Master Mo and Pareto Improvement

When people first came into being and before there were governments or laws, each person followed their own norm [yi; or righteousness] for deciding what was right and wrong…Within families, there was resentment and hatred between fathers and sons…Throughout the world, people used water, fire, and poison to harm and injure one another, to the point where if they had strength to spare, they would not use it to help each other, if they had excess goods, they would leave them to rot away rather than distribute to another, and if they had helpful teachings, they would hide them away rather than teach them to one another…The chaos that ruled in the world was like what one finds among the birds and beasts.” Mozi, Chapter 11, p. 65 (translated Ivanhoe)

I would like to return (recall) to Master Mo's description of the state of nature. Because in teaching the passage (quoted above), I noted a nice feature about it that had escaped my notice before. (I get to that in a moment.) For Master Mo the state of nature is characterized by thoroughgoing normative disagreement that also generates a nasty war against all (including within the family) that he takes to be characteristic of animal behavior.

One of the illustrations of the chaos that ensues absent thee norm-unification that is a consequence of polities and law is the claim that in the state of nature people are willing to see their excess goods go to waste rather than "distribute it to another." This amount to the claim that in the state of nature people will reject so-called Pareto improvements. For "a Pareto improvement occurs when a change in allocation harms no one and helps at least one person, given an initial allocation of goods for a set of persons."

A Pareto improvement is often treated as an obvious principle, maybe even a minimal principle of (social) rationality. (To be sure, Pareto efficiency/optimality is not treated as so obvious.) And it has intuitive attraction for recognizing that a state of affairs is better than another when at least one person is better off and nobody is harmed (regardless of the criterion).

What Master Mo here discerns is that Pareto improvements are only no-brainers if one assumes shared norms in the background. Shared norms are absent in his version of the state of nature. Master Mo's point can be made plausible if we recognize that absent agreement over what counts as 'better' or 'worse,' the claim that there is a Pareto improvement is (to use a different register) merely formal. In fact, in practice, often there is an element of stipulation in what is counted in an distributional exercise in which Pareto improvements are appealed to.The Mozi argument makes clear that the very fact of such stipulation means that some meta-coordination problem about norms has already been solved. 

 

One may suspect that Master Mo's argument relies on unduly pessimistic view of human nature. But all Master Mo needs is that people have an intrinsic disposition toward moral reflection or reactive attitudes without that being sufficient for generating agreement over norms/morality. That strikes me as rather  minimal commitment. He does not require that people get pleasure out of,say, seeing harvests going to waste (and folk dying in misery).

 

Of course, it also seems to follow that Master Mo thinks that inside political life, Pareto improvements can be uncontroversial. And this fact explains their seeming obviousness. So, in virtue of the fact that a meta-coordination problem has been solved -- that is, a legitimate political order which is is constitutive of norms --, Pareto improvements are self-evident.