In the past decade, the Chinese people have experienced a painful food safety crisis from hidden to obvious in the field of daily life, its scope is wide and far-reaching, and it has never been seen before.Moreover, their situation shows no signs of improvement.It is clear that this phenomenon cannot be explained by the malpractice and malfeasance of individuals and institutions.As an artificial object, food itself does not bear the corresponding moral and legal responsibility, the problem is that as a manufacturer there are problems with the people and regulatory authorities.Metaphysically, the dilemma of food safety reflects the failure of society and the crisis of institutions.
A Surface Failure: Moral Constraint Failure and Fragmentation of Group Values
As a kind of social existence, people will always encounter two kinds of dilemma from inside and outside, namely inner moral sense and outer legal restriction.For any individual, in his daily life, his actions are bound by the moral norms of a particular era, and morality, as the most important informal institutional arrangement in human society, covers almost all aspects of group life.According to the economist Hayek, morality is established through spontaneous order.In the chain of social evolution, moral groups bring about a reduction in the cost of transactions between social order and the community, thereby developing the group and vice versa, which is the intrinsic reason for moral existence and function.The distinction between morality and law can be understood simply as follows: moral constraints are not mandatory, whereas legal constraints are explicitly mandatory.From the content of both, the scope of moral involvement is wider, while the law is relatively narrow.Those that prove more important in moral evolution and whose boundaries are clearer are elevated to law.According to Russian philosophers.C. Sheikh Frank (1877-1950) said, "There are two forms of existence that regulate social relations and define the 'should' of social relations from ideas: the legal form and the moral form."Cold laws, for their legitimacy of egoism and harsh coercion, sharply contradict the elements of freedom and benevolence that form the basis of moral life; and any attempt to abolish them altogether leads to a worse outcome than the rule of law.From Frank's argument, we find it fragile to maintain social order with morality; in other words, moral discipline of groups is achieved by non-coercive measures, usually by two means: censure, isolation, and alienation.Its mechanism is that human beings have dignity, and when they violate social morality, public opinion humiliates their dignity and deprives them of their prestige, and measures of segregation and alienation are based on human social animals.However, the two measures have a fatal weakness: in the case of poor dissemination of information, disciplinary measures quickly weaken as space distance increases.All this proves that moral constraints are inherently inadequate.Even so, we need to use ethics to sustain our daily lives rather than resort to the law for everything, which is related to the transaction costs of daily life.For a society, the long-established moral atmosphere is a public property, which means that its property rights are unclear and therefore easily exploited by individuals.The American political philosopher John Rawls once said, "A common sense of justice is a great collective wealth that requires the cooperation of many people to maintain it."The intolerant can be seen as an evader who pursues the benefits of a justice system without doing their part in maintaining it.This is the kind of hitchhiking we often see: each of us wants to be moral, and we want to be moral at every opportunity, at the expense of the local or collective stock of moral credibility.Failure to effectively curb such immoral gains would result in a breach of ethical norms by all, leading to moral bankruptcy locally or collectively.This is a conflict choice that rational people inevitably face in the face of interests.It is clear from the food safety incidents that have been exposed that this indiscriminate embezzlement of local moral capital stocks for self-interest.The problem is that once a local, institutional, or individual has a moral deficit, it will be very difficult to recover because of the slowness of moral capital accumulation.Just like the dairy industry represented by Sanlu milk powder in 2008, the violators were not severely punished for illegally adding toxic melamine chemicals to milk powder production, causing a wide range of serious food safety accidents.As a result, the incident has seriously overdrawn China's dairy industry's already small moral inventory, resulting in an ethical deficit in the entire dairy industry, and the dairy industry's crisis cannot be resolved in the short term.At present, the Chinese people through various channels to buy a large number of foreign safety-guaranteed dairy products, indicating that the public has no choice but to vote with their feet for domestic dairy companies.
The question this article is interesting to ask is why there have been so many ethical lapses in the field of food safety in a short period of time.In addition to the profit-seeking motives of rational people in the economic society mentioned above, is there any other reason that has aggravated the process of moral collapse of the group?In fact, this is a problem that has been neglected for a long time, that is, the group psychology is trapped in the strange circle of "Lucifer effect".The Lucifer effect was originally a conclusion drawn by American social psychologist Philip Zimbardo based on his Stanford Prison Experiment, a proposition he made about how good people become demons.According to Western mythology, Lucifer was originally God's favorite angel and guardian of the light, and because he challenged God's authority, he finally went to hell and turned into Satan.The question is what the underlying mechanisms are that drive this transformation, Zimbardo argues: "Not just attributes and situations, 'systems' must also be considered in complex patterns of behavior."[3] So far, we know that there are three factors that contribute to adult sexual transformation: personal characteristics, specific situations, and ubiquitous systems.From this point of view, it is difficult for individuals to resist the temptation of evil.Fortunately, as a responsible social psychologist, Zimbardo has given us a piece of advice: When confronted with the pressures of situations and systems, we should stand up to the best of human nature—to glorify human dignity against evil.Nevertheless, we can dig deeper into why China's food industry has experienced such widespread irregularities.Combined with Zimbardo's discussion, we will analyze the reasons for the deviation of Chinese society in terms of personal characteristics and situational situation.As we all know, Chinese society is in a period of rapid transformation, and this change has both a visible and hidden side.There is no need to repeat the external changes in society, but only a simple analysis of the internal changes in the psychology of the group.First, the decline of the mainstream ideology has led to fragmentation of the overall consciousness of the group, which is the consequence of the so-called cultural pluralism that we often misjudge.What underpins true cultural diversity is the conviction of various populations of the values provided by their respective cultures, such as faith.Second, due to the monopoly of the market, excessive and disorderly competition, the pressure of survival is highlighted, and moral density is reduced, which potentially contributes to the possibility of social dislocation.These factors spread among random groups, which contributed to the emergence of serious irregularities on the surface of society as a whole.The only difference is that the food industry is closely related to everyone's life, so that the food safety problem is particularly prominent.As the French sociologist Durkheim put it, "Morality is not a system of abstract norms that people find engraved in their consciousness, nor is it a system of abstract norms derived by moral philosophers in their private offices."