Mohists: Early Effective Altruists?

I am suspicious that there were time travelers

Painting of Mozi.

Mohism was an ancient Chinese philosophical school. You may have heard that the Mohists were early utilitarians, which is right, but incomplete. In fact, Mohism is the philosophy you’d get if an HPMOR fan was transported back in time to the Warring States Period, shortly after finishing the Sequences and before they read their first microeconomics textbook.

Mohism was founded by the philosopher Mo Di, better known as Mozi (i.e. “Master Mo”).¹ He is traditionally depicted as being an extremely boring person obsessed with ethics. He was likely of low social status, possibly a carpenter or wheelwright, as he often uses metaphors drawn from those occupations. “Mo,” an uncommon surname meaning “ink,” may have referred to his dark skin. However, some scholars believe it may have referred to convict tattoos, indicating that he had a criminal past.

Although best known for their ethical system, Mohists made contributions in many fields, including military defense, geometry, mechanics, optics, economics, and slanderous stories about Confucius. Most of their scholarly work has been long lost. One of their military defense innovations, however, is known. A common tactic in war was to tunnel under a defensive wall to sneak into the city or collapse the wall. To counter it, a Mohist would dig a tunnel and put the drum in the tunnel, which would resonate and amplify the sounds of enemy miners. The Mythbusters tested this and it probably worked.

Mohists were opposed to aggressive war, so they formed a mercenary army that went around defending small countries from aggression by larger countries.

Mohist thinking was based around the shi-fei distinction. Shi, which comes from the verb used to connect nouns to each other (i.e. "this is an ox", "the queen is a cat", but not "the cat is blue") means that something is a member of the category denoted by a particular word. Fei means not shi. To Mohists, thinking is the process of distinguishing shi from similar fei.²

How do you tell apart shi and fei? Models-- that is, exemplars or standards used to guide activity. Their central examples are the compass and the carpenter's set square. Role models, examples, definitions, principles, and abstract concepts are all seen as models for how you should think, the same way that a compass is a model for how you should draw a circle. Mohists think of thought as being about pattern recognition: putting things in the correct categories and then responding appropriately to a particular category member.

This is, of course, basically the cluster structure of thingspace.

Unlike Plato, Mohists don't accept the justified true belief model of knowledge-- they don't care about justification. Instead, they care about reliability: knowledge is the ability to reliably make true distinctions. Ignorance is, most centrally, not about not knowing facts, but about not having a skill. It's not that you don't know what "round" is, it's that you don't know how to tell apart round things from nonround things.

All this is paralleled by the ancient Chinese approach to mathematics, which didn't have the concept of an axiomatic system, but rather algorithmic techniques for solving particular problems.

To Mohists, the three kinds of evidence are:

1. the "root"-- historical precedent from the behavior of ancient sage-kings

2. the "source"-- empirical evidence, what people see and hear

3. the "use"-- arguments that a belief would benefit the state and the people if adopted

The root might seem a little weird to moderns, but we use analogous ideas. The ancient sage-kings were thought to be perfectly wise, so this is basically drawing on expert testimony. While the source is the form of evidence modern people are most likely to agree is actually evidence, it still sometimes got them off on the wrong track: for example, the Mohists argued (against Confucian borderline-naturalism) that ghosts obviously exist because of all the respectable people testifying that they’d seen ghosts.

Mohists made numerous other advances in philosophical argumentation, including the first recorded thought experiments in China.

Mohist ethics begins in the state of nature. In the state of nature, everyone wants to pursue the Good (including not just ethics but also customs, etiquette, and general good advice). Unfortunately, everyone disagrees on what’s Good, but they still have a sense that everyone should agree on what’s Good.³ People can’t use argumentation to figure out what’s Good: ideas like “seeking compromise” or “finding what we can all agree upon” or even “making nonfallacious arguments” are themselves part of the Good. In short, the only way to get people to agree with you on what’s Good is to fight them. War, violence, and disorder result.

The purpose of political authority is to give everyone the same sense of the Good to end this chaos. The Mohist approach to political authority is arguably sort of social-contract-ish: “all under Heaven” collectively agreed on the ruler, because regardless of their various senses of the Good everyone agreed that violent chaos sucked.

So what is the Good? Mohism is hierarchical—it extends the societal hierarchy of classical Chinese society to the spiritual world. Ruling over all is Heaven, which created the world and human beings and gave us everything we need to survive. Everyone is the subjects of Heaven the way that people living in a state are subjects of the lord. Heaven is the wisest and most ethical entity, so all ethics can be judged against it.

Mohism is sort of a divine command theory. But Mohist epistemology, with its knowledge-as-a-skill framing, makes metaethics kind of a wrong question. Heaven is a model that allows us to develop the skill of distinguishing right and wrong; its will is not an axiom from which we reason about moral facts.

Heaven isn’t really a deity in the usual way we understand it. Heaven does not exist outside time/space/nature; it just is nature. While it has desires and intentions and emotions, it is not anthropomorphic. It occasionally sends spirit emissaries in emergency situations, but otherwise does not speak to people.

Heaven intervenes to punish bad people and reward good people, but not like a Greek god smiting people with thunderbolts. Heaven is quasi-naturalistic. We figure out what Heaven wants through observing regularities in nature. "If you commit crimes, then bad things happen" is a reflection of Heaven's will in the same way that "if you throw a rock, then it falls down" is. We discern Heaven's will through noticing which actions are rewarded. For a theistic system, it’s really remarkably atheistic.

We can also model ourselves on Heaven. Heaven is impartial: it treats everyone equally regardless of their wealth, status, location, etc. It is generous: it created us and gives us rain and sun and rich soil. Heaven is constant: it does the regular cycles of the seasons and the weather. Heaven wants people to live, because it gave them life in hte first place. Heaven wants people to be rich, because it gave them abundant natural resources. Heaven wants human society to be orderly, because it made the world follow regular rules.

Mohists believe that every action is the predictable working out of Heaven’s will. Therefore, Mohists don't believe in fate. Everything is, in principle, under human control. You might not know what rule someone broke that caused the bad thing to happen, but all bad things can be prevented if we just knew more and made sure to always do what was right.

In one heartbreaking passage, Mozi is asked whether his sickness meant he displeased the spirits; he replies that illness has many causes, and even if he pleased the spirits he might have done something else wrong which he doesn't know.⁴

Mohists believe in the principle of “inclusive care”: that is, that everyone else’s wellbeing should be as important to us as our own. Inclusive care reflects, again, the way that Mohists think of knowledge as a skill: ethics isn’t a set of rules people can learn, but the skill of being moved by other people's suffering and joy.

It took the Mohists centuries to notice that inclusive care might imply altruism? Until relatively late, Mohist ethical writing taught that practicing inclusive care simply means not exploiting, stealing from, doing violence against, or otherwise mistreating other people. Beyond that, the ethical life consists of practicing appropriate virtues in the three fundamental relationships: being a generous ruler or a loyal subject; being a paternally kind father or a filial son; and being a harmonious and loving brother.⁵ Perhaps the reason for the oversight was that Mohism is more of a political philosophy than an ethical system: on the rare occasions that Mohists talk about what individuals should do instead of what states should do, they mostly instruct individuals to advocate for particular public policies.

However, a late Mohist essay does argue that inclusive care means people should take care of the disabled, teach the ignorant, take care of elderly people without children, and adopt orphans. Most people are thought to be able to take care of themselves as long as no one is stealing from or attacking them.

The Mohists are objective list consequentialists with a remarkably short list:

• Everyone having their basic needs met.

• No violence or war.

• Societal stability and order.

• Large populations.

Even that last one might be folded in to the earlier items on the list: large populations are good because they mean higher tax revenues, more support for the elderly, and a stronger army.⁶

Mohists argue for promotion based on merit, not background. Everyone—even farmers and artisans—should have an equal chance of joining the civil service if they can do the work. No one should be allowed to get their failchildren jobs in the civil service. The reasons for this are:

1. It’s inherently disorderly for the stupid and cruel to be ruling over the wise and just.

2. Competent, ethical people will run the country better.

3. If civil service jobs are a reward for ethical behavior, everyone will compete to become more and more ethical so they can get civil service jobs (as is everyone’s goal, of course).

Mohists have a reputation as pacifists, but from a modern perspective they really aren’t. They forbid starting wars, but support states having a large army so that people wouldn’t think it was a good idea to invade them. States can not only defend themselves against invasion, but can also go to war to defend allies or weaker states. Punitive wars are permitted against states that had done some great evil, as long as Heaven expresses its approval with miracles: “freak weather, crop failure, midnight sun, rains of blood and flesh, screeching ghosts and animals, and fantastic creatures, such as a giant bird with a human head... spirit envoys [that] publicly authorize the sage-king's campaigns” (pg. 208).⁷ If no miracles occur, then Heaven is presumably handling the punishment of the wrongdoer itself.

Mohists object strongly to excessive expenditures. Depending on the Mohist, they can get quite ascetic. Some just object to jewelry, exotic animals, harems, and expensive perks for officials like special vehicles. Others object to all kinds of aesthetic value in goods, from tasty food to beautiful clothing to decorated homes. One passage even encourages requiring all men to marry at twenty and women at fifteen, so that fertility won't be wasted.

The thing Mohists hate the most is elaborate rituals. To be sure, they support moderate rituals to honor the ancestors and the spirits. But the elite in the Warring States Period spent an enormous amount of resources on rituals. A single set of bells for a musical ceremony could cost many times a peasant's lifetime income. States levied high taxes to pay for dancers and orchestras, which caused peasants to starve. Properly sending off a dead person to the afterlife could bankrupt a family or a state. The three-year mourning period after a parent’s death took people away from work and made them sick through ascetic practices.

The Mohists’ most vicious criticisms of the Confucians were about rituals, which many Confucians of the period supported themselves by performing:

In spring and summer they beg for grain, and after the harvests have been gathered in they follow around after big funerals, with all their sons and grandsons tagging along. If they can get enough to eat and drink and get themselves put in complete charge of a few funerals, they are satisfied. What wealth they possess comes from other men’s families, and what favors they enjoy are the products of other men’s fields. When there is a death in a rich family, they are overwhelmed with joy, saying, “This is our chance for food and clothing!”

It’s true that these rituals were the custom. But, Mohists argue, accepted social customs can be morally wrong. Other cultures practice customs that seem morally abhorrent, so clearly not all customs are morally justified. The Confucians teach that a gentleman doesn't come up with new things, only transmits wisdom from the past; these rituals are traditional, so they should be practice. But if that’s so, the Mohists argue, the traditions must have been invented by people who weren’t gentlemen. How is it the way of a gentleman to obey non-gentlemen just because they were in the past?

In general, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mohists that societies could be rich. “It’s bad to steal money from hungry people to pay for elaborate musical performances” is a pretty sympathetic ethical position. But Mohists don’t seem to have believed that a society could ever be wealthy enough to afford both food and orchestras. To them, society would always be in a position of triage.

This might explain the Mohists’ very short list of values. It’s difficult enough, if you’re in Warring States Period China, to imagine a society without war, crime, famine, or death from exposure. Anything else you care about is trading off against those things. Dancers and mourning periods, harems and fancy clothes, are all measured in dead children. Why bother to care about anything else? Getting everyone up to the minimal standard is hard enough.

Mohism died sometime in the Han Dynasty, for several reasons. With China united, no one wanted to follow Mohist political philosophy so they could take advantage of Mohist militias’ knowledge of defensive tactics. Confucianism gradually adopted much of what made Mohism distinctive, such as the emphasis on benevolence. What was left was Mohism’s extremely unpopular beliefs about luxury, which were a hard sell to the people who got to go to the musical performances and wear the pretty clothes and have the harems. If aristocrats and officials lived like peasants, how would the peasants know that the aristocrats and officials were better than them? The entire hierarchy would collapse.⁸

So what are my takeaways?

1. In many ways, modern people are less weird than we think we are. A lot of ideas that we think of as “modern” were first developed thousands of years ago. When we generalize about what happened in The Past (TM), we’re often projecting the conflicts of our own society, not taking past societies on their own terms.

2. Much of Mohist thought has parallels in modern effective altruist thought, but thinking of knowledge as a skill doesn’t. Would it be a useful framing? What benefits could we get from thinking about knowledge as a skill (of making distinctions and predictions) in addition to or instead of thinking of it as a set of facts?

   1. One of my beta readers pointed out that while effective altruists don’t think of knowledge as a skill, we do think of rationality as a skill. It still seems different to me: “the skill of forming true beliefs” is different from “beliefs themselves are skills, not facts.”

3. More than any other ethical system, consequentialism depends on actually being right. If you believe that Heaven sends spirit envoys to tell you when it’s okay to intervene in crimes against humanity, you might fail to intervene when you should—or fall victim to a con artist who can fake it. What’s more, intelligent, thoughtful, rational people can be seriously wrong: I wouldn’t assume that, if you lived in the Warring States Period, you’d obviously notice that ghosts aren’t real. We aren’t the first people in history who got everything right, and it’s important to bear that in mind.

4. Many people dismiss historical ascetic ideologies as sadomasochistic or as just hating joy. But I think we need to understand the context that premodern societies were very poor. Luxuries that we consider trivial, like spicy food or musical instruments, were historically measured in lives. It puts a new spin on the medieval sin of gluttony.

5. Are we, like, confident that time travel is impossible?

The Philosophy of the Mozi, by Chris Fraser. Published 2016. 320 pages. $42.

1. “Mo” is pronounced “mua,” kind of like you’re making a kissing sound, and “zi” is pronounced with a schwa as the vowel.

2. Mohist epistemology is based on nouns ("ox"), unlike modern epistemology, which is often based on sentences ("the ox is brown").

3. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, Mohists don’t believe that in the state of nature everyone was selfish—just that they disagreed.

4. Heroic responsibility!

5. As always in classical Chinese philosophy, women don’t exist.

6. Although in my heart the timetraveling rationalist that founded Mohism was a total utilitarian.

7. I want people to believe this just so that whenever presidents want to go to war they have to make speeches claiming that the Lincoln Memorial wept blood.

8. Yes, they made that argument explicitly.