China & East Asia · c. 430–200 BCE
Mohism
Care for everyone impartially, and judge every doctrine and practice by whether it benefits the people.
What standard tells us which practices are right?
Mozi, probably of humble artisan background, lived through war and hardship and rejected the Confucians’ graded love and costly rites such as elaborate funerals and music. His followers formed a disciplined organisation that also served as defensive military engineers for besieged states.
Disorder arises because people care for their own family and state more than others’. If everyone cared impartially, theft and aggression would lose their point. Any doctrine should pass three tests: the precedent of the sage kings, the evidence of ordinary people’s eyes and ears, and its benefit to the people.
- Practise impartial care for all (jian ai).
- Wars of aggression are unjust.
- Wasteful rites and music harm the people.
It faded after the Qin–Han unification, but its later canons contain China’s earliest systematic logic, optics and mechanics, and it was rediscovered by reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thinkers
c. 470–391 BCEMoziFounder of Mohism and critic of Confucian partialityKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstConfucianismMozi attacked the Confucians’ graded, family-first love, their lavish funerals and music, and their fatalism.
What it led to
Borrowed bySchool of NamesLater Mohists and the disputers worked on the same problems of names, kinds and argument; the Mohist canons seem to rebut some disputers’ theses, though who influenced whom is not recorded.
Its answers to the big questions
EthicsHow should one live?Care for everyone impartially, and judge every custom by whether it benefits the people.PoliticsWhat makes power legitimate?Promote the worthy whatever their birth, and unify standards for the common benefit.On the record
The Mozi’s “Impartial Care” and “Against Offensive War” chapters are listed as Mozi’s work.
The Mozi is a collection of anonymous texts from the 5th to the 3rd century BCE. The core chapters, each surviving in up to three versions, record the doctrines of Mozi’s movement as written down by his followers, not by Mozi himself.