In Mencius, “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch, and a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” has long been paraphrased as “to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of righteousness” since the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, only when one “forgets about his death” can he “sacrifice his life for the sake of righteousness”. Instead, if he “never forgets about his death”, he would “prefer his life to righteousness”. According to the context, Mencius here speaks against Chen Dai’s viewpoint that “to bend one foot of something to straighten eight feet of it”, in other words, “to sacrifice minor principles for greater gains”. In a similar context, it is also stated by Confucius as “keeping to the Tao is not as good a thing as keeping to one’s official duties”. In Shuo Yuan, however, the same expression that “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch” is strangely interpreted as the opposite words of the rule of “sacrificing one’s life for the sake of righteousness”. Moreover, Hanshi Waizhuan tells a story which has nothing to do with this rule. Here “a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” is used to describe those scholars who feel contented to live a simple and virtuous life and would not rush to pursue wealth with dishonor. In this sense, “忘” or “forget” in “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch, and a man of valor never forgets that he may lose his head” is the interchangeable word of “妄”, thus transforming the sentence into “a man with lofty ideals never rushes to die unnecessarily in a ditch, and a man of valor never rushes to lose his head pointlessly”. In such case, the whole sentence highlights the significance of life and disvalues a death without a just cause. Therefore, from the standpoint of pre-Qin Confucian scholars, “attaching little importance to death” only embodies the courage of the man of meanness; rather, to value life and etiquette and to keep independent from gains, powers and popular opinions reveals the courage of the man of virtue.To judge that whether a man “sacrifices his life for the sake of righteousness” or he “attaches little importance to life and death” is to see whether he lives and dies in accordance with the ritual system. As the “righteousness” in the ritual era means a strict and highly fixed duty for social individuals, “the death for the sake of righteousness” could only be acknowledged when the official dies for “keeping to his duties”. Likewise, the death caused by wielding power beyond one’s official duty is regarded as the result of “the embezzlement of duty” or “the unnecessary death in the ditch”. Therefore, for those who die for their remonstrance, Bi Gan, both an imperial relative and a high-ranking official, is thought to sacrifice “for the sake of righteousness”, while Xie Ye, an official bearing a different surname and thus an outsider for the imperial clan, “dies unnecessarily”. As defined by early Confucians, the noble deaths of Xie Ye, Shi Yu and Zong Lu are nothing but the consequences of the meaningless and arrogant “embezzlement of duty”. More than that, their self-assumed loyalty and tragic ends cause greater damage to social rituals.The principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” allows retainers to safeguard the interests of their feudal lords but not to obey their monarch blindly, and thus serves as the foundation of the power balance and mutual respect between the monarch and subjects in the ritual system of the Zhou Dynasty. Therefore, the significance of Confucius’ sticking to the principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” far exceeds the value of subjects’ loyalty to the monarch or of their pursuit of Tao and righteousness. In the autocratic era after the Qin and Han dynasties, as individual duties stay no longer as closely differentiated as those in the ritual era, and as the connotations of “Tao” and “righteousness” become no longer subject to social rituals and consequently broadened with great uncertainty, and the standard of morality and ethics becomes different from that of the ritual era. As a result, the Confucians in the autocratic era deny that Confucius once said that “keeping to the Tao is not as good a thing as keeping to one’s official duties”; rather, they equate the principle of “keeping to one’s official duties” with the thought of being loyal to the monarch.The pre-Qin Confucianism achieves an excellent balance between the seemingly contradictory views that “to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of righteousness” and “to value one’s life so as to keep his official duties”. The idea of “a man with lofty ideals never rushes to die unnecessarily in a ditch” or “keeping to one’s official duties” serves to be a counterbalance to both Yang Zhu’s idea of “extreme egoism” and Mo Zi’s idea of “extreme altruism”. Without this mutual balance, denying “extreme altruism” would inevitably lead to a dominant “extreme egoism”. In consequence, the public would find it embarrassing to mention “egoism” and feel forced to advocate “altruism”. As far as the text is concerned, it is not difficult to perceive the interchangeability between “忘” and “妄”. The difficulty lies in the bold interpretation of “a man with lofty ideals never forgets that his death may be in a ditch” into “a man values his life and never rushes to die unnecessarily”, since such understanding would establish Mencius as a coward, which fails to meet the public expectation of Confucian morality or Confucian sages.