Mohism
470 BCE – 221 BCE
Care for everyone equally, judge every practice by whether it benefits people, and treat lavish ritual as theft from the living.
- Active
- 470 BCE – 221 BCE
- Where
- The state of Song, and then across the warring states
- Also
- 墨家 Mòjiā
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Chinese
The claim
Impartial care — jian ai. You should care for other people's parents as you care for your own, because the partiality everyone takes for granted is precisely what produces war, theft and cruelty.
What it held
Mohism is the first consequentialism anywhere, by roughly two thousand years. Mozi asks of every practice: does it enrich the state, increase the population, and bring order? If not, abolish it — and he applies the test without sentiment to the things his society held most sacred.
Elaborate funerals fail the test, because they impoverish families and take the living out of production for three years. Ritual music fails it, because it consumes resources and produces nothing. Aggressive warfare fails it most obviously of all, and the Mohists did not merely argue the point: they trained as military engineers and travelled to besieged cities to help defend them, on the reasoning that making conquest expensive is the practical way to stop it.
The later Mohists went further and built something no other early Chinese school attempted: a formal treatment of definition, inference, naming and optics, preserved in the Mohist Canons. It is the closest thing classical China has to a logic.
How it argued
The three tests: what did the sage kings do, what do the people's eyes and ears report, and what happens when the policy is applied. Evidence, precedent and consequence — argued plainly, in deliberately unadorned prose.
What it was arguing against
Confucianism, at every point. The graded love that begins with family and radiates outward, the elaborate mourning ritual, the ceremonial music, and the fatalism the Mohists thought Confucians used to excuse inaction. Also the Daoist withdrawal from public affairs.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether impartial care asks the impossible of ordinary people, which the school answered by arguing it need only govern conduct, not feeling. The three later Mohist sects disagreed about the canons and, according to the Zhuangzi, called each other heretics.
Common misconceptions
That impartial care means loving strangers as much as your own children in feeling. Mozi's claim is about treatment and obligation rather than affection. And Mohism is not otherworldly: its Heaven is a standard-setter that rewards and punishes, invoked to give the ethics teeth.
How it began
Mozi may have been an artisan or a craftsman — the name suggests a convict's tattoo or simply the colour of ink — and the school's suspicion of aristocratic display reads like the view from below. It was organised as a disciplined order with a leader who could impose the death penalty.
What became of it
It vanished almost completely after the Qin unification in 221 BCE, and the texts were barely read for two thousand years. The Canons were so corrupt by the time scholars returned to them in the nineteenth century that reconstructing them is still a live discipline.
Lasting influence
Almost none directly, which is the striking thing about it. Its lasting effect was on Confucianism, which sharpened its own defence of graded love in response — Mencius calls Mozi's doctrine the denial of one's father.
Why it still matters
It is the clearest early statement of the case for impartiality in ethics, and modern utilitarians arrive at the same objections Mencius raised. The defensive-warfare programme is a rare instance of a philosophical school acting on its conclusions at physical risk.
Put another way
An auditor with a conscience, walking into a temple and asking what any of this is for.
Where to start
The chapters Impartial Care and Against Aggression, in that order. They are short, unornamented and lose nothing in translation.
The surprising bit
The Mohists were siege engineers. Their texts include chapters on tunnel defence, gate reinforcement and counter-mining, and members travelled to cities under attack to make the walls hold.
In their own words
If everyone regarded other states as they regard their own, who would raise armies to attack another state?
The murder of one man is called unrighteous. Murder ten thousand and it is called a glorious deed.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Confucianism (classical), Daoism (Dao-jia)
The verdict
The most modern-sounding school of ancient China, argued into silence and then simply forgotten.