The greater selection

Introduction

The Greater Selection may be the hardest chapter in the Mozi. The text is damaged, its strips out of order, and scholars still disagree on many sentences. But it preserves the most finely drawn principles of Mohist ethics.

The first is weighing. "Cut off a finger to save the wrist: among benefits take the greater, among harms take the lesser." "Taking the lesser harm is not choosing harm; it is choosing benefit." That is the Mohist form of "the lesser of two evils," and the measure 墨门 / The Mohist Community uses most when deciding.

The second follows immediately and matters most. "Killing one person to save the world is not killing one person to benefit the world. Killing oneself to save the world is killing oneself to benefit the world." Weighing has a floor: you may trade greater for lesser on your own account, but you may not use another person as a chip.

The third concerns the reach of care. "Caring for people does not exclude oneself; the self is among those cared for." And caring for earlier and later generations is like caring for people today. This is where the Community's habit of putting "the people not in the room," descendants and distant strangers, into every decision comes from.

The fourth is "motive and result together" (志功为辩): judge an act by both its intention and its outcome. The chapter also says "where doing right allows more, give more; where it allows less, give less," and calls this proportion. Care is not graded, but what one gives may vary with circumstances. This is often misread as a concession to graded care; what it concedes is that resources are finite.

The three tests

The Greater Selection is the third test, use, worked out in detail: what counts as benefit, what as harm, whose benefit counts. But "killing one to save the world is not benefiting the world" adds a line that use may not cross. Benefit cannot be calculated by treating a person as a mere instrument. Where does that line come from? Not from consequences; more likely from the definition of impartiality. If everyone is "among those cared for," no one can be set aside as the price. This week's discussion should settle whether that floor is derived from the three tests or is a premise that comes before them.

For families

• "Finger for wrist": give children a small dilemma (one toy on a trip) and practice taking the greater and giving up the lesser.
• "The self is among those cared for": ask whether looking after yourself counts as impartial care. Does enough sleep? Breakfast?
• "Motive and result": tell a story of someone at home meaning well and getting it wrong, and decide together how to judge it.

For chapters

• 20 min reading · 20 min 墨辩 · 10 min 三表 review · 10 min 职 reports.
• 墨辩 motion: "When the 兼爱基金 is short, should it give more to greater need or divide equally?" Quote the passage on proportion.
• 三表 review: have one Mohist introduce the state of the damaged text and discuss "what can we be sure of when the text is broken?" That is itself an exercise in the second test.