Thinker · TH-0303
Mozi
Mozi was a Chinese thinker of the early Warring States period and founder of the Mohist school, the main rival of the Confucians for…
墨子
Also known as Mo Di, Mo Tzu, Micius
c. 470 – 391 BCE · State of Lu and the warring states of northern China
Traditions: Chinese
Schools: Mohism
Mozi was a Chinese thinker of the early Warring States period and founder of the Mohist school, the main rival of the Confucians for two centuries; his dates are approximate. He judged doctrines and practices by whether they benefit the people, increasing wealth, population and social order, and argued for impartial care for all. The text that bears his name, compiled by his followers, is often read as an early systematic consequentialism.
Key ideas
- Impartial care (jian ai): we should care for others' families and states as for our own.
- Doctrines are tested by three standards: precedent of the sage kings, the evidence of people's eyes and ears, and benefit to the people when applied.
- Offensive war is condemned as theft and murder on a large scale.
- Elaborate funerals and costly music waste resources that should benefit the people.
Major works
- Mozi (the Mohist text, compiled by followers, c. 5th–3rd century BCE)
- 'Impartial Care' (Jian ai) and 'Against Offensive Warfare' (Fei gong) chapters of the Mozi
In the conversation
- Debate “Chinese philosophy had no epistemology” is wrong, and the Mohists are the proof
- Discussion Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
- Debate Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
- Question What were Mozi’s three tests for judging whether a doctrine is right?
- Question What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
- Question Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
- Discussion Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
- Question Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
- Discussion ‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
- Debate A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
- Reading group Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
- Question Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
- Debate Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
- Reading group Reading group: the Mozi’s three chapters on impartial caring (jian’ai), one a week
- Question Xunzi on “obsession” and modern cognitive bias: the same diagnosis of irrationality?
- Discussion Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
- Question Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
- Reading group Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude