 Still, what makes killing robbers a case of “this but not so” rather than “this and so”? Indeed, what is the basis for the entire fivefold taxonomy of cases? The Mohists answer neither question  explicitly.[35]  Nor do they offer a principled or systematic diagnosis of the failures of syntactic parallelism. They simply stipulate that killing robbers belongs with the other examples under “this but not so.” A critic might respond that the entire “this but not so” group looks suspiciously ad hoc. Why isn’t Jill’s caring about her good-looking brother an instance of caring about a handsome man? Granted that sibling affection is different from sexual attraction, it is still care, in this case directed at a man who happens to be handsome. Similarly, granted that executing criminals is different from murder, it is still an event in which people are killed. The Mohists could probably have found a more compelling way to do justice to the distinctions at stake than by insisting on the apparently paradoxical claim—later attacked by Xunzi—that although robbers are people, killing robbers isn’t killing people. One promising alternative consistent with their program might have been to distinguish between different kinds of killing. They could have pointed out that ‘killing people’ refers generally to all kinds of actions in which one person causes another to die. These include a range of more specific kinds of actions, among them intentional, morally wrong killing of the innocent (murder) and community-sanctioned, morally justified killing of criminals (execution). Thus killing robbers could be an action of the kind killing people without being of the kind morally wrong killing. 