 In rejecting the Mohists’ judgment on this point, Xunzi is not contesting the Mohists’ general theory of inference. He is only disputing its application in this case. While there is no evidence that Xunzi held that all complex meaning is strictly compositional, he was disinclined to take seriously the kinds of exceptions that the Mohists garnered for their ethical views. His preference seems to have been for a simpler theory that accommodates terms of whatever levels of generality are necessary for purposes of communicative clarity. The complex “killing people” is better analyzed compositionally if another simple term of appropriate generality (e.g., “murder”) is at hand to avoid the confusion: