Evaluating only consequences justifies atrocities in the name of “the greater good”. Only an ethics founded on a complete theorization of moral substance can give us ethical guidelines to live by.

The difficulty for the Mohists and other consequentialists lies in establishing that consequences are the only such relevant factor. Consider an example the Mohists themselves touch on: slavery. 42 They argue that, along with other aspects of military conquest, enslaving the people of a defeated state is immoral. Their official explanation is that this and other consequences of war benefit neither Heaven, the ghosts, nor people.43 But is slavery wrong merely because it harms its victims? Suppose the enslaved prisoners were from an impoverished, crime-ridden state, and after their capture they lived comfortably as servants in a wealthy, orderly state. By the Mohists’ criteria, one might argue that enslavement had benefited them. Still, most of us—probably including the Mohists—would deny that this benefit justifies their enslavement. The challenge for the Mohists is to explain why not. NonMohists can suggest that slavery is wrong not just because it is usually harmful but because it contravenes other crucial values, such as people’s autonomy, dignity, or exercise of their characteristic capabilities. A Mohist might rejoin that trampling on such values amounts to harming people, and so Mohist ethics can indeed explain why benevolent slavery is wrong. However, subsuming such values under the concepts of benefit and harm seems redundant and gratuitous, a Procrustean attempt to assimilate into consequentialism reasons that are fundamentally not consequentialist.44 Indeed, this redundancy sometimes emerges even in the Mohists’ own explanations of immoral conduct. One passage explains that theft is wrong because the stolen items are the product of others’ labor and thus not the thief’s property (Mz 28/57). According to their ethical theory, the Mohists’ official explanation of why theft is wrong must be that the practice of appropriating what is not one’s own is harmful to all. To a critic of consequentialism, however, this explanation will seem redundant. Other things being equal, that thieves take what is not theirs is already a sufficient explanation of the wrong. Indeed, it is not obvious that theft actually is harmful to all, nor that, were it beneficial, it would thereby be right. Without purporting to offer a knockdown critique of Mohist-style consequentialism, then, I suggest that a more persuasive ethical theory would acknowledge different types of moral value rather than subsuming all moral value under the single label of benefits to be promoted. A third respect in which the Mohist conception of value seems too narrow is that the Mohists tend to assume that moral value is the only kind there is, or at least the only kind that matters. As I have remarked, they disregard aesthetic value and devote little attention to personal happiness or fulfillment or to a conception of well-rounded human excellence. For them, the best sort of life—for a committed Mohist—is that of the benevolent person or the sage, a life of total devotion to morality and to promoting the benefit of all, construed as material welfare, sufficient population, and social order. Their texts hint at recognition of other values, as when they point out that ancestral sacrifices offer an occasion for an enjoyable gathering (Mz 31/102) or enthusiastically describe dialectics as a path to knowledge of the myriad things (45/1). However, their texts, especially the “Dialogues,” give the impression that morality is all that really counts. The problem with this stance is that morality may not be all that matters, and a life of total devotion to it may not be the best sort of life. Many goods that enrich our lives are morally neutral; examples might include beauty, knowledge, humor, and excellence in various activities. A flourishing, wellrounded life may be one that makes a significant place for the pursuit or appreciation of such nonmoral goods.45 Mohist ethics thus contrasts with the dominant orientation of classical Greek ethics and that of classical Chinese texts as diverse as the Ruist Xúnzǐ and the Daoist Zhuāngzǐ. Much ancient ethical thought, in both Greece and China, is concerned with the good or flourishing life of the individual. A widely shared assumption is that leading a morally good life is in the individual’s own interest, since such a life is the most excellent or happiest for us as individuals. The morally good and prudentially good life converge: what is morally best turns out to be what is also prudentially best for us as persons.