 One can appreciate, in this regard, why the Confucians insisted that the correct use of names is a matter for authority to decide, because only an appropriate authority can justify how one ought to act. This authority was assumed to be found in the forms of ritual propriety (li) that were the common ingredients of established traditions, or in the judgments or discretions of “virtuous gentlemen” or other exemplars of moral conduct, and in this regard was considered to be – if not universal – then at least constant, dependable and unifying. But the Mohists were skeptical, not hesitating to point out that tradition was not a strong enough criterion for proper action. They knew, for instance, that social practices vary and conflict dramatically across time and place; how can they all be “righteous”? Something independent of these practices had to decide to serve as an objective criterion of moral conduct. It is noteworthy that the Mohists themselves did appeal to an authority of sorts, in the abstract, quasi-godlike entity they referred to as Heaven (tian), which they deemed to be the most perfect moral agency. They referred to this agency as  “Heaven’s intention”  (tian zhi), believing that it could serve as the basis of an authority independent of the variable and opposing opinions and social practices of people. But in later Mohist writings, particularly the Mohist Canons, we find no mention of this agency, possibly because the Mohists found that their conception of it was not substantive enough to discriminate things at the level of philosophical precision that they sought to address. Whatever the case, they essentially divorced the justification of action from any authoritative individual or entity that would otherwise serve to establish it, and this raised new philosophical concerns about how the norms of conduct and language use were to be decided. Central to Mohist ethical thought are the principles of utility (an action is right depending on whether its consequences are useful) and universal love (the usefulness of an action is determined by the impartial beneficence it contributes to public welfare). So, according to the Mohists, the moral description of an action depends partly (indeed, largely) on whether it contributes to these ends, or whether these ends may be judged appropriately analogous to the consequences of the actions of a moral exemplar. But the judgment of similarity here may itself depend on preexisting normative standards of correct use independently of considerations of utility. Safe to say that since the Mohist Canons do not explicitly address the issue of convention in language, or its role in the justification of principles of naming, the Mohists were probably undecided on this point. Not until the philosophy of Xunzi do we find a clear consideration of this issue, but Xunzi avoids the hard questions it exposes by deferring to the more fastidious judgments of an intellectual elite.