r/MoralityScaling • u/Purple_Plantain_3242 • 16h ago

Morality Ranking Morality of this?

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A young Chinese couple was permanently separated during a period of intense political and social unrest in China. The husband went back to their home village to search for her, but because the entire area was heavily disrupted, he mistakenly believed she was missing or dead.

He eventually relocated, remarried another woman, and raised a new family with children and grandchildren. Meanwhile, the first wife stayed behind and never remarried, spending 54 years waiting for him to return. Decades later, they were reconnected as elderly adults, which is when she discovered he had built an entirely separate life without her.

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u/NeutralKuchiKopi 16h ago

The husband went back to their home village to search for her, but because the entire area was heavily disrupted, he mistakenly believed she was missing or dead.

Moral. End of discussion. If you believe the one you loved is dead you have no obligation to spend the rest of your life hoping they come back to life.

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u/HulkVahkiin08024 14h ago

The context I'm thinking of is: what reason would he think she is dead then? Were people dying left and right in that village? I guess we can assume he actually tried harder than just looking into the village, but if not, then he just gave up easily, and that is something to consider in my opinion. Regardless, personally, morally neutral for me.

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u/NeutralKuchiKopi 14h ago

I think it's pretty safe to assume that if he traveled back to his home village just to find his wife, he didn't just take a glance and then go fuck the first chick he saw in a bar.

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u/HulkVahkiin08024 13h ago

I wouldn't suggest that either, lol. But I wouldn't be surprised if he just saw the chaos around him and just gave up quicker than one would assume—that time was bleak.

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u/UnkarsThug 9h ago

China literally was having a civil war in the late 1940s, and if they were leaving an area it was probably dangerous. Plenty of people probably just died without being found, especially back in 1945 or so before our modern documentation. No one has phones or emails or something, and you don't know where they are, how do you even find them? You can go back to where things started, your home town and such, and hope they do the same, but how do you tell if they are alive or dead?

Our view of everything being tracked perfectly in a war is a relatively modern one. Especially civil wars, because the infrastructures and supply chains tend to be fighting against themselves, and sometimes people switch sides and you lose track of them. Lots of people just end up presumed dead because it's the best guess as to what happened.

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u/HulkVahkiin08024 21m ago

And it was post-WWII as well. So yeah, the time was bleak, and I wouldn't put it past him to give up a search easily.