The Great Divergence
This chapter demonstrates that it was in the hands of Mozi and his followers, the Mohists, as well as the self-professed followers of Confucius, especially Mencius and the Mencians, that the tension between humaneness and justice would receive full treatment in their effort to articulate their respective moral-political projects. As a consequence, the tension between the two norms would become increasingly glaring and could no longer be glossed over. The Mohists would fully embrace justice, whereas the Mencians would tout humaneness. The author calls such a development during the early to mid-Warring States period the “Great Divergence,” referring to the fact that the Mohists and the Mencians would gravitate toward justice and humaneness, respectively, and finding the tension between them hard to reconcile—even irreconcilable under certain circumstances. This pivotal divergence would drastically reshape the subsequent development of the moral-political discourse in the classical period and beyond.