AMERICAN founding father and political philosopher Alexander Hamilton wrote in the "Federalist Papers" that "the judiciary has no influence over either the sword or the purse," meaning that the judiciary is weaker than the executive and legislative arms of government.

Generally speaking, that is correct. The judiciary or legal system does not always hunt down and punish wrongdoers. And it does not always ensure that justice is done.

There is a lot of media coverage in China these days about good Samaritans wronged and sued by ungrateful and indeed greedy and malicious people they have helped. As a result, many people with good intentions now swear they won't extend a helping hand to the needy.

This apathy is so pervasive that it caused widespread indignation and soul-searching following a tragic incident in Foshan, Guangdong Province, on October 13, in which a two-year-old toddler was run over successively by two cars and no one stopped to help.

CCTV footage showed 18 pedestrians going by the crumpled child lying in blood, without stopping. The child later died of her injuries.

Inept judges

Public probing of the causes of callousness invariably assigns the blame to some inept judges who have wrongly held Samaritans responsible. It is generally believed that the Pandora's Box of indifference was opened in 2006, when Peng Yu, a citizen in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, helped up an old woman who was jostled off the bus, but was accused as the culprit and sued successfully for compensation.

The presiding judge in Peng's case ruled against him, saying, "Since no witness could prove his innocence, he has to prove it himself."

Such appalling legal work and total lack of justice is rare in modern legal systems in which there is a presumption of innocence until one is proven guilty.

However hard officials are trying to arrest the general moral decline - blaming media hype and sensationalism for a host of similar cases - the public remains unconvinced and deeply cynical.

In the suffocating atmosphere where indifference is considered a safer choice than moral decency, we finally have some solace. In Wuchuan City, Guangdong Province, a driver who chased, hit and killed a fleeing robber has been cleared of wrongdoing and officially honored for his bravery.

On May 18, Ling Huakun acted out of what he called "civic responsibility" when he saw two men attempting to rob a motocyclist of his necklace.

He pursued them for 200 meters and incessantly signaled them to stop with car horns. In a frantic attempt to avoid oncoming traffic, he swerved and knocked the two robbers off their motorcycle, killing one of them.

Procedural justice

Ling was quickly hailed by authorities in Guangdong, but controversy also followed, centering on the question of whether he used disproportionate force that caused the robber's death.

To everyone's relief, police have deemed the case a traffic accident, thus exonerating Ling and laying to rest his worries over the legitimacy of his action.

Ling's exoneration should also represent a deterrent, as robberies carried out by motorbike gangs are rife in Guangdong.

However, there are also disturbing questions. Not all is well that ends well. Ling's courageous deed cannot erase the fact that he killed a man and should have been prosecuted.

Guangzhou-based lawyer Zhu Yongping told the Oriental Morning Post on Monday, "It's wrong to conflate Ling's commendable pursuit of robbers with his accidental killing of one of them. They are two different matters. Otherwise we'll be misleading the public."

By "misleading the public" Zhu means the moral hazard of saying that doing good justifies illegal violence against criminal suspects.

Although online opinion is strongly opposed to his prosecution, Ling's case would be more legally significant if he stood trial and was found not guilty.

Had the law been allowed to run its course, then one man's bravery would not just be a shot in the arm for morality, but for the rule of law as well. Procedural justice counts.

Some may argue that law is a poor alternative to moral teaching, in that its role in regulating ethics and family matters is limited. This is true. But without laws we can barely expect decency to gain the upper hand in its encounter with vices.

It is with mixed feelings that many learned of the trial of Wang Xiaojing, a local young man who stabbed his mother over tuition fee disputes upon his return from Japan in March.

He was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Despite his mother's pleas for mercy, judges insisted that consideration of filial piety and family ethics could not supersede the legal process. Cold justice, but this is the right thing to do.

Sociologists often say a moral vacuum is a consequence of a society in rapid transition, like China, and that resetting our moral compass is necessary if a market economy is to thrive and benefit society as a whole. This is surely true. The question is, how do we fill the vacuum?

There's no easy solution, but official canonizing of moral models, sometimes ridden with money-for-honors frauds, is the last thing we need.

Take filial piety. It is a product of spontaneous emulation and perfection of various rituals in daily life, rather than dictated learning, much less artificial engineering.

It's utterly absurd and suspicious to concoct an official national scheme to turn out a million filial children in five years, for it's impossible to reduce intangible tradition and moral education to concrete figures.

At a time when the nation is obsessed with sloganeering about honesty yet dishonesty is still a plague, Thomas Paine's words serve as a warning: when man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

There should be less talk about morality and more genuine practice of moral behavior, with the law as its guardian where necessary.