On The Crisis And The Reformation Of The Letters And Visits System-based On Systemic Ethics Theory

In terms of moral practice, the norms of ethics contain two parts: institutionalethics system and personal moral system. John Rawls noted that moral evaluation andselection to the system prior to the moral evaluation and selection of individual. Peoplealways pick the moral principles of the system for the first, then the personal moral principles.If a system is on a very high morality level, then, Even if the respective unethical individual isno enough harm to society as a whole. If a system itself is in violation of morality, even if thesocial group have a correct understand of the moral won’t do a positive impact on theexistence of the social morality, on the contrary, moral behavior will be restrained. Theperspective of "systemic ethics" is a method to observe the pros and cons of a system, whichis based on the knowledges shows in front. Systemic ethics is concerned with Social system’sresponsibility and moral duty to Personal power and interests, and evaluate the justice and therationality of the system itself based on that.The Letters and Visits System was established in1951, and it has run for more than60years since then. Over time, the Letters and Visits System play an increasingly important rolein politics. Yet, this system is strengthening with a hidden danger. The Letters and VisitsSystem developed rapidly during the project which was called “bring order out of chaos” afterthe Cultural Revolution. The Letters and Visits System was growing rapidly as a whole, and itmoved toward the center of the political stage since then. However, the construction of thesystem’s regulation didn’t evolve as rapidly as its physical structure. Ever since, there goes anincreasingly obvious anomic situation in the works of the Letters and Visits System. The mainLetters and Visits System activities can be divided into three types: participational ones,pursuing-for-adjudication ones and legal-involved ones. There is always a subtle and tensecircumstance in the work of the last two of which are listed above. This situation developedinto a crisis which last today since the mid to late1990s. On the surface, the crisis triggered a tense discussions on the topic as much as “whether the Letters and Visits System is difficult tosustain”, yet, there are deeper political issues contained within.As a pioneer scholar in Letters and Visits System territory, Mr. Yu Jianrong points outdirectly that there are two problems consist in this system: violating the authority of judicialand creating conflicts. We have to notice that the reason why those problems exist for so longis that the Letters and Visits System doesn’t simply impact the healthy development of thesociety, the existence of those problems is base on the paradoxes as “Letters and VisitsSystem often create conflicts, but they terminate them too” and “Letters and Visits Systemfrequently maintain the justice of the judicial by the cost of the authority of the judicial”.Precisely, the main task of this paper is to analysis the cause and the continuance of theproblems contained in this system, from perspective as history、the judicial、administrationand the institutional arrangements etc. Then, the path and content change of system will beexplored, based on Systemic Ethics theory.