Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

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Yes it's sickening, and also broadly understood to be a logical thing to do in China.

Let's play the devil's advocate and understand the motive behind it-

The average annual wage of a Chinese citizen is $7,500 USD, whereas the average annual wage of an American is $45,000.

Which means that $400,000 is worth 400,000 x 45,000 / 7,500 = $2,400,000 . And that's only over 23 years so far. You have to keep paying until the day the victim dies. That's the equivalent of $105,000 for Americans per year.

If you refuse to pay, the victim will take you to court and confiscate all your belongings. If you still refuse to get a job to pay, the court will throw your ass in jail and (here is the important part) force your family to pay, indefinitely, until the victim dies.

So are you going to have your family pays $105,000 per year while you sit in jail, or are you going to make sure the victim is dead?

Trust me when I say no one wants to kill another human, but when the law is lay against you in such way, well don't be surprise that humans can override their natural instinct.

(I am from Hong Kong that, while most people there do not share the same sentiment, but can understand the math behind this horrific logic.

This. Frankly I don't understand these people who "don't get it". We're talking about the difference between moving on with your life with a guilty conscience, vs. having your entire life financially ruined due to injuring someone. I make $80k per year. If my country mandated > $100k per year for injuring someone, that's literally the rest of my life destroyed. I could not financially recover for the rest of my life. Ever. For what? An honest accident in which someone's leg is broken and they feign permanent disability?

Imagine you broke someone's leg. Would you rather kill the person and pay $1000, or spend the rest of your life in prison? Letting the person live and paying them $1000 isn't an option. You either get away scott-free, or ruin your life. I can completely understand a culture in which the reality of the consequences makes people choose the lesser punishment.

The solution isn't to increase the punishment for killing someone on the street. The solution is to abolish the ridiculous costs associated with merely injuring someone, especially if that injury comes from an accident.

Of course what's absolutely a joke is people acting all aghast about another country's culture from behind their white picket fences. You do realize that if you were born in their country, you would have the exact same perspective? What the fuck is with this high and mighty bullshit? Your upbringing in a privileged society doesn't make you better than those from less privileged societies, it just makes you privileged. Be thankful your day-to-day routine doesn't involve having to worry about the possibility of having to kill someone in order to keep your pristine life intact.

> What the fuck is with this high and mighty bullshit

By the time a comment descends to this, it's clear that it shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first place. This is supposed to be a site for civil, substantive discussion. If you can't abide by that, please don't post here.

> Of course what's absolutely a joke is people acting all aghast about another country's culture from behind their white picket fences. You do realize that if you were born in their country, you would have the exact same perspective?

From the article:

> With so many hit-to-kill drivers escaping serious punishment, the Chinese public has sometimes taken matters into its own hands. In 2013 a crowd in Zhengzhou in Henan province beat a wealthy driver who killed a 6-year-old after allegedly running him over twice.

Clearly people born and raised in China do not "have the exact same perspective".

People are worth more than property.

Would I kill someone I don't know in order to save someone I know and love deeply? No. That is murder. Now saving a loved one vs. saving someone who is a stranger is a different scenario. The scenario depicted here is very clear. Kill or suffer loss of property that will impact your family physically.

I can see that this would be much harder to do in a collectivist society, I'll give you that much. But murder remains immoral.

I also agree that the consequence of injuring someone should be less. But I don't know what it's so high in the first place so I'm not at a point to really comment on that.

As an aside, I was not born in the U.S. and have lived the vast majority of my life in my country of origin. You stating that I would have the same perspective of those in China if I grew up there does not make that perspective the morally justifiable one. Not having grown up in that culture has given me (or most of us) the freedom of thought to come to the point where we can clearly identify it as immoral, even if we are never faced with the proposition.

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