The Mozi Playbook

Shan Golan’s book Being and Nonbeing focuses on the wu-wei traditions of the four great pre-Qin thinkers: Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, and Zhuangzi.

Actually, two “minor kings” also make appearances in the book—Xunzi and Mozi. Given the time constraints, I didn’t mention them in the program. Xunzi was the head of Confucius’s fan club; his views were basically an enthusiastic expansion of Confucian-style wu-wei, so we’ll skip him here too.

In this little article, let’s fill in the gap by talking about Mozi.

From the perspective of wu-wei, Mozi occupies a fascinating position: you could say he stands squarely opposed to all four great kings—Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, and Zhuangzi.

The four great kings disagreed on plenty, but they were united in aiming for wu-wei. In other words, whichever direction they started from, they all ended up at the same destination: the effortless freedom of life led by hot cognition.

Mozi, on the other hand, argued for this: suppress hot cognition across the board and let cold cognition walk alone.

In Mozi’s view, “wu-wei” is completely useless. What matters are goals rationally derived and beneficial to the country and its people. All we have to do is choose our course of action according to those goals.

As for whether, while pursuing your goal, your actions come from the heart and feel effortless, or whether you’re being forced to do them, old man Mozi simply—does. not. care.

So, in Mozi’s eyes, what goals should we act toward? There are only three:

1. Increase wealth;

2. Increase the population;

3. Increase national order.

If you aren’t working toward one of these goals, your behavior is wrong.

“Morality,” that especially metaphysical concept for the other kings, is remarkably simple for Mozi. In his view, moral standards should be objective, and deciding whether something is moral should be like solving an ordinary math problem. Weigh the positive and negative consequences against those three goals, start calculating, and then force yourself to choose your course of action according to the answer. That is the “Mozi Playbook.”

This ethical model has a twin brother in the West: the moral philosophy of “utilitarianism” or “consequentialism,” laid down by people such as Jeremy Bentham.

The gist of utilitarianism can be summed up in one sentence: every action should be guided by the maximization of overall human happiness—which is extremely Mozi.

Some conclusions of utilitarian philosophy sound pretty heartless. Philosopher Peter Singer, for example, concluded that in certain circumstances, euthanizing severely disabled infants is justified. He also argues that as long as so many people on Earth cannot afford food, we should donate every bit of income beyond our own minimum material needs; otherwise, we are being immoral.

Abandoning emotion and embracing extreme rationality—doesn’t that sound awfully familiar?

—Isn’t that exactly the vibe of a psychopath?

In fact, historical records suggest that Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, was an extremely cold person. Some people suspect he had Asperger’s syndrome, but he was probably a psychopath. I suspect Mozi probably was one too.

Utilitarian philosophy is an extremely important school of thought, and it has in fact produced tremendously rich results in philosophy and public policy. But for individuals, completely suppressing hot cognition may not be such a great idea.

The famous neuroscientist Antonio Damasio once observed patients whose hot cognition had completely failed. He found that these people were utterly incapable of making any reliable moral judgments.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has also conducted a series of studies showing that human moral judgment must be grounded in the “hot” systems of emotion and intuition. People without “hot” feelings effectively become people who “can’t tell right from wrong.”

So the utopia Mozi dreamed of would actually be a world where psychopaths roamed everywhere—but that doesn’t sound like a particularly wonderful world.

References:

1. Shan Golan. (2018). Being and Nonbeing.

2. Jonathan Haidt. (2014). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Note

• This article in the “New Psychological Knowledge” series was a short popular-psychology essay/commentary written to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: New Psychological Knowledge. It was published on the now-shuttered platform “Fantuan”; the original link no longer exists.