John McLean
Section 9
Extra Installment
The last chapter I decided to look at asked the question “is
there moral progress”? To me this was an interesting question considering with
in the last century this world has seen terrible acts against humanity such as
the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, child soldiers in Africa, and
chemical attacks against a nations own people. With all this in mind along with
current terrorist attacks and on going conflicts it is had to say that this
world has become more moral.
Yet the United Nations adoption of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights has a different way of looking and judging the general moral
level of the world takes a dramatically different approach to this question.
Instead of looking at big events such as the Holocaust and how frequent these
events a happen, they set out to answer the question “how well have we done in
combating racism and sexism”. This was done by giving surveys to nearly 15,000
people in sixteen different countries, some of the bigger names including
China, Egypt, India, Mexico, The Palestinian Territories, Russia, and the
United States. All in all this was supposed to represent 58% of the world
population. I believe straight off we can assume some of these countries have
already made much larger strides in combating racism and sexism. The United
States being the first example, while we still have a long way to go we have
made some amazing strides when we think about Gay Rights, the feminist
movement, and having our first black president. While there is still discrimination
you have to admit that we’ve at least taken a step or two in the right
direction of becoming more moral. However when we look at countries such as
Saudi Arabia, it is easy to see the women are still considered second-class
citizens. The women of Saudi Arabia do not have the right to drive a car and
the idea that woman should be able to vote is a joke, and sadly these ideas are
not contained to just Saudi Arabia. With those countries in mind can you really
say that as a global population we are becoming more moral? However one
laughable static that came out of these surveys was that “86% of all people who
took this survey reported that equal rights for women were important”. When
looking at this same question in Saudi Arabia, 82% of the population believed
that equal rights for woman were important.
While this study found that sexism and racism is on the
decline as a global population, personally I am not convinced. Instead I would
argue that there are pockets of the world that becoming more accepting of other
races and woman being of full equality in society, while other pockets of the
world have seemed to push a pause button on this subject and are stuck in there
racist and sexist ways. I also believe that this will be a long and slow fight,
for it is not the generation that first accept these ideas but the next
generation that will actually but to ideas to work and make a change.
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