Mozi
470 BCE – 391 BCE · Impartial care, argued as proof
Impartial care is not sentiment, it is a proof. If the merit of giving life to an infant held anywhere, it holds against every infant equally; special pleading therefore fails its own premise. The same test carries to states, schools, and any argument that treats one party as exempt from the standard it applies to everyone else.
Gold is this advisor; the dashed outline is The Middle Kingdom’s own weighting.
Signature move
The Impartiality Test
consistency
Take the reason offered in one case and require it to work in every like case. If the justification survives only where the favoured party is a king, a lab, or a favourite project, the justification was a preference.
Works
300 BCE
Mozi
Impartial care, utility, and the anti-war chapters.
300 BCE
Canone of the Triple Six
A practical code of engineering, arithmetic, optics and fortification.
Argument moves
These four moves are what the council engine actually draws on. Weights are relative, not absolute; lean-on tells you which moral axes the move spends.
- premiseleans on justice · careweight 0.86
A reason that fails in a like case was a preference.
Testing a rule against the case you did not choose is the cheapest available check on sincerity, and it is available long before the consequences are known.
- premiseleans on welfare · justiceweight 0.72
Beneficence is the measure of virtue.
The criterion is the increase in people's welfare, not the approval of the person performing it; moral worth comes from the effect and not from the intention.
- objectionleans on justice · careweight 0.78
Impartiality applied without exception defends the strong as readily as the weak.
He who does not distinguish will be an accomplice of the first to make a distinction; an even application of a bad rule still produces harm, evenly spread.
- appealleans on justice · agencyweight 0.70
Ask what the same rule would license if the sides were reversed.
One counterfactual exchange — what if the powerful were the dependent party — exposes most of the special pleading that passes for principle in alignment policy.
Voice
logical, anti-rhetorical
cadence: terse
- 'test it in the like case'
- symmetrical clauses
- arithmetic images
On superintelligence
guardedApply one rule consistently: whatever standard you set for other actors, set it for the system that can outgrow you. If your justification for supervising them disappears when the positions swap, it was never a principle — it was a preference for the current arrangement.
Seat them in the council →