Should you care for everyone equally? Mozi and the first great argument about impartiality

When people learn that I study Mohism, they often ask whether Mozi was "the Chinese Bentham". The comparison is not silly. Chris Fraser's study of the school is subtitled The First Consequentialists, and the label has stuck. But I think the most valuable thing about the Mohists is not that they anticipated utilitarianism. It is that they started one of the oldest recorded philosophical debates about impartiality, against opponents who were every bit as sharp, and the shape of that debate can still teach us something.

Who was Mozi?

Mozi, Master Mo, lived in the fifth century BCE, a little after Confucius, in a period of near-constant war between Chinese states. The text that bears his name was compiled by his followers over generations. Its core chapters come in triads, three versions of each essay, with titles such as "Impartial Caring", "Against Offensive Warfare", "Moderation in Use", "Moderation in Funerals" and "Against Music".

The Mohist criterion is benefit (li) to all under heaven, which in practice meant wealth, a growing population and social order. Every doctrine is to be tested by three standards: its basis in the deeds of the ancient sage-kings, its confirmation by what ordinary people have seen and heard, and its effects when applied in government. Practices that consume resources without benefit, such as lavish funerals and years of mourning, which Confucians treated as central to filial devotion, fail the test.

The central ethical teaching is jian ai, usually translated "impartial caring" or "inclusive care". The root of harm in the world, Mozi argued, is partiality: people caring for their own family, their own state, themselves, and not for others. If people regarded other families as their own, who would attack them? The opening of "Against Offensive Warfare" makes the point with a ladder of cases. Everyone condemns a man who steals peaches and plums from a neighbour's orchard. Stealing his animals is worse, and killing an innocent person to take his clothes is worse still. Yet when one state attacks another and kills thousands, people praise it. They have lost the ability to see that the same principle applies.

The Confucian reply

The Confucians did not reject care for others. Their ethics is full of concern for the people and for good government. What they rejected was impartiality as the structure of morality. For them, care properly has degrees: it begins with parents and family and extends outward, as ripples spread from a stone. Mencius, the fourth-century Confucian, attacked Mozi in strong terms: impartial caring, he said, amounts to not acknowledging one's father, and to acknowledge neither father nor ruler is to be like the birds and beasts.

That sounds like abuse, but there is an argument inside it. In another passage of the Mencius, a Mohist named Yi Zhi proposes a compromise: love should be without gradations, but its practice begins with one's parents. Mencius replies that Heaven gives things a single root, while Yi Zhi gives them two: one principle for what you ought to feel and another for how you act. The point is that motivation and justification cannot be pulled apart so easily. Love for one's parents is not a regrettable bias to be managed. It is where the capacity to care for anyone grows from.

The Mohist counter-reply

The Mohists saw this coming. In "Impartial Caring" they ask what a filial son wants: surely that other people care for and benefit his parents. And how is he to get that? By first caring for and benefiting the parents of others, so that they will do likewise. Impartiality, on this argument, is the best way to secure the very goods the Confucian prizes.

They also denied that impartiality is psychologically impossible, as their critics claimed. Behaviour that seems hard becomes common when those above encourage it. Their example is King Ling of Chu, who admired slender waists, so that his ministers limited themselves to a single meal a day. If people will starve themselves for a fashion, the Mohists asked, why should they not care for others when it is honoured and rewarded?

Then and now

Mohism faded as an organised school after the Qin and Han unifications, while Confucianism became state orthodoxy. But the argument reappeared, with no documented transmission, in modern Europe. The utilitarian maxim that everybody is to count for one and nobody for more than one, which Mill attributed to Bentham, is a direct statement of impartiality. Peter Singer, in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972), argued that distance and nationality make no moral difference to our duty to relieve suffering. Bernard Williams replied that a theory requiring a person to treat their own commitments and relationships as just one input among others has lost hold of what makes a life a person's own. Care ethicists have pressed a related objection.

Williams and the care ethicists stand roughly where Mencius stood; Singer stands roughly where Mozi stood. But the differences cut against the "Chinese Bentham" label. The Mohists maximised material and social goods, not pleasure or preference satisfaction. And their argument was addressed to rulers and to policy as much as to private conscience: it is first of all a theory of how a state should be run. The standard consequentialist reading of jian ai is also not unanimous; some scholars have argued for a more deontological reading.

My own view

Here is where I come down. On psychology, I think the Mohists were more right than they usually get credit for. Norms of concern really are shaped by what is honoured and rewarded, and the circle of people we feel responsible for has widened a great deal over history. The Confucian claim that impartial concern is simply impossible looks too strong.

But on the structure of motivation, I think Mencius saw something deep. Yi Zhi's "two roots" is not just a logical slip. If you justify care for your parents only as an efficient route to impartial benefit, you have what Williams later called "one thought too many": the person who must consult a principle before helping their own family has already missed something. The best modern consequentialists accept this and argue that an impartial theory can recommend partial dispositions. Whether that answers Mencius or quietly concedes his point is, I think, the real question.

What the ancient debate shows most clearly is that impartiality is not a modern discovery, and neither is the objection to it. Reading Mozi and Mencius together is one of the best ways I know to see the issue whole, because both sides argued as if their society depended on the answer, and in an age of constant war, perhaps it did.