Should Singapore Airlines and its three pilots come out at this point and apologize to the families of the victims of the crash of flight SQ006?
Disagreement between family members and the airline is apparently brewing into a major storm. A closer examination reveals that the controversy may be, at least partially, attributed to cultural and legal differences between the Eastern and Western worlds.
One way to amicably resolve the controversy is to have the airline and the three pilots apologize for their "moral responsibility," before a conclusion on legal responsibility is reached.
Chinese people generally shy away from public displays of emotion, be it negative or positive. Love is rarely expressed verbally or through gestures such as kissing and hugging. The same goes for negative feelings as well. Confrontation is to be avoided as much as possible.
One exception from the above principle is when a loved one dies or is injured. We see scenes on TV of enraged and heart-broken families beating, kicking, spitting and cursing at murderers, while the latter bow their heads or get on their knees begging for forgiveness.
It is as if people who ordinarily repress or bottle up their emotions have all of a sudden found a vent for an avalanche of feelings. The practice has virtually become an everyday part of our culture and society. We often, therefore, observe the police,passively allowing such a "ceremony" to carry on.
Without touching upon what such practices accomplish, the plain fact is that they rarely, if ever, happen in Western culture. This may in part explain why the three pilots have not yet come out to apologize.
While Westerners are ordinarily more expressive of their feelings (both positive and negative), they rely on formal legal means to resolve real controversy. Their mentality seems to be that, "If I have legally wronged you, then I'll pay the legal consequence, be it imprisonment, payment of fines or compensation." This kind of attitude would be interpreted by many Chinese as cold-blooded and lacking sincerity.
Probing further, we will discover that this attitude difference may be attributed to diverging focuses on responsibility in these two cultures. Chinese focus very much on "moral responsibility" in addition to legal responsibility, while Westerners, generally speaking, focus more on "legal responsibility."
Singapore Airlines and its three pilots may feel that since they are willing to take full legal responsibility, should there be adjudged to be any to take, what is there to apologize for and how can anyone accuse them of evading their responsibility? Perhaps they do not realize that what the victims' families are asking for right now, without so much as saying it, is an apology for "moral responsibility."
The distinction between moral and legal responsibility may be obvious, if we think about it, but the distinction easily becomes blurred in emotional situations. While legal responsibility requires legal obligations, investigation, proof and a verdict, much less is required for moral responsibility.
Certainly, many would argue that even if the pilots and the airline are not legally responsible for the plane crash, they have at least moral responsibility.
Another root of the controversy may be the different burdens of proof under Taiwan and Singapore's legal systems.
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