Mozi

Their big question

Should you care about everyone equally?

Mozi was born soon after Confucius died and disagreed with him about almost everything, in a way that is still useful.

Confucius taught that you should love your own family most, then your neighbours, then outward in decreasing circles. Mozi said that this is exactly the mechanism that produces war: if your loyalty narrows as it goes out, then the people far away are always less than people, and armies are just the extreme version of thinking that. His alternative, jian ai, is that you should care for another person’s family as you care for your own — impartial care, all the way out.

He was not sentimental about it. His argument was consequentialist: test a rule by whether it brings benefit and reduces harm. That test made him oppose offensive war, expensive funerals, elaborate music and wasteful ceremony, on the grounds that the resources had somewhere better to go. His followers were known for marching long distances to defend cities, which is a strange look for people who opposed war — until you notice they were always on the defending side.

The obvious objection is that impartial care is impossible. Almost nobody can feel for a distant stranger what they feel for their own child, and pretending otherwise is a lie that makes you useless when your own child is hungry. That is a strong objection. It is also why the argument never went away: if caring more about your own is a natural fact, it does not follow that it is a fair basis for running anything larger than a family.

“If everyone cared for others as they care for their own, there would be no war.”

A summary of his doctrine of jian ai, commonly translated as impartial care or universal love.

Three things worth knowing

• He was an engineer as well as a philosopher, and he designed the siege defences — then travelled to defend cities against the very armies he had armed.
• He thought a rule earns its place by the benefit it produces, which makes him one of the earliest thinkers to test morality by consequences.
• His followers were famous for walking barefoot across whole provinces to stop a war between two rulers who had never heard of them.

Try it — think like Mozi

Choose one thing you would do for a friend that you would not do for a stranger. Now write an argument for why the difference is right — and then write Mozi's reply to it.

We have no portrait of Mozi that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.