amount of money involved in this event, so the whole thing is solved quickly and easily. But you cannot rely on this attitude. Before you go to withdraw the money, you should consider about it more carefully. After you have grown up, the amount of money you will be dealing with will sometimes be very large and it is irreversible once the situation has occurred.
Even it is involving your best friend, you should still be very cautious. And always remember, your friend can turn into total stranger if he has to protect his own interest or wants to take benefits from you. You have to learn how to protect yourself, then you can help the people who are really in needs of your helps. You have to be strong then can carry others. ” This is a very impressive event to me. It makes me realized that you are not supposed to trust everything from people, even it is from your friends, especially under the condition that they want to ask some favors from you.
And also, helping other is important but do not let this to be hurting myself. Self-protection and the awareness of people’s motivation is equally important as being a good friend or a good man. Moral challenges of business leadership From my developed moral compass and my personal integrated knowledge, I understand that the conflicts of different parties or stakeholders in business are inevitable, and you have to be very cautious and sensitive about the bad situation caused by your components or competitors that might come and drive you in. imply being nice and good is not enough; to do the business and compete in the market, you need to be very smart and shrewd that you can not only make profits from your customers with business partners, but also prevent yourself from being set up with dirty tricks by your enemies, or even your business partners. You cannot expect whether your ventured partner would one day turn on you due to the theory of “nature is evil”, so it is always better to be prepared.
Doing business is about making profits, and this behavior generates conflicts and disagreements; it is not as innocent as coordinating team job in school work. Furthermore, with the globalization and the gradually-increased market competition today, the complexity of human or organization’s relationship is getting higher and higher. If you are doing business with people from different cultures or in different markets, it is even easier to be thoughtless and lose all your benefits just from a single, inconspicuous mistake.
Every step and decision needs to be made carefully. So, my principle of realizing my moral compass in doing the business will be acting honestly, stay low-key, not trying to take advantages of others via unethical dirty tricks, carefully putting my trust on people who are observed and examined, and most importantly, always put in mind to place the priority of setting up the stop-loss point and protective measures in legal and contractual way to better insure the position of my company.
Summary The moral compass assignment provides me a chance to examine my own moral values and what my core beliefs are. It also reminds me my parents’ teaching and the philosophy that I grew up with. The Xunzi’s and Confucius’ teaching is not to ask you to mistrust anyone, but more about realizing how important it is to trust the “right person” and be sophisticated in making friends and even doing business. Also, it is possible for one to help someone else only if he is strong enough.
To sum up, I will be going to the direction of getting more reliable, being more conscious of potential risks in every aspect of doing the business and being more cleaver at judging situations, to better protect my company’s interests and benefits. Reference 1. Badaracco, J. J. (1997). Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right. Harvard Business Press. 2. Legge, J. (1893). “that the nature is evil”. Chinese Classics: with a translation, critical and exegetical notes and copious indexes , 2 (2), pp. 79-88. 3. Thompson, L. J. (2009). The Moral Compass: leadership for a free world. IAP.