joker8baller Wrote:There's a problem with your argument, and silly's got a point.
Every society in the world has people like this, and many people will never go to their aid. It's actually a psychological principle that many people are afraid to help when something wrong is happening (Especially in America, people are afraid of getting sued).
Hundreds of events like these are present in other societies and have been present over the past few decades.
Being ignorant when being faced with such situations is not exclusive to the Chinese society. Correct me if i'm wrong, but that psychological principle you're referring to is the "Fight of Flight" response, which is behavior experienced by both humans and animals. I am interested to know the other hundred events that has an immoral issue of this magnitude.
Anyway, note that people of different beliefs make up a society.
"Adam Smith wrote that a society "may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility without any mutual love or affection, if only they refrain from doing injury to each other."[1]
When I refer to a society, I meant Chinese people in its entirety(in a general sense) as obviously not all Chinese people are immoral. My argument is that the degradation of morals are more prominent in Chinese society, rather than the West. The West has their own issues on immorality, which in my opinion, is less severe relative to the Chinese society.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society#cite_note-0
joker8baller Wrote:Melamine poisoning and other tainted chinese products are not good examples to explain the "degradation of Chinese society" as well. It's just companies skimping out to make a higher profit margin. Again, this has happened many times in many different societies as well, and has occurred over the past few decades.
On the contrary, I believe that the melamine poisoning and other tainted chinese products are good example to explain the degradations of morals in Chinese society. In its race to be the next global superpower, it has placed extreme emphasis on economic growth (which is an important factor in legitimizing authority). They have successfully achieved this economic expansion in the past three decades. However, the price they paid in an overly profit-driven society has created a moral crisis. These are the very words of their current Chinese Premier Wen Jia Bao,
"
Wen cited a spate of widely reported food safety scandals in recent years as example for ''degradation of morality''. These include the melamine-contaminated infant formula, clenbuterol-contaminated pork, the rampant use of oil retrieved from drainage gutters for cooking by restaurants, and recently discovered steamed buns dyed with unidentified chemicals (so they would look like made from a mixture of wheat flour and corn flour, as the latter is more expensive).
''
These virulent food safety incidents have shown the grave situation of the degradation of morality and the loss of integrity,'' the premier said in an April 14 meeting members of the Counselors' Office and the Central Research Institute of Culture and History (CRICH), two advisory organs to the State Council - China's cabinet. Wen's speech was reported on Sunday by the state-run Xinhua News Agency. "
Source:
http://atimes.com/atimes/China/MD21Ad02.html
This is just one of the many examples on how a "profit-driven" society has caused some of its people to be immoral.
"A lorry driver ran over a five-year-old boy – and then reversed over him to make sure he was dead in an apparent attempt to avoid footing hospital bills for the child."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ident.html
If this doesn't show that a society in general is immoral, how else can you define an immoral society? Surely you can't explain that in empirical data.