Mozi

State of Nature Arguments

Loy Hui Chieh General, Hanfeizi, Mencius, Mozi, Xunzi

You can find them in various Classical Chinese philosophical texts, e.g., Mozi (the Shangtong triad), Mencius (3A5), Xunzi (Chapter 19, 20, 23), and even in Hanfeizi (Chapter 49). But let’s get clear on what sort of animal or animals we are talking about.

Traditionally, “state of nature” accounts are associated with ideas put forward by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and so on, each of whom proposed stories about what the lives of people must have been like before the genesis of civil society. By so doing, their aim is to illuminate the nature of civil society and justify its ways to us. The standard story, associated especially with Hobbes and Locke, talks about how life was nasty, short and brutish, a state of war of all against all in the state of nature, or at the very least, very inconvenient. And so civil society was formed–and here, the state of nature part of the story intersects with another important concept also associated with the same thinkers–through a social contract. But technically, the two ideas “state of nature” and “social contract” can be disaggregated.

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Some Questions on the Mozi

Loy Hui Chieh Mozi

Tanya asks:

Regarding the [the slide titled] Chinese argument [in “06 Mozi (2)”], I’m not sure I see the difference between (2) and (4) – (1) We know Yao to be a sage because he did the right things and (3) Yao was a sage because he did the right things. I can’t see how ‘we know’ makes it a different statement (for 1&3 or for 2&4).

At the most general level, “P” is not the same as “We know that P”—while the latter will entail the former (you can’t know something unless it is so), the former does not entail the latter (even if it is so, we might not know it). Now let’s consider the statements you mentioned. Looking back at the slides, I see that my examples could have been better phrased:

(1) We know Yao to be a sage because (we know) he did the right things

(2) We know that these are the right thing to do because (we know) they were what Yao did

(3) Yao was a sage because he did the right things (i.e., being someone who did the right thing makes Yao a sage)

(4) These are the right things to do because Yao did them (i.e., being a sage makes the things he does the right things)

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Mohist Logic

Loy Hui Chieh Mozi

In the first lecture on Mozi, I mentioned that later members of the school he founded, sometimes called the Neo-Mohist or Later Mohists, did some work on logical matters. The text, unfortunately, is not in good shape. The standard treatment is that by Angus C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science (1978), though it is not without its detractors. The relevant passages are also in the recent translation of Ian Johnston (2010). While this part of Mohist thinking is not strictly covered within the syllabus of PH2301/GEK2038, here is a titbit for interest (Johnston trans.).

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The Argument in Mozi Chapter 17

Loy Hui Chieh Mozi

As I presented Mozi’s overall thinking in lecture, his (and his followers’) concern is to present, argue for and defend against doctrinal rivals a conception of the Way–not just “the way to order the state and conduct personal life” in a general sense, but more specifically, the morally right (yi 義) way. In addition, not just ” a conception” in a general sense, but a conception that is verbalised, articulated as doctrine (yan 言). And in the process of doing so, they also take their opponents and other people whose conduct they consider reprobate as ‘coming from’ wrong doctrine. The choice between competing conception of the Way is, for them equivalent to a choice between competing doctrines.

The second half of the lecture was devoted to Mozi’s “Three Gauges of Doctrine”, what we might call his “meta-doctrine” or “doctrine about doctrine”. Turns out that Mozi was concerned not just to argue for various first-order proposal (e.g., regarding how rulers should honor the worthy, how people should have an impartial concern for others, how military aggression is wrong, etc.), he also made some crucial comments regarding the justification of any (first-order) doctrine. First, he insists that there must be a fixed common standard, and second, he proposes his so called “Three Gauges” as fulfilling the function of that standard. We also raised the question of how these Gauges are meant to relate to each other.

But now a different question comes to the fore. Granted that Mozi thinks that the three Gauges are supposed to be the “standard of justification” regarding first-order (moral) doctrine–or maybe one among them is prior to the others, which are somehow derived from it–but what justifies the Gauges as such standards in the first place? What should it be these (or this) Gauge?

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