QuestionsWhat is a just society?Governing through non-action
What is a just society?Virtue and harmony

Governing through non-action

Laozi c. 579 BC · c. 500 BCFollow the Way (Dao) through non-action.
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What it claims

One should govern through non-action: the best ruler is the one whose people barely know he exists, and say in the end "it happened of itself".

Why

The more laws and bans a ruler piles up, the more disorder there is: a people left alone regulates itself.

In short

"Governing through non-action" is an argument by Laozi (Daodejing, 3, 17, 57 and 60) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: virtue and harmony). Its claim: One should govern through non-action: the best ruler is the one whose people barely know he exists, and say in the end "it happened of itself". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Daodejing, 3, 17, 57 and 60
Valid with an implicit premise

"Governing a great state is like cooking a small fish": turn it over too often and it falls apart. The Daodejing holds that laws, prohibitions and rewards create the disorders they claim to cure. The text proceeds by maxims, not by proof: the form P1, P2… → C below is our reconstruction.

P1The more power multiplies laws and prohibitions, the more poor people and thieves there are.
P2If disorder does not come from human nature, then a people whose desires are not stirred up (talent is not exalted, rare goods are not prized) do not quarrel or steal: they order themselves.
P3 · implicit premiseDisorder does not come first from human nature itself, but from the desires and rivalries that society and power give rise to.
P4If interventions make disorder worse and if, without an outside cause of disorder, the people order themselves, then the best government is the one that intervenes least.
Therefore one should govern through non-action: the best ruler is the one whose people barely know he exists, and say in the end "it happened of itself".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where laws make things worse but disorder also comes from human nature: then the people do not order themselves, and doing nothing is not the best policy.
With P3 the conclusion follows. Without it the argument fails: if humans are prone to disorder by nature, removing laws does not bring back order, it removes it. Yet the word "human nature" (xing) does not even occur in the Daodejing: it really is a hidden premise, and it is where its Chinese opponents attacked. Mind the context too: this non-action is advice to a prince, and the same chapter 3 wants to keep the people "without knowledge and without desire". It is not praise of individual freedom in the modern sense.
Analogy. The small fish of chapter 60: the more you turn it in the pan, the more it falls apart. The commentator Wang Bi sums up: "not stirring". A modern image: a gardener who keeps watering, weeding and pruning can do more harm than one who lets things grow.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Xunzi 250 BC · attacks premise 3

Human nature is bad: left to themselves, people follow their love of gain and their envy, and it ends in violence. Teachers, laws, rites and a sense of right are absolutely necessary for courtesy and order to arise. Warped wood becomes straight only in a press.

Lao-tseu replies
Lao-tseu What the text already says
The Daodejing does not deny that people quarrel and steal. It sees the cause in what power puts forward: exalting talent creates rivalry; prizing rare goods creates thieves.
The debate goes on (our summary) Xunzi would answer that envy and love of gain are there from birth, before any power: removing rewards does not remove them. Elsewhere (chapter 17, not yet in our corpus), he judges that Laozi "saw the value of bending, but not of straightening".
Confucius (Analects) attacks premise 1

Agreed about laws and punishments: they make people careful, not honest. But not everything that comes from above is of the same kind. A prince who leads by example and regulates customs through the rites gives the people a sense of shame, and makes them good. What is needed is not less education but better education.

Lao-tseu replies
Lao-tseu What the text already says
The rites are only the thin husk of loyalty and good faith, and the beginning of disorder (chapter 38). And humaneness and righteousness appear only when the great Way has declined (chapter 18).
The debate goes on (our summary) A Confucian would answer that even the non-action praised by Confucius, that of King Shun, rested on example and ritual: Shun "watched over himself and sat gravely on his throne" (Analects 15.4). Without education, spontaneity has no shape.
H
Han Fei and the Legalists 240 BC · attacks premise 1

Han Fei himself comments on Laozi but draws the opposite lesson: the prince can "do nothing" provided that clear laws and certain punishments do everything in his place. It is not laws that create thieves, but vague, badly enforced laws.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
We have not yet found a direct reply by Lao-tseu in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Chapter 74 is often quoted against him: "The people do not fear death; to what purpose is it to try to frighten them with death?" But Han Fei would answer that the chapter does not reject punishment: it adds that if the people fear death, one can seize and kill those who do wrong, and that "there is always One who presides over the infliction of death". For a Legalist, that One is the law.
Hobbes 1651 · attacks premise 3

Without a common power to keep them all in awe, people are in a state of war of everyone against everyone, and life there is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Disorder is not created by the State: the State is what gets us out of it.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1651, after the author's death (-500).