Philosophy
Mozi argues for impartial care, merit, frugality and opposition to aggressive war in a complete bilingual translation.
A practice is right when it produces the greatest benefit for everyone, and Mozi calls impartial love right precisely because it causes the world's major benefits. Benefit here does not mean pleasure. It means a plurality of collective goods: political order, material wealth, and a growing population.
The book treats Heaven's will as the measure of right: Heaven loves all people without distinction, just as it sustains all life regardless of status. It also argues that when people stop believing that spirits reward the good and punish the wicked, immorality and social chaos follow.
Any claim should be checked on three points: its basis in past experience, whether people can verify it with their senses, and what happens when it is put into practice. The final measure is the benefit it brings to the country and the people. Even how we draw distinctions between things should be chosen partly by which distinctions do the most good.
The book argues that people should be concerned for everyone's welfare without drawing lines between self and other, or between family and strangers. You are to view others as you view yourself and act for them as you act for yourself. This was a direct challenge to the rival view that it is natural and right to care more for your own kin.
Conflict comes from treating what is yours as mattering more than what is another's. If everyone regarded other people's states and cities as they regard their own, no one would attack another state or seize another's cities. On this argument, impartial care is what removes the motive for theft and war.
To judge any spending, first state its purpose and refuse anything beyond it. A house exists to keep out wind, cold, heat, rain and thieves, so ornament past that is waste. By the same test the book condemns lavish luxury, elaborate funerals, long mourning, and aristocratic music as costs that do not serve the common good.
The book condemns every form of offensive warfare as violence and exploitation that destroys the benefit of all. Its condemnation is aimed at attacking others, not at all use of force. Its authors were also recognized experts in defending a city against siege.
Government posts should go to worthy and talented people, not to those favored by birth or connections. A state that fails to keep its learned people injures itself. Anyone who sees a worthy person and fails to recommend them is failing the ruler.
The book holds that disorder comes from each person holding their own standard of right and wrong. Its remedy is for people to identify with their superiors, all the way up, so that one moral standard runs through the whole society. The aim is order, bought at the price of conformity.
The book rejects fatalism because believing outcomes are fixed makes people stop trying. People can change their circumstances by observing the world with their senses and judging events by their causes, functions, and historical record.