Are the later Mohists preference-satisfaction consequentialists? A discussion of Daniel Stephens’ “Later Mohist ethics and philosophical progress in ancient China”

ABSTRACT

The Mohists may have been the first consequentialists on earth. Their most important principles are that right action is what benefits the world and that the underlying outlook for benefiting the world is inclusive care, whereby each person receives equal consideration. The early Mohists are clearly objective-list consequentialists, whereby benefiting the world amounts to promoting the most basic goods. Stephens argues that the later Mohists shift to a preference-satisfaction consequentialism whereby benefiting the world amounts to promoting what happens to please individual people. Stephens argues that while the direct texts are ambiguous between an objective-list interpretation and a preference-satisfaction interpretation, the latter better explains later Mohist engagement with opponents. I argue that the direct texts actually preclude Stephens’ preference-satisfaction interpretation, which moreover has the later Mohists concede an implausible amount to their opponents.

KEYWORDS:

• Consequentialism
• Later Mohist
• preference-satisfaction
• utilitarian

This article responds to:

Later Mohist ethics and philosophical progress in ancient China

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and referees of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy for comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 With modifications, I use Fraser’s 2020 translation (see also the freely available supplement, The Mohist Dialectics, which contains much of the primary material cited in this paper). Stephens, while rejecting Graham’s reconstruction of the Mozi (“Progress”, 397–99), uses Graham’s section numbers, and so I mention these when they differ from Fraser’s.

2 Indeed, CE A19 gives us a precedent for the language A26–27 should have employed to specify a singular subject. It says an ideal officer undercuts his own (jǐ) and promotes others’ advantage (yì) and does what he himself (shēn) detests to promote what is urgent (jí) for others. It is notable that in this apparent case of benefiting the world, the text speaks not of what others detest or are pleased by but of what is urgent for them. Likewise, the text shies away from defining one’s individual non-advantage in terms of one’s individual detesting (we should also note the peculiar absence of ‘benefit’, lì, and ‘harm’, hài). There is only some connection, which is perfectly compatible with individual detesting being a mere indication of one’s non-advantage.

3 I owe much of the following argument in this paragraph to a Referee.

4 See also CE B44, which appears to appeal to the situation as far as the management of one’s desires. Now, A75 indicates that if the epistemic situation as to benefit/harm is unclear, it is permissible to follow one’s individual desires (yù), where yù has an important prospective orientation and might even be translated as ‘about to’ (Graham, Later, 332; Fraser, Essential, 233). But A75 also indicates that what one desires and what is actually beneficial can come apart and hardly suggests that if the epistemic situation is clear, as seems to be the context assumed by GS 44.3a, we should go along with desires against what is actually beneficial. Now, CE A84 also suggests this posteriority of desire to benefit in its distinction between desire that is direct (zhèng) and desire that comes after weighing the benefit. But A84 then creates a problem when it proceeds to symmetrically distinguish between detesting (wù) that is direct and detesting that comes after weighing the harm. For our first text, A27, works the other way around by defining harm in terms of what one detests. I think there are two senses of ‘detests’. In A27, it refers to the object’s value as ‘detestable’, as A26 refers to it as ‘pleasant’. In A84, ‘detests’ refers to the individual subject’s prospective relation to the object, as ‘desire’ does in A75 and A84. This reconciliation between A27 and A84 yields an important result for A26–27. Although ‘detests’ opposes ‘desires’ (A25, A84) and ‘pleases’ (A26–27), we cannot immediately infer a slide between ‘desires’ and ‘pleases’, a slide that would perhaps aid a preference-satisfaction interpretation. For it is an object-oriented sense of ‘detests’ that opposes ‘pleases’ and a distinct, subject-oriented sense of ‘detests’ that opposes ‘desires’.

5 See also Fraser, Philosophy, 144–48, and Essential, 263, 272, on the idea that relational virtues are a part of social order (zhì), which is in turn a basic element of benefit (lì).

6 Something else crisscrosses the Mozi and would be hard to explain on the subjective interpretation: the Mohist worry about the hedonic treadmill. As I have argued (“Austerity”), the Mohists deny pursuit of even a moderate variety of goods on the grounds that once one passes over the threshold of bare necessity, there is no principled limit to stop one from excess. Denial of even a moderate variety would seem to preclude the subjective interpretation.