Chapter eighteen is four lines, and each one converts a recognised good into evidence of a loss.
When the great way is abandoned, benevolence and rightness appear. When cleverness comes forward, great pretence follows. When the six kinship relations fall out of harmony, filial devotion and parental care appear. When the state falls into disorder, loyal ministers appear.
The two virtues named first are the central pair of the Confucian vocabulary, and filial devotion is the foundation of the whole ethical system built on it. The chapter does not say they are bad, and it does not say they are false. It says they become visible, and become subjects of discussion, precisely when the condition they describe has stopped being ordinary.
The observation is uncomfortably good. Loyal ministers are conspicuous in disordered states, because in a functioning one nobody has occasion to notice who is loyal. Filial devotion is praised in families where it is in doubt. A virtue that has acquired a name and a literature is a virtue that has become an achievement, and things become achievements when they stop being normal.
What the chapter refuses is the remedy of promoting the named virtue harder, which is chapter three's argument in another form. Naming and exalting the good produces its absence as a category, and the more the naming is done, the more there is to name.