The high cost of low morality

Nearly 10 years ago, I read a disturbing story that caught my attention and left me shaking my head in disbelief; you may have the same reaction. The story was reported on slate.com and detailed a tragic practice in China and Taiwan.

In these countries, when drivers accidentally hit pedestrians, they often intentionally ran over them again. Although this sounded like an urban legend, Slate assured readers it was not. Security cameras regularly captured drivers running over victims repeatedly to make sure those victims did not survive. Slate reports, “The Chinese language even has a saying for the phenomenon: ‘It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.’”

As recently as 2015, the penalty imposed by the Chinese legal system for accidentally killing a pedestrian was $30,000 to $50,000. Often after the payment was made, the matter was over, though occasionally there was a short jail sentence. However, in China, the cost of being responsible for an injured person for the rest of their life was sometimes well over a million dollars, so it was far less costly to kill someone than to disable them.

Sometimes, the first time a pedestrian was hit, they were not seriously injured, but they were killed when ran over a second time. Consider one case in the Sichuan Province where a huge truck knocked a 2-year-old down. The dazed toddler did not appear to be seriously injured. He got up immediately and retrieved an umbrella that had been knocked out of his hand. The driver stopped and then backed over the boy, this time killing him. Despite eyewitness testimony, the chief of police claimed the truck had not run over the child, though one website even posted pictures showing the child’s body under the truck’s front wheel.

The Taiwanese legislature has attempted to stop these terrible incidents, and China’s legislature has said “multiple hit cases” should be treated as murders. The point is that when right and wrong are determined by what is best for me instead of what is morally right, society suffers, and innocent individuals inevitably get hurt.

The book of Judges illustrates this principle during a difficult time in Israel’s history. The book’s theme is captured in a remarkable phrase repeated multiple times, “…the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” The final verse of the book, Judges 21:25, states it for a seventh time. When God’s laws are ignored, and everyone merely does what is good for them, society is weakened. This is the exact opposite of Jesus’ challenge to treat others as we want to be treated. Otherwise, this kind of disregard for life can lead to anarchy. Moral societies must do what is right, even if it does not seem economically advantageous, because eventually, the cost in human lives is inevitably too extreme.