De is the second word in the title of the Daodejing and the usual English virtue smuggles in a moralism the Chinese does not carry. It is closer to inherent potency, the effectiveness a thing has by fully being what it is — a knife's de is its sharpness, a ruler's de is the authority that makes people follow without being coerced. The Daodejing's central move on it is inversion: the highest de does not consider itself de, and that is why it has it, whereas the person conscious of their virtue and displaying it has already lost it. The same logic runs through the text's treatment of benevolence and ritual, which it presents as progressively degraded substitutes appearing only once the real thing is gone — a direct swipe at the Confucians, who are the argument's intended target throughout.