Professor Peter Singer's April 17 article, "Have we finally achieved moral progress?," is insightful and interesting. He is right in that we have made progress in the areas of racial and gender equality. Our Eastern societies need more gender equality. Nevertheless, Singer's views are Eurocentric in that he seeks to see progress from the standpoint of the West.
No doubt, Eastern societies have modernized but their modernization has been based on a Western model of possessive individualism. As a result, individuals in Eastern societies have not become rational; rather, they are increasingly becoming selfish. They are losing sense of community and family values. This explains why they increasingly prefer to send their aged parents to nursing homes. Older generations are increasingly growing helpless in modernizing Eastern societies. It is the highest form of moral degeneration that those of us living in such societies have experienced.
No doubt, many people have become citizens and have received the rights to vote under new democracies in the East, but the irony is that they are more concerned with consumerism than with the rights and obligation of citizenships. It would be better if Singer, an erudite thinker and respected philosopher of our times, paid attention to the immoral values that have taken root in Eastern societies under the phenomenon of modernization.
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