The Mozi School: Impartial and Heterogeneous Interacting Agents
The more usual understanding of Confucius’ teachings is not only rather different from Shibusawa’s advanced interpretation, but also lacks social views of institutional and behavioral interactions and coordination.
This is often considered a fatal flaw of Confucianism, and requires another doctrine to complement it.At almost the same time as Confucianism developed, so did the Mozi school, founded by Mozi (ca. 470 BCE-390 BCE) and espousing Mohism. The two schools shared some ethical views: Mozi is recognized as a pacifist, but one who accepted the need to take action against invaders’ attacks. Mozi’s high reputation internationally is because of his constant passion for the good of the people, without concern for personal gain or even his own life or death.[23] His tireless contribution to society was praised by many, including Confucius’ disciple Mencius. He acted on the belief of impartial caring all his life. Mozi, Book 7, Will of Heaven 1 in Mohism in Mozi (1934) wrote:
He who rules a large state does not attack small states: he who rules a large house does not molest small houses. The strong does not plunder the weak. The honored does not demean the humble. The clever does not deceive the stupid. This is beneficial to Heaven above, beneficial to the spirits in the middle sphere, and beneficial to the people below. Being beneficial to these three, it is beneficial to all. So the most excellent name is attributed to such a man and he is called sage-king.
Confucianism gives its highest level of priority to propriety then to the arts. However, the Mozi school was organized by engineers and artisans, whose respect was naturally given to actual practice. The Mozi school was therefore particularly excellent in its social and political commitments. Much more interestingly, it developed a unique moral philosophy. Mozi believed that a large power should not attack a small country, and coupled his belief to practice.
He always tried to exercise his professional expertise in munitions and fortifications to protect smaller countries from attack by larger ones. For example, he successfully prevented the state of Chu[24] from attacking the state of Song by engaging in nine simulated war games, defeating Gongshu Ban, a strategist employed at the court of Chu.I now turn to the utilitarianism of heterogeneous interacting agents. The idea of impartial caring is often considered to be the same idea as Western utilitarianism. However, Mozi utilitarianism was not based on individualistic homogeneous agents. Instead, Mozi had a clear concept of multiple stakeholders or heterogeneous agents. The school then evolved Mozi’s original idea away from the earlier version, because it was too restrictive to accept the idea of pursuit of profit, and advocated a system of mutual benefit by taking into account that profit can be generated in a way that allows others to generate a profit too. Hence the system of mutual benefit aims to create a situation where everyone can enjoy the welfare of the whole world, which would arise at the point at which pursuing self-interest at the cost of others stopped, according to the spirit of impartial caring (Asano 1998, p. 59).
The school did not focus on the so-called naked individuals when it developed the idea of impartial caring. It regarded the world as the aggregate of seven different intersecting units (father-sons, elder brother-younger, lord-subjects, myself-others, wife-other wives, family- other families, home country-other countries): within each unit, unit members share the same interest, and between units, they stand in interest opposition. ■ ■ ■ The Mozi school classified the world in the light of only one criterion to maintain social order, according to its original purpose of impartial caring. ■ ■ ■ It asserted that there was no discrimination between his own unit and an opponent unit (impartial); an agent should not attain his own benefit at the price of his opponent’s (caring or others regarding).[25]
It is clear that the Mozi school view encompassed all the constituents for modeling the heterogeneous interacting agents:
• The community members are functionally classified into heterogeneous agents.
• Heterogeneous agents are aggregated into subgroups as clusters so that an agent belongs to a cluster in which unit members’ interest is entirely unanimous, but the clusters are mutually conflicting.
• Profit may be exchangeable between clusters within a system of mutual benefit. This suggests that agents are also exchangeable.
As we have seen, Mozi propounded the idea of multiple stakeholders, now the situation for the modern corporation system, in terms of the old idea of heterogeneous agents, and also added an original idea of moral belief as a coordination mechanism. In this kind of framework, human interactions are understood in terms of a macroscopic microeconomic feedback loop and take into account a kind of macroscopic condition. Thus his disciplines proposed the following proposition:
Proposition 1.1 (Aruka 2007 in Aruka (2011, Part II)). The framework of heterogeneous interacting agents can employ the system of impartial caring and mutual benefit as its moral code.
Incidentally, Shibusawa’s social view and ethics cannot hold without a conjugation with the dynamic coordination among heterogeneous clusters innate to Mohism. In some senses, therefore, Shibusawa succeeded in integrating Confucianism and Mohism.
1.11