Fang Yun swept his gaze over those curious eyes and continued his lecture.
"In fact, different races, different cultures, and different civilizations have different moral concepts. Some races have extremely low moral standards, or even no morality to speak of, such as the Demon Barbarians. Some have relatively average moral standards, such as certain savage human peoples, while the human nations of our Saint Origin Continent have comparatively high moral standards."
"High moral standards make a race more stable internally, while keeping it from being excessively aggressive toward outsiders, because such a race is better at observing morality and prefers conciliation over forceful methods when dealing with other races. Only when left with no alternative does it resort to violent force. This is the principle behind offering courtesy before taking up arms."
"Races with low moral standards, however, are fiercely aggressive from the moment they emerge. Such races share one characteristic: a considerable proportion of their people engage in robbery, killing, plunder, and similar activities. The Barbarian Race, for instance, is an entire people of bandits. By contrast, aside from a few exceptional circumstances, we humans restrict our soldiers from robbing and plundering. This is a very interesting phenomenon."
"We call these two kinds of races benevolent races and bandit races, for short."
"The Human Race has now reached an extremely high stage of development as a benevolent race. Our laws contain certain concepts originating within our race, and many criminal laws are actually retaliatory laws. Why do most of us humans prefer severe punishments for serious crimes and oppose abolishing the death penalty? The reasons are those I mentioned earlier. First, all of us have selfish interests. Second, our race has high moral standards, and our laws tend toward 'protecting victims.' Why is this inclination to protect victims self-serving?