It is a cornerstone principle that all people everywhere have innate rights. The entirety of the Enlightenment is based on this idea. And while China may be actively involved in oppressing these rights domestically, it tacitly endorses them on the international stage.
Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better.
I think this is what the parent was trying to communicate. All humans may have certain inalienable rights, but not all humans fully understand the concept, let alone demand (or even desire) that their rights be respected.
It's kind of mindblowing to contemplate, but enlightenment thought has yet to deeply penetrate the mainland Chinese populace.
Simplified Chinese:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E4%BA%BA%E6%9...
English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=human+rights&y...
That claim appears to not be true. And since many Western concepts (like all the specialist communist terminology) made their way to Chinese through Japanese words using Chinese characters, if it _were_ true it would seem like it'd imply something about Japan too. Japanese uses a word with the same characters but I couldn't run down a good citation of the first dates all of these appeared besides the ngrams.
Your choices are (a) moral relativism, or (b) all humans are despicable. Choose wisely.
Half the point of civilization is accepting the fact we're all terrible people ready to stab each other in the back to get ahead and deciding not to do so so we can actually take a shot at building something great.
And honestly, that's a trick question, because one is a subset of the other. Despicable people being a superset of moral relativists.
That doesn't mean one isn't morally right and one isn't morally wrong.
If you want a hint for which one is which: one asserts that every living person has basic human rights. The other has frequent videos of people ignoring people who are dying, are currently destroying an indigenous population in concentration camps, and when a novel virus broke out, first shut up scientists trying to get the news out, then underplayed it, and then as it started spreading saw citizens weld shut doors of people suspected of having that virus.
Meanwhile it's undeniable that Taoism is a major cultural cornerstone of China and very much affects how the state and its population are related. Thus "Moral relativism is a cancer, applied selectively by the lazy. Do better." is actually quite an ignorant statement that applies a specific moral lens to the entire world without acknowledging the lack of universality in ideals across humanity.
The existence of other frameworks of morality doesn't mean that there isn't one True Morality. It just means that some people act against it.
It's not pompous, it's reasonable, as in it's a deduction that anyone can make for themselves with the reason they have, applied to the vessel they were born with.
Probably not, because anything human will only be an approximation. It's probably a whole damn closer than the Chinese morality though.
> To suggest that there's somehow a single philosophy that's correct is quite pompous. Why? In science we accept that there's one true way that any process can be described. Others might be entirely wrong (theory of Humors), or partially wrong, but useful (Newtonian physics). Why is the notion that there's on true moral framework so outlandish?
A big argument I see by Chinese nationalists online, which I think carries validity, is that Western governments who enshrine human rights and democracy in their constitutions throw their weight behind horrific dictators that support their business interests and suppress democratic movements that don't.
Basically, Western governments aren't more moral than China; just more constrained by our institutions.
Regarding the lack of good samaritanism in China, this is a recent thing stemming from a 2000s legal case where a man was sued after taking an injured girl to hospital. Most Chinese, especially the older ones, find this aspect of their culture abhorrent and there are active campaigns against it in several cities.
Chinese leaders might even understand America better than we understand ourselves.
I had just read an op ed the other day how America has no strategic thinkers in positions of power at this point. Someone like Kissinger. I don't even know how to argue with that because we don't. We don't even have the political will to want someone like that. We want a circus. China can see this, we are basically blind to it.
Focus in Western civilization shifted to trivia. We are spending all our effort deciding whether or not to take vaccines rather than deal with this problem efficiently and talk about really important problems like, you know, future of our civilization.
That's quite a strong statement about a theory taken seriously by a number of moral philosophers.