From the Private-Good Personality to the Rational Public-Good Personality: The Transformation of the Human Heart and the Modern Construction of the Moral Subject
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The construction of a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity appears on the surface to be a matter of global governance, institutional coordination, and the alignment of interests; at a deeper level, however, it is a matter of the structure of the human heart and of value judgment. Existing research has advanced mainly along three paths, institutions, interests, and civilizational dialogue, yet it rarely addresses the micro-level foundation of subjectivity: how the Community can transform the human heart. This paper proposes a thesis of the transformation of the human heart from the private-good personality to the rational public-good personality. Grounding the analysis in a four-layer structure of human nature, namely the material, bodily, affective-appetitive, and rational layers, it argues that the pursuit of one's own good is a basic existential condition rather than selfishness, and that the public good does not cancel the private good but provides a sustainable framework for its higher realization. It identifies dignity, recognition, and the settlement of meaning as the psychological dynamics of personality transformation, and constructs a model of transformation: private-good motivation; creating value by harnessing good to dispel evil; protecting value through legitimate restraint; advancing future value through constructive pressure; value feedback; the rational public-good personality; and community stability. The paper's contributions are threefold: it supplies an anthropology and a moral-psychological foundation for community research, reconceptualizes the axiological relation between the public good and the private good, and establishes personality transformation as the micro-level precondition of cognitive consensus and communal action.
Author: Hua, Guoping
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222136704
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