 The texts provide enough detail about “relation ranking” for us to speculate that later Mohist ethics is consequentialist at the foundational level. Given the statements that morality (yì) is benefit (lì) (A8), that in our commitments, we are to take all the world as our “portion,” or object of responsibility (A8), and that care for all is to be equal (EC13), the most explanatorily powerful hypothesis for the empirical content of those texts is that the theory is foundationally consequentialist. “Relation ranking” was thus probably justified as a code of conduct on the grounds that its practice best promoted the welfare of all, making later Mohist ethics a form of indirect social-practice consequentialism. The Mohist position would have been that in practice the welfare of all is best secured by having everyone follow conventional relationship-roles where the whole social system leads to more universal well-being that an alternate set of social practices. So doing more for closer relations and less for distant would still be moral where everyone followed that convention, e.g. the elderly would generally have been more effectively cared for by their children, who loved them and better understood their needs, than by strangers. So equal concern for the welfare of all would have justified a code in which individuals provided primarily for their own elderly parents, not others’. This social dào could have been expected to meet the needs of most elderly, so it would have been unnecessary for everyone to provide equal benefits for other people’s parents. Outside of the family, generally only orphans and the childless elderly would have required help. The Mohists probably expected the burden of caring for them to be split across society, with the relatively well-off contributing from their surplus resources. 