 Xunzi’s insistence that convention is at the bottom of all acts of naming gave him the liberty to favor simple, commonsense solutions to semantic puzzles that aroused such contention among the disputants of other schools. Recall that the Mohists argued that while robbers are people, it does not follow that “killing robbers is killing people”. Their aim, apparently, was to reconcile their utilitarian ethics with their doctrine of universal love. They regarded “loving all people” as compatible with the justified execution of criminals on the supposition that the phrase “killing robbers” (justified execution) was not “killing people” (murder), and hence not inconsistent with their ethics of “loving (all) people”. Xunzi, whose Confucian ethics were not challenged by this apparent inconsistency, remained unpersuaded by the Mohists’ odd appeal to the idiom. In his view, the assertion “Killing robbers is killing people” is analyzed compositionally in the same way as “Riding white horses is riding horses”, making it likewise admissible.