Mozi · Philosophy
Mozi’s method for deciding whether any doctrine is worth believing: test it by its <em>root</em> (does it accord with the precedent of the sage-kings?), its <em>evidence</em> (do the eyes and ears of ordinary people confirm it?), and its <em>use</em> (does adopting it benefit the country and the people?) - an early fusion of empiricism and consequentialism.
Mozi noticed that his opponents defended their doctrines by mere assertion, or by appeal to what sounded elegant, or by citing revered names - and that arguments conducted this way never end, because there is no shared measure to settle them. His response was methodological and, for his age, revolutionary: before we debate whether a doctrine is true or worthy, we must first agree on a standard (fa) by which to test it. To reason about right and wrong without a fixed standard, he said, is like a man trying to tell the direction of sunrise from sunset while standing on a spinning potter’s wheel: everything turns, nothing can be fixed, and no dispute can ever be resolved. So Mozi laid down three tests that any doctrine must pass. It is one of the first explicit attempts in human thought to say not just what is true but how we are entitled to decide what is true.
Take each test in turn. The first, the basis or root, asks whether a doctrine agrees with the practice of the ancient sage-kings - rulers like Yao, Shun, and Yu, whose reigns Mozi treats as demonstrated cases of good government. This is an appeal to tested precedent: what has actually worked. The second, verification, asks whether the doctrine is confirmed by the evidence of the senses - not the sense of an elite, but ‘the eyes and ears of the common people,’ the shared, public observation available to everyone. If no one has ever seen or heard the thing a doctrine asserts, that counts heavily against it. The third, application, asks what happens when the doctrine is put into practice as law and policy: does the country grow richer, more orderly, more populous - or poorer and more chaotic? Precedent, evidence, and benefit: a doctrine must answer to all three, and the third, benefit, is the one that finally decides.
Mozi does not leave the three tests abstract; he immediately puts them to work on a real doctrine - fatalism, the belief that wealth and poverty, order and disorder are fixed by fate no matter what people do. Run it through the tests. Basis: did the sage-kings teach fate? No - they taught that diligent government brings order and that effort matters, and their success came from acting, not from resigning themselves to fate. Verification: has anyone ever actually seen or heard this thing called ‘fate’? No one, ever; it answers to no evidence of the senses. Application: what happens when people believe in fate? Rulers grow negligent, officials lazy, farmers and weavers slack - for why toil if the outcome is already fixed? - and the country sinks into poverty and disorder. Fatalism fails every test, and fails the third catastrophically. The three tests thus do exactly what a good method should: they take a seductive doctrine and show, by a shared and public procedure, precisely why it should be rejected.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Mozi demanded every doctrine be measured by a fixed standard, and proposed three tests - the basis in the sage-kings, the verification in the senses of the common people, and the application judged by benefit - an early empiricist and consequentialist method for evaluating claims. Explain the three te…
Leads to Jeremy Bentham.
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