Mohist Consequentialism

Origin. Mozi (Mo Di), 5th century BCE; the Mohist school was the major rival to Confucianism before the Qin unification.

Mechanism. Actions are judged by their consequences for the benefit of all (jian ai — impartial care). The Mohists rejected Confucian emphasis on graded love (caring more for family than strangers) as the source of conflict and partiality. They developed rigorous methods of argument and demanded that policies be justified by their effects on wealth, population, and order — not by tradition or ritual propriety.

Procedure. Define the benefit to be maximized: material welfare, social order, population flourishing. Evaluate proposed actions by their actual consequences, not by their conformity to tradition or their expression of virtue. Reject appeals to authority, custom, or intuition that cannot be grounded in demonstrable benefit. Apply this test impartially — do not weight benefits to your own group more than benefits to others.

Applies to. Policy analysis, resource allocation, any decision where traditional justifications may obscure consequences.

Limitations. Impartial consequentialism conflicts with the particularistic loyalties that motivate most human behavior. The Mohist program was historically unsuccessful precisely because it demanded a degree of impartiality that people would not sustain. Calculating consequences requires prediction, and prediction is uncertain.