Confucius presented himself as a transmitter rather than an innovator, recovering a way of doing things he believed had once been practised and since lost. What he transmitted was an account of how people become good, and of why that is a political question and not only a personal one.
Ren, humaneness or fellow-feeling, is the central virtue, and the Analects declines to define it, answering the question differently depending on who asks. Li, ritual propriety, covers ceremony in the narrow sense and also the whole range of learned forms: manners, deference, mourning, the way one addresses a superior or a child. The claim is that character is formed by practising these forms and not merely expressed through them.
Yi is rightness in the particular case. Xiao, filial piety, the duty owed to parents living and dead, is treated as the root from which the other obligations grow. The junzi, the exemplary person, is the one in whom all this has become second nature, a term Confucius redefined from an inherited rank into an achieved quality.
Relationships rather than individuals are the unit of analysis. The tradition sets out five: ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, elder and younger sibling, and friend and friend. Each carries obligations running in both directions, though not equal ones.
Government follows from this. A ruler who is himself upright will be obeyed without issuing commands; a state held together by punishment produces subjects who evade punishment, while one held together by ritual and example produces subjects with a sense of shame. Zhengming, the rectification of names, requires that words match realities, that one called a ruler in fact behave as a ruler should, and is offered as a first task of government.