 The Mohist appeal to happiness and dislike is interestingly different from that of classical utilitarianism in the West. Utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill held a hedonistic theory of value, on which happiness is the fundamental good. Moral value for them lies in maximizing happiness. For the Mohists, by contrast, happiness is not a fundamental good, but a criterion by which to identify the goods that constitute benefit. Their theory thus sidesteps a well-known criticism of hedonistic theories of value, namely that happiness is an unconvincing explanation of or basis for moral value, since it generally is not a fundamental good but a byproduct of our achieving other goods. 