Ep. 313: Mozi’s Political Ethics (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 313 is something like what is righteous action? We're looking at Mohism, the main school contending with the Confucians in the ancient Chinese Warring States period. Reading the selections of Mozi, excerpted by Burton Watson for the 1953 Basic Writings book. The original text is from around 400. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer turning my back on the concerns of the Sage kings by saying that there are no such things as ghosts.

0:42 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, absolutely Righteous in Austin, Texas, this is

0:47 Wes: Wes Alwan trading in my birds for boats in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:52 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey using my compass and square in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Mark: And our special returning guest.

0:59 Tzuchien: Hi, I'm Tzuchien Tho, optimistic about rationality in Bristol still United Kingdom.

1:05 Mark: Nice. I think you were in Germany last time we talked to you for Confucius. You just reminded us six years ago. Yeah, crazy.

1:11 Tzuchien: I've since become much more of a podcast consumer.

1:14 Mark: We're glad to have you back. And we timed this because your first child had just been born before we recorded with you last time and now she's six. So crazy.

1:23 Tzuchien: Yeah. There's a lot more dishes to do, a lot more laundry, a lot more house cleaning to do. And so I would say having you folks and other podcasters in my ear has lightened the load. It's almost a joy to do dishes and clean, mop up milk things and wash bottles. We're kind of beyond that now, but there were years of bottle washing and

1:50 Mark: did you do so in the way

1:52 Tzuchien: I found what was most beneficial to the people.

1:56 Mark: So you recommended Mohism? Just to remind folks that you study analytic philosophy. Leibniz was.

2:02 Wes: Is that right?

2:03 Tzuchien: I would in no way identify as an analytic philosopher.

2:06 Mark: Okay.

2:06 Tzuchien: Although I don't think it's bad or anything. I do mostly history of philosophy, history of science. I did my PhD on Leibniz. I've since then moved on to the 18th century. I do work on philosophy of physics in that period, philosophy of mathematics in that period and lots of intersections between philosophy, mathematics, natural science, what we call natural science now. I teach mostly material from between Galileo to. But I also here at University of Bristol I also teach Hegel. And then before the pandemic I taught a classical Chinese philosophy class. Basically spanned all of these figures. And then during the pandemic that unit sadly got axed and now I teach with another colleague a rather interesting take on ancient philosophy where half the unit is on Plato and the other half of the unit is on a range of possible Chinese philosophers.

3:02 Dylan: Oh cool.

3:03 Mark: All right. So I think when we talked to you last, you had not actually taught these Chinese figures but you had grown up and read Mencius in your house. So when we were going to do Mencius Yes, I contacted you actually I contacted you about the Daodejing but the scheduling didn't work out for that. But you said no, no, no, I don't want to do Mencius, I want to do Mozi who Mencius is responding

3:22 Tzuchien: to the particularly stinging bits of is him responding to these sort of challengers to Ruism I suggested that you couldn't really understand the fiery bits of Mengzi without having taken already a look at Mozi for example.

3:38 Mark: So Ruism, I just heard that term here our translation calls it Juism but that's what Confucianism was before Confucius and what they actually still call it. So that was the opponents of the Mohists that we're reading now, right?

3:52 Tzuchien: Yeah, the so called Confucian lines the sort of students of Kongzi and that tradition, including the heritage that they claim from the writings of the late Zhou period they call themselves the Ruists and that is the kind of more or less the 2,500 years of mainstream Chinese philosophical lineage and then various challenges.

4:15 Mark: Should we to kick off kind of go around the horn here and give some initial impressions or words of summary? Who wants to start?

4:22 Dylan: I started out reading the introduction in the Watson translation getting a little bit of history of it. What I found most different about Mozi was just that you have the. I'll call it the structure of arguments. You know there's sections especially later in the Watson translation. You know there's a way in which you make an argument and you appeal to validity and applicability and origin and I thought that was distinct from the way in which the Dao works. The Dao is poetic in a kind of sacred text way and Mozu's writings were presenting reasons. Now there are different challenges on that.

5:02 Wes: They're not the greatest reasons, they're not

5:04 Dylan: always the greatest reasons but they are nonetheless. The other thing that was very interesting to me about it was effectively the political philosophy and how many times I found myself saying oh well that's really interesting and like oh wow, that doesn't sound good and I think that that was a reflection of I don't Know my own experience with political philosophy as being things like public good, being associated with individualism and freedom, which is a very sort of Western political philosophy thing. And Mozi has this combination of public good and benevolence. And the needs of the people being tied up very tightly with reverence for the heavens and hierarchy. And the. I'll call it a philosopher king, a sage king, as being the source of stability in a political community. Which also makes sense in a way, but was jarring to me. That combination was jarring to me.

5:59 Tzuchien: That's the kind of thing you get in Plato's Republic, right?

6:02 Dylan: Exactly.

6:02 Tzuchien: No, the question is, we're trying to save this world. One common feature of all of these classical philosophers. And you've been making a bit of a trek through these thinkers, right? Starting from Kongzi, everyone is experienced, essentially the end of the world, this great period. Flourishing culture, civilization. It's coming to an end. And it's jarring to these people. I mean, everyone feels the sense of wars are getting bigger. They're getting more violent, more common, more frequent wars. You know, villagers are being pressed into compulsory service.

People are away from home for years to fight in some unknown land. These philosophers are trying to literally save the world by saying, what can we do? What is the proper ordering of our society? And that Mozi and these people share a lot with figures like Plato was also living through a period of Greek or Athenian decline. And the idea is, what's wrong with our society? What's wrong with our people? Let's find a way to remake social order. Whereas Kongzi saw it as kind of moral reform or ritualistic reform. Mozi thinks that we should have a meritocracy.

We should get people to sort of really behave like they live in a society and have that kind of philosopher king, that kind of pyramidal structure that is also common to, for example, Plato's Republic.

7:26 Mark: And just to remind folks, Confucius equals Kongzi equals Ruism.

7:31 Wes: I think the argument against fatalism is interesting because it suggests that people are responsible for their own happiness. It's interesting, the part with the will of heaven. I think it's evocative of the alternatives of utilitarianism and, say, deontology. So, for instance, you could think about the good of the people versus the will of heaven, which turns out to have something to do with righteousness or what is right, or subordinates not deciding what is right for their superiors. You can think of this in terms of hierarchy or in terms of obedience to divine commands or obedience to the commands of people.

Higher up in the hierarchy. But you can also just think about it in terms of the concept of right or the concept of obligation as it stands distinct from the concept of the good of the people in general. So I think that intersection of the good of the people and the will of heaven is an interesting ethical area.

8:25 Tzuchien: Yeah. I think traditionally, in almost every kind of introduction to Mozi that people identify him with consequentialism. And there is certainly a part of that, I think much more fundamental is a kind of pragmatism. So this will of heaven bit, I think, really does flow out of the idea that. So he has a kind of state of nature kind of argument early on in the book where he basically says there was that one time when everyone just decided for themselves what was right and wrong. And because of that, there was chaos and people were in violent competition. You know, much like the kind of Hobbesian version. But instead of being driven by base avarice, in this version, what's actually more important than avarice is ideas.

9:10 Wes: Right.

9:11 Tzuchien: That people could make other kinds of judgment.

9:13 Dylan: And so there's no normative standard.

9:15 Wes: That's the problem.

9:16 Dylan: Everybody's just choosing other stuff. Not because they're, as you said, avarice, but just because they're just picking different stuff.

9:23 Tzuchien: Exactly. They're just deciding different things are right. And so he has a kind of. His equivalent of a hegemon, but instead of being a king hegemon in Hobbes's Leviathan. Exactly. It's somebody who basically convinced enough people to decide that he was right. And so the wisdom of the sage kings was able to unify, harmonize the ideas of the people. And so that people were able to act in concert and act in harmony because of this unification of ideology. It's a pragmatist argument because the idea is that the unifying, the harmonizing gesture of the sage kings led to greater welfare for the people. And so it's not necessarily what's more important than, say, justice or rightness is in fact unity. Right is, in fact, the harmony. The harmony itself is like a means to an end.

10:13 Wes: This sounds like a utilitarian argument, though, right?

10:15 Mark: It is.

10:16 Tzuchien: But the utilitarian seems to presume a good that is relatively stable for which the utility principle operates. So sort of pleasure or something like that. Whereas Mozi doesn't presume that at all. Mozi thinks that people running into fire and people doing tough jobs like going into battle or running to fire to save people or working hard to make food for the city. These difficult jobs, these Painful experiences. People only do them because they have a shared ideological.

10:51 Wes: I think the utilitarian, though, would not to get too deep into the utilitarianism, but they would want to say it's utility or happiness or the greatest good of the greatest number, however you want to define it. And then it gets complicated what that standard actually is, and that, as Mill and others thought, you can ground obligations within that framework. So it's not that the concept of obligation disappears, it's just not the base layer and obligation can be derived. But in various episodes, we've talked about this conflict between obligation, utility and where they intersect or where they conflict. And I think between the will of heaven and the good of the people. I think there's some of that tension in here, but maybe, maybe not, but we'll find out.

11:30 Seth: So I did not pick up. I'm not saying it wasn't there. I didn't pick up on the utilitarian thread. What I saw when I was reading this, particularly in the early part of the work, is that it's much more like communitarian, like what we were talking about with Habermas, because there's this emphasis on universality, this idea of seeing just because somebody's in another state. There's quite a bit actually where he's talking about setting yourself up against another state or setting yourself up against another person because they're from another state, as if that somehow negates or denies it's being particular or emphasizing particularity over universality.

And so as I was reading this, I was thinking about Habermas and the episode we did on with him and Kant, on whatever it was, towards the universal. I can't remember the Kantian work, but the idea that if you view all people as one, if you negate the structure of national borders through the concept of universality, you'll take a very different perspective. And then the sense of righteousness that flows from universality is quite a bit different than the sense of righteousness that would flow coming out of a position of particularity.

12:39 Wes: The talking utilitarianism is just about the appeal to the common good. So whatever you want to call that, that's fine. But if you search on the people in this text, the people will have enough to eat, the people will be well off. The people this, the people that. That's one strand of a standard for the arguments that are made here.

12:57 Mark: Yeah, it's very. You were saying pragmatist, Tzuchien, almost a materialist. Despite all this talk of heaven and ghosts and things, he actually Materializes those things. He says it's food, clothing, and rest. That's what people need. There's no higher pleasures. There's no actually talk of pleasure at all.

13:16 Tzuchien: Specifically says art thinks very low of pleasure.

13:19 Dylan: Yeah.

13:19 Seth: Yes.

13:19 Mark: I'm not denying that music is pretty. I'm not denying that banquets and feasts aren't very delicious and that all the decorations that you made aren't great, but they do. So clothes aren't comfy. Yeah, but it's all very elitist. So he's assuming a condition of scarcity such that if everybody isn't working as hard as they can, doing their utmost, then you're not going to have a state that's going to fulfill its needs. And so there's a lot of this being frugal is not about, oh, it decays your soul to be so lavish with things like, who cares about your soul?

Like, it's that it is just distracting time and resources from fulfilling these basic needs. And then when you talk about, like, well, do the will of heaven what heaven wants. Heaven is like the shepherd over the sheep, and we are all the sheep that it wants the sheep to be healthy. It wants them to have food and clothing and rest. And so that's what heaven wants. That's why you can so clearly. Can I use, you know, the will of heaven as my measuring stick, as my compass to decide how the state and how individuals in the state should operate? Well, you know, is that because you have a direct line to heaven?

He does seem to talk sometimes like, heaven told this king to go invade that other king. And that's why war was okay in just that circumstance. But for the most part, we can know the will of heaven just because we know what these material things are.

14:34 Wes: Can I add one? So on page 86, I think Mark is right about this material focus, but he does appeal to psychological concepts as well. So, therefore, if one clearly understands how to obey the will of heaven and put it into practice in the world at large, then the government will be well ordered so we can talk about what that means. That's a concept that goes above and beyond the material, Though maybe it is just for the sake of the material. The population harmonious, the state rich and the wealth and goods plentiful. The people will all have warm clothes and plenty to eat and will live in comfort and peace, free from care. So that free from care adds a psychological component to this, that it's above and beyond. Maybe that's just about having enough to eat, but it could go beyond that.

15:16 Tzuchien: There were many things to pick up on there, but it's come up several times. So I wanted to maybe say something about this belief in ghosts. You know, this way of heaven can actually be de. Divinized. I don't know how to say secularized, de Godded, yet degodded. So secularized. I mean, very much in the way that we can talk about Kongzi without making the way or heaven kind of divine thing. Also saw that he didn't like to talk about ghosts and stuff. One of the things that he does is actually much more of a commonsensical thinker. And he seems to accept within his context, sort of, if so many people believe in ghosts, you know, shouldn't we also kind of believe in ghosts as well?

Right. I mean, it seems like who am I to say that ghosts don't exist? And all the historical records and sort of all the texts that they would have been brought up with all emphasize some kind of spiritual realm. So there's a kind of a common sense approach to this kind of thing and even a kind of empiricism when it comes to that, right? Not in the sense of, oh, here I see a ghost, but rather there have been reports of people. If you read the section on ghosts, right. He said people have reported these things happening. And who am I to sort of question such reputable testimony?

And so therefore. And so part of this is wrapped up with the thing I was mentioning before about pragmatism. I'm thinking in of terms particular about William James pragmatism concerning religious belief. Right. So we should only consider the actual existence of ghosts or the divine to some degree. Another aspect of it is the effects that such belief has in the world. So that's kind of what I was pointing to with pragmatism. And again, like it doesn't contradict at all with consequentialism here.

16:59 Wes: One of the primary arguments in explaining the ghosts, in defending the idea of ghosts, is that the desire to see that the wicked are punished and the good are. Well, I think primarily here it's. It's punishment. It's not the only place it comes up in the text. But this seems to be the primary function of the ghosts. And beyond that idea of appealing to the common people and their sightings of ghosts or what sages believed or whatever, it's just the idea what happens if we get rid of the ghosts and we get rid of this idea that one's evil deeds will be naturally punished, right?

Not just punished by some legal authority by something that we've set up post State of Nature. The idea is that there should be something natural, you know, and it's a bit of a stretch, but you might point to some commonality in Plato, right? There are natural consequences as well. The evildoer has a unharmonious soul or a deformed soul or something like that. So there are those sorts of consequences here. It seems like more of an externality, although one could reinterpret it. But the idea that Mozi wants to hang on to is that there are rewards and punishments that are not simply the products of human intervention.

18:05 Tzuchien: It's possible to disagree on some of this stuff, I think. But another thing that you have remarked on since the beginning of our discussion is how kind of rationalistic and sort of systematic his thinking seems to be. And so he does outline, right, the principles for like, kind of right judgment towards the beginning. I forget exactly where it is, where one of them is evidence.

18:25 Wes: It's in the against fatalism section that he first gives those standards.

18:30 Mark: Yeah, evidence of the senses. But that means, with an interesting connection to our Wittgenstein that we just discussed, that testimony actually gets included in that. So it's the evidence of their senses, right? And those people that they really wanted us to believe in ghosts, and so they wrote it on the leaves for us to pass down. And we should. So this referring to history and the practices of sage kings of antiquity. And the second criterion, referring to the evidence of the senses, end up kind of blurring into each other because of testimony, right?

18:58 Tzuchien: And it also has this additional thing of satisfying the principle of benefit, right? So it benefits people to believe in ghosts because you can establish a kind of universal justice, kind of a universalism beyond the grave, as it were. And so it serves to function the temporal dimension, whereas something like the sort of will of heaven serves a kind of spatial dimension, right? So everyone under heaven should regard each other as kind of the same. And that universality, that sort of common universality, that common love that I have for my brother or my children should then also I should regard any stranger as being worthy of love, or I should cultivate love towards strangers.

19:43 Mark: One thing in on that, you know, so universal love, this was supposed to be, or impartial love, I guess is a better translation, was supposed to be one of the big things that we attribute to Mozi, that, you know, he kind of invented consequentialism and then has this impartiality. And those are one and the same thing in terms of our discussion with Peter Singer and the usual issues against utilitarianism. Wes has referred to this as ponds all around that. You know, it seems there's always some way that I could be more help to the people, to the wider populace, to strangers, than to my own family. And so that would lead you to great loss of integrity of your life plans if you were just forever rushing around to try. But, you know, Mozi does not have

20:22 Wes: helping careless little boys who got themselves into ponds.

20:25 Mark: He has this idea of impartiality in the section near the end when he's, you know. So this is supposed to be contra Confucianism, which is very much filial piety. You know, it's kind of like you should regard your parents first and then your kid and your spouse and then your uncles and then your, you know, it's all. And that plays into how long you're supposed to mourn for their funeral, how much expense you're supposed to put into their funeral, all these practical consequences. And so he is getting rid of a lot of that. But in one of his arguments against Confucians, he is saying, isn't it ridiculous that you would mourn more for your own kids.

Kids than you would for your uncles, because your uncles, as elders, are more worthy. It's not actually that one person equals one utilitarian unit, and you should regard each of those the same. It's just that don't regard your kids differently than other people's kids. But elders still have more honor, and there are plenty of other people. It's just not based on their riches or their beauty or whatever, but based on their merit. And so they actually get more consideration in the moral calculus than your own kids or any other kids. So it's not complete universal love.

And the impartiality is only with regard to don't favor your kith and kin to others.

21:39 Tzuchien: I think that's why sometimes it's very misleading to think about it as akin to utilitarianism, because there is a kind of pyramid of moral worth. Ideally, anyhow, he thinks that we're not dealing with individuals and their sort of units of utility, right? So the normal kind of conversation wouldn't work. But I think that is the fundamental difference that Mo Tzu brings to the discussion. The difference between Mohism and Ruism is a fundamental disagreement over what is the root of moral cultivation, right? So for Ruists, they emphasize partiality because the love of your immediate surrounding is what makes you into a moral person, right?

So the habitual practice of social harmony, of love and care and the skills of sympathy. Those are the things that you cultivate inside the household and within your smaller social circle. And so to go against that is a kind of perversion of moral psychology. Whereas the Mohists see that as the root of the problem. Because everyone just loves their country and their neighborhood and their family, they will willingly hurt others in order to bring benefit to them.

22:52 Wes: Shall we look more closely at the chapter on universal love? Please do so. This is on page 39. It is the business of the benevolent man to try to promote what is beneficial to the world and to eliminate what is harm harmful. So again, this is why he gets tagged with consequentialism. Right beneficial to the world or to the community, the public good, as opposed to thinking in terms of obligation and right or divine, you know, what God commands me to do, or what is virtuous on an individual level. So now, at the present time, what brings the greatest harm to the world?

Great states attacking small ones, great families overthrowing small ones, the strong oppressing the weak, the many harrying the few, the cunning deceiving the stupid, the eminent lording it over the humble. These are harmful to the world. And the conclusion that he gets to is, or I guess he argues for it in his way, is that towards the bottom of the page, partiality in their dealings with one another is what gives rise to all the great harms in the world. Therefore, we know that partiality is wrong. Partiality should be replaced by universality, nationalism, factionalism, filial piety.

Yep. Looking on page 41, the believer in partiality says, how could I possib regard my friend the same as myself, or my friend's father the same as my own? So it's a really interesting proposition. It sounds similar in some ways to Christian brotherly love. A universal level, I think it's different, but this request to transcend one's own personal loyalties. So we understand that on a government level, right. We have institutions of justice which are supposed to transcend particular loyalties and replace feuding and revenge cycles and all that sort of thing that you might see in an honor culture.

But it's something different to ask for us to do that on a personal level. So for instance, treat a stranger as if they were on the same level as a family member.

24:44 Dylan: It's interesting, Wes, because I didn't get that the universality had necessarily that universalistic ethic for individual people to it as much as it should be. The way in which the, for lack of a better term, the political society, the political interactions ought to be grounded and that the structure of society should be taking universality as its mode of operation. I mean, there might be something to the issue you're raising in that Society basically is amounting to groups of families that are interacting together. And so somehow they have to have a principle working amongst themselves that would, he's arguing, would be universality is better than partiality. But it doesn't seem to me like it's kind of Singerian. I mean, if I look at page,

25:32 Wes: I could be wrong, but yeah, 41. Okay, you're looking at 41.

25:35 Dylan: Yeah. So if I say. When he talks about what the benefits are of universality, he says, now if we seek to benefit the world by taking universality as our standard, those with sharp ears and clear eyes will see and hear for others. Those with sturdy limbs will work for others. Those with knowledge of the way will endeavor to teach others. Those who are old and without wives or children will find means of support and be able to live out their days. The young and orphaned who have no parents will find someone to care for them and look after their needs.

When all these benefits have been secured merely by taking universality as a standard, I cannot understand how the men of the world can hear about this doctrine of universality and still criticize it. So to me, when I read that, it is much more about there being, you know, going towards all the people have care of their food, shelter and weariness.

26:23 Wes: Right.

26:24 Dylan: That's what I hear.

26:25 Tzuchien: It's both, right? I mean, it's acting on both levels. Governments should be the kind of governments that carry these kind of policies out. But also individuals should be the kind of people that clothe the naked and feed the hungry. You know, it's a kind of. But I think what's key here is the optimism about changing your perspective or the optimism of an ideological message. Right. So the Ruist basically is not very optimistic about these ideologies. Right. Moral cultivation occurs very slowly. Moral cultivation occurs in good families, like from childhood, like the love and the care that parents show their children will then filter into the love and the care that grown individuals will show to their neighbors and their colleagues and their friends.

Right. So, you know, Kongzi in the Analects is incredibly pessimistic about whether or not his way would even work. He's like, oh, maybe in two generations, maybe in three generations of carrying this out. But Mozi thinks, for example, if we tie this back to the state of his version of the state of nature argument, he thinks actually just getting people to change their views, change their Judgments that. That has a kind of strong enough pull on people to change their behavior. So in other places, he says, usually people wouldn't rush into a burning building, but with sufficient kind of ideological conditioning, people will rush into burning buildings.

And the whole mechanism of his political philosophy is to institute enough strategies for this kind of thing to become effective.

27:59 Wes: Right. He's trying to illustrate in that example, someone says, well, impartiality is too hard. This is why I think it's more than just an institutional. There are various places in this which suggest to me that it's happening at an individual level as well. And one of them is this objection that, well, that's too hard. You can't expect people to do X, Y and Z. And the response is, well, you can if you model that and if you have good enough propaganda. No, that's not.

28:21 Mark: Because you get what you. You give. If you realize that it makes sense for you to value other people's parents as much as you value your own, because then the kids of those parents are going to value your parents as much of their own, once you get this ball rolling, the virtuous cycle, then it will absolutely make sense to the exception. And this is what people. Part of the Christian ethic is turn the other cheek. And there's none of that in here. If those people are wicked, well, it's okay to honor the worthy. You don't have to be impartial among the wicked and the nice.

It's in the Confucian section at the end. One of the things is the Confucians say if the army is running away from you, the army that has attacked you, they're fleeing, you should just let them go. Like, in other words, mercy. And he says, well, consider this. Either they're good or they're wicked. If they were good, they wouldn't be fighting with you in the first place, right? You know, unless you were wicked, in which case this, you know, you're not going to listen to me anyway. But if they're wicked and they attacked you, then absolutely, you should scourge them from the earth.

29:22 Tzuchien: Think about it like the multiple strategies, right? And key among these strategies is meritocracy. Meritocracy is as much based on skills and abilities as it is on morality, right? So if you rush into burning buildings to save strangers, yes, you are going to be bumped up in the meritocracy, and society is going to honor you. We, as a moist society, we're going to honor you and we're going to make sure you get slightly Better now, if you protect your own children at the expense of others, for example, then you will be bumped down. Right. So that's his key strategy.

Right. Honoring your superiors, because your superiors are the ones that are going to be promoted by the meritocracy ghosts, for example. Coming back to that topic, ghosts is a big thing. If you can't be motivated out of virtue or social prestige, you can be motivated from fear. So you don't commit harm because you'll be. So all of these different things are just the accrual of various strategies to make sure that this kind of impartiality is instituted against partiality, which he sees as the reason for the social decline and violence. But also, Mark, you mentioned another thing that Mozi is well known for is his stance against war.

Some people might think he's a pacifist, but he isn't. He actually thinks you should fight like hell if you're being attacked.

30:43 Wes: Yeah. On the question of partiality, it's a little bit unclear what that means. Right. And he's using the phrase universal love in opposition to that because does partiality mean that I give my inheritance not to my son, but to some randomness, random person, son or daughter. So in other words, one might interpret impartiality as just basic obligations to people about respecting people's rights. Right. About something that's negative, all the thou shalt nots that we have in our dealings with people. Or we might think it means something more. You know, we might go as far as Singer and think that impartiality means that I kind of have to be an individual agent of distributive justice and minimize my own material well being and even that of my family in favor of saving strangers. So this is whole big range of what impartiality might mean, which it's unclear exactly where that falls.

31:38 Tzuchien: I agree with you. It's unclear. It sometimes seems positive. So in the sense that you do end up having to take care of orphans and if you don't, who will? Right. So he definitely spells that out. The strong works for the weak. The intelligent work for the not so intelligent.

31:56 Dylan: The large states don't conquer the small

31:58 Tzuchien: states, but you know, in times of hunger, famine, that they have the obligation to help, et cetera. So it does sound kind of positive. But then he doesn't really go into a huge amount of detail.

32:09 Seth: I think there's a way you can kind of counterbalance. Again, I'm not going to make a plea here for I don't want this to become a Singerian Is that the right word? I don't know, you know, screed. I don't want to get to that. Like, what are the limits of our obligation outside of partiality? But I think this notion of balancing two things. One, the notion of universality, which in a weird way, you can read universality as, you know, respect for individual human dignity. There's a lot of different ways you can read it which are not necessarily an extension of impartiality in the Singerian sense.

In other words, you can read that notion of universality not as a consequentialist type, in a non consequentialist way. You can read it deontological. You can read it as respect for individual human dignity, community, and so forth. But as we've seen, not just in this text, but in many others from this tradition, there is a notion that ultimately comes down to character. And the strength of your character starts with family, right? It starts with filial piety. And then as you become a parent, like how you treat your children. And so there has to be some level of respect and prioritization for the fact that if you cannot act appropriately within your family unit, you're never going to cultivate the virtues that are required for being able to know when to intervene with somebody outside of the family or outside of the state.

And so there is a sense in which your relationship, your filial relationship or your familial relationship has a sense of priority because it's constitutive in the way that your character is developed. And so you don't come out of the womb saying, all children are equal. I will treat my neighbor's child like the way I treat my child, or I'll treat my neighbor's parents the way I'll treat my parents. You have to learn, learn through development in the family unit what all of these things mean before you can actually go on. And so I think there is a counterweight.

I don't know how the mechanism works, but I do believe there's a counterweight in there.

34:02 Wes: He specifically addresses this question of filial piety right on page 46, in relation to partiality. So. And yet men of the world continue to criticize, saying if one takes no thought of what is beneficial or harmful to one's parents, how can one be called filial? Right? So the idea is that if I'm treating my father just the same as your father, then what is the place of the virtue of filial piety in that picture? And Mozi said, let us Examine for a moment the way in which a filial son plans for the welfare of his parents. He wishes others to love and benefit his parents.

Now, if I'm a filial son, how do I go about accomplishing this? Do I first make it a point to love and benefit other men's parents so that they in return will love and benefit my parents, or do I first make it a point to hate and injure other men's parents? Obviously, I must first make a point to love and benefit other men's parents and then they'll do right by my parents. So it's a very interesting. The implication of the argument is that I actually do value my own parents above the appearance of others and that when I value other people's parents the same, it's really instrumental.

The argument is, oh, you love your parents. Well, if you don't treat other people's parents kindly, then your parents are going to reap the harm of that. Beyond that, this is not really to the point. Right. This, again is really about obligation. When you start talking about whether we're harming people, you're talking about obligation. What most people think about when they're objecting to the concept of universal love is the idea that I would love a stranger's father more than my own father. And in certain circumstances, that has real consequences for our behavior.

Right. Because a lot of this is just about time and energy and who we give our time and energy and kindness too. And there's going to be a preference for that. If your father is lonely and there's no one to hang out with him, and so is mine, I know whose house I'm heading to. Right. So these arguments that Mozi is making, they're kind of sophistical in that sense. They evade that central concern, as far as I can tell.

36:00 Tzuchien: I would just like to add that in some ways, and I think when I do my classes, this is one of the sort of exam questions, but, you know. So as you rightly point out, Wes, his argument is that we achieve filial piety as an end by first practicing impartial care. So this is the main thing, and then we get filial piety out as a reward from that action, whereas the Confucians would flip it around. Right. It's not that Ruists don't care about the stranger. Right. Ruists think that you should cultivate, just as Seth was saying just a moment ago, right. Your capacities for sympathy and care and love, so that when you meet a stranger who is in need, you will be able to help them. So fill piety first, then you achieve, if you are a sage, universal love as a result.

36:54 Wes: Yeah, there are circles of concern. It's not that we're not. And this is like ancient Greek stuff too, you know, there's circles of concern. It's not that we're not concerned with the people on the edges, it's just that we know who's more important to us. You're closer to the center of the circle. You're more important to me. And I have different obligations. And I think a Confucianism sounds the same.

37:12 Tzuchien: It just flipped around. Right. So the argument between the Mohists and the Ruists, if there actually is one, is what is first. So I've already said this once, but you know, Ruists are pessimistic about the ability for ideas or viewpoints to actually motivate you morally. You know, it's actually that love. It's actually that sort of love and harmony that can only be had at that small level scale within the family. Right. That's the kind of place where real moral education occurs. Whereas I will throw in there Plato as well. Right. He actually.

37:46 Wes: I was just gonna say this.

37:47 Dylan: Just by saying it's about the ideas makes it very.

37:51 Tzuchien: Right, Right, exactly. So Plato, like Mozi, they think actually large. It's actually at the level of large scale social messaging and engineering. Let's say that you form citizens, really. I mean, citizens of the world, or this kind of new type of person who is able to be rather selfless and kind of emphasize social.

38:14 Wes: Let's just say the word.

38:15 Tzuchien: It's not a surprise that during the Cultural Revolution, whereas Ruism is the main culprit, Ruism is the reason for China's moral decline, social decline. And Mohism gets a hearing within communist China. Right. Mohism is okay. I mean, it's this kind of proto

38:35 Dylan: socialist kind of ideas, impartiality, the way you were just talking about it. Tzuchien also made me think of just the way justice works in Plato. It becomes justice and the good. And those sorts of things are universal concepts that are supposed to be guiding all of our actions, both, for lack of a better term, politically as well as individually.

38:59 Seth: I don't want to kick off a dispute, but I'm going to take issue a little bit with your reading, Wes, that there's nothing in the text that suggests that loving and honoring somebody else's parents commits you to the same set of obligations to them as you have to your own parents. It's A disposition. And so there's nothing in there that I saw that implies inequality of love and honoring. In that sense, it's more like, well,

39:24 Wes: page 41, how could I possibly regard my friend's father the same as my own? I agree. I think it's ambiguous. So you could go with something more like you're reading. I think ultimately you could defend them in this way. But I think it's ambiguous enough that some of these phrases look like they're asking us to regard my friend's father the same as my own. That seems to be the direct implication. I mean, it's a sentence. It's right there. It's on page 41. The believer in partiality says how could I possibly regard my friend the same as myself or my friend's father the same as my own?

So he goes on, he's going to make the argument ultimately that you should regard your friend's father the same as your own. Then the question is, well, what does regard mean? And you want to take it in a way that's more defensible, right? Or less radical, which I get. And I'm saying, well, what if it is the radical thing? It doesn't seem so plausible. So what does he mean? To me it's unclear, but I don't see anything that rules out the more radical interpretation and either. And there's certain things that suggest it, in which case we have to entertain that possibility.

So that's all.

40:26 Mark: Could I just cut through this, which is division of labor that motsu throughout. The rulers need to do their job as rulers. The individual workers need to attend to their specific tasks if they're being distracted and sent off as soldiers, if they're spending too much time at funerals, if they're doing anything. So part of your specific task as a worker is that you're assigned to your parents and your kids first and foremost. But that's not because you don't actually love the stranger just as much as your parents. Like he could be recommending something radical with the psychology. But as you said, Wes, I think he's kind of statistical about it that he is making a psychological claim and he's just saying, well, it'll work out utility wise. I don't think he thinks very deeply about the psychology in this text at all.

41:10 Wes: So he doesn't say what Seth is, you know, he has the opportunity to do what Seth is suggesting. And I think Seth is right. He could be. Ultimately that could be the track that he's on. It just doesn't really come out very explicitly in the text that he's going to give us a more subtle psychology. So the objector says, you know, oh, you want me to regard your father the same as mine? Then he doesn't really satisfy the objector on that point. He just sidesteps it and goes to this other stuff. But he might agree if we were to try and reconstruct a different psychology and say, well, that's not exactly what I meant and blah, blah, blah, then I think that would be consistent with his overall argument.

41:44 Tzuchien: One of the things that comes up later, I mean, the Mohists and the Ruists are fighting constantly. One of the things that they really focus on this argument that's actually, that's in the analects, right? Where Kongzi is hanging out with his royalty. And the royalty says, my city is so virtuous that when the father commits the crime, the son will report them. And Kongzi turns to his student and says, you know, this is not what I consider virtuous at all. If the father commits a crime, then the son will cover for him. If the son commits a crime, then the father will cover for him.

Right? So within the Ruist's framework, I mean, this is obviously a non ideal theory, right? Obviously. Ideally, nobody would commit a crime. But if a crime does occur, the son is due to filial piety, partial care. The son sort of buries the body, right? I mean, the son helps the dad bury the body, right? I mean, that's what filial piety requires. And then the Mohists will say, look, even the master said that partiality means this, right? So the whole culture based on partiality easily slides from helping your father bury the body or like hide the body to oh, maybe we'll hurt some people to benefit the family, maybe our state, well, we should attack the smaller state.

And so for Mozi, it's just that slippery slope from helping your father hide the body to, I don't know, committing mass genocide or whatever, right? Whereas Mozi is saying, we nip this in the bud. You get filial piety out from the end. But the principle should be impartiality.

43:20 Wes: Filial piety becomes emergent upon.

43:23 Tzuchien: Exactly, exactly.

43:25 Wes: The general impartial comportment.

43:27 Seth: I don't want to give up my point, but I also don't want to derail the conversation. I will just say that I had. Recently I've been circling through, as I normally do, our past episodes and just recently listened to the table read of Antigone and the conversation around that. And this is exactly the Conversation of should I go bury body of my brother or should I obey the dictates of the state? And that same conundrum of familial responsibility versus let's call it the dictates of the state. And I think he's pointing out that same tension here.

44:00 Wes: It's a perennial theme, right, in literature and film. I mean, the Godfather for instance, the very beginning of that film, is about well, can this system of justice, which focuses on impartiality, do justice to my daughter who was just sexually assaulted and the two guys got a slap on the wrist? Godfather, I'll do something about it. So it's about loyalty and friendship and favors and honor and satisfying the desire for vengeance in a way and part of victims and things like that, as opposed to what you get in a more abstract justice system which can never do justice to those more familial and loyalty based concerns.

44:37 Dylan: But well, it's the whole Oresteia, right?

44:40 Seth: Yep.

44:40 Wes: Yep. Yeah. Choose your text.

44:43 Mark: So the Mohists are going to say don't put the horse's head just in one bed. You need to put equal horses heads in all the beds. That's what ghosts are doing.

44:53 Seth: Right?

44:53 Tzuchien: That's. That's why he thinks belief in goals is important.

44:57 Wes: They're making us offers that we cannot refuse.

45:00 Dylan: Absolutely.

45:01 Mark: That's a great way to end part one. We're going to continue with part two in a couple minutes. If you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, you it'll be the next thing in your feed. If you're not, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support become one. Thanks everybody.

45:14 Wes: Thank you.