Wang Yang-ming's ethics of war

Abstract

Mozi was an early critic of the tradition of thought associated with Confucius, and founder of a religious and social activist community. The main source for Mohism the thinking associated with Mozi and his followers, the Mohists is the eponymous Mozi. Modern critics believe that the received corpus was probably written over an extended period of time throughout the Mohist community's existence, possibly taking final shape only in the early imperial age well after the demise of the community. The Mohists' main intellectual attention was focused on offering arguments against military aggression, and relatedly, on the distinction between unjustified military aggression and justified punitive interventions. Mohist doctrine has a broadly consequentialist structure specific ways of conduct or policies are moral if, when put into practice, they promote the world's welfare, and immoral if they harm the world. This chapter concludes with some brief remarks regarding the nature of the Mohist writings on war.