I am curious to know how Peter Singer is viewed in China (or would be, if he isn’t yet known there). How would this talk go down with a Chinese audience? (The video isn’t playing for me, but there is a transcript.)
The thing is, while I reject his entire framework, I have never seen anyone give an argument against, to argue that supererogation is a thing, moral duty is bounded and is owed first to those nearest to you, having more than someone else does not imply a duty to give the excess away, and so on. These things are said, but never in my reading more than asserted.
When it comes to the accident that Peter Singer refers to, the article talks about it as:
There were a couple of extreme cases where Chinese people refusing to help led to the death of the person in need. Such is the case of Wang Yue, a two year old girl who was wandering alone in a narrow alley, because her mother was busy doing the laundry. She was ran over by two cars, and 18 people who passed around the area didn’t even look at her. Later a public anonymous survey revealed that 71% thought that the people who passed by didn’t stop to help her because they were afraid of getting into trouble.
The article goes on to say:
That’s not the only case in 2011 an 88 year old Chinese man fell in the street and broke his nose, while people passed him by no one helped him and he died suffocating in his own blood. After some anonymous poll the result was the same, the people didn’t blame those who didn’t help, because the recent cases show that if you try to help someone you can get into trouble.
When Peter Singer talks to the TED audience he can assume that everyone will say the would have done something. In Chinese, most people empathize with the people who did nothing.
An example of the dangers of helping in China from the article that ChristianKl talked about.
While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.
The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.
While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. [I bolded this] If you help someone it’s because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.
I don’t know enough about the situation to guess why this norm exists. Or even if it actually exists. But if so, it seems like a bad equillibrium.
Historically, the problem seems to be that most Communist government initiatives to get people to be more altruistic result in them LARPing and not being more altruistic.
At the moment the Chinese government solution seems to be: “Give everybody social credit scores that measure how altruistic they are and hopefully that will get everyone to be more altruistic”.
I don’t get how larping altruism results in the norm that “if you’re helping, you’re guilty”. Unless people went out of their way to cause problems and act like saviors to seem altruistic? Which might be possible, but also sounds like it would be difficult to execute and isn’t the only way people could goodhart altruism metrics.
I am curious to know how Peter Singer is viewed in China (or would be, if he isn’t yet known there). How would this talk go down with a Chinese audience? (The video isn’t playing for me, but there is a transcript.)
The thing is, while I reject his entire framework, I have never seen anyone give an argument against, to argue that supererogation is a thing, moral duty is bounded and is owed first to those nearest to you, having more than someone else does not imply a duty to give the excess away, and so on. These things are said, but never in my reading more than asserted.
When it comes to helping strangers, the Chinese help strangers a lot less. There are articles like: https://medium.com/shanghai-living/4-31-why-people-would-usually-not-help-you-in-an-accident-in-china-c50972e28a82 about Chinese not helping strangers who have an accident.
When it comes to the accident that Peter Singer refers to, the article talks about it as:
The article goes on to say:
When Peter Singer talks to the TED audience he can assume that everyone will say the would have done something. In Chinese, most people empathize with the people who did nothing.
An example of the dangers of helping in China from the article that ChristianKl talked about.
I don’t know enough about the situation to guess why this norm exists. Or even if it actually exists. But if so, it seems like a bad equillibrium.
Historically, the problem seems to be that most Communist government initiatives to get people to be more altruistic result in them LARPing and not being more altruistic.
At the moment the Chinese government solution seems to be: “Give everybody social credit scores that measure how altruistic they are and hopefully that will get everyone to be more altruistic”.
I don’t get how larping altruism results in the norm that “if you’re helping, you’re guilty”. Unless people went out of their way to cause problems and act like saviors to seem altruistic? Which might be possible, but also sounds like it would be difficult to execute and isn’t the only way people could goodhart altruism metrics.
If most altruism is larping then for someone who does something altruistic, people who do altruistic things become suspect.
If I remember right there are cases where in former communist countries people who always vote cooperate on the ultimatum game get punished for it.
Communism isn’t the only factor here but I would expect that it’s one meaningful factor.
“OK, I guess I’m evil then.”