In his contribution to the “States of Unease” Public Forum 2026, media scholar CHERIAN GEORGE explored the idea of moral progress as a core objective of a good society. This essay elaborates on his argument.
The final four words of our National Pledge enjoin us to strive for “progress for our Nation”. While Singapore’s material progress is obvious, a “good society” requires thinking about progress also in fundamentally moral terms.
It can be thought of as a direction, not a destination, making the relevant question how well we are equipped for the journey. While Singapore has been extraordinarily successful in charting a course for economic competitiveness, its capacity for moral progress has been limited by constraints on the national imagination.
On the last page of her groundbreaking book and in her remarks at the State of Unease forum, Teo You Yenn points out that it is everyone’s right and responsibility to take part in conversations about what a good society means and how to get there. Unfortunately, the national forums best equipped to host such collective discussions — namely media, universities and Parliament — are tightly managed by a government that treats conscience-led conversations as unhelpful or even dangerous.
Moral progress
Moral progress can be thought of as extending society’s sense of moral obligation to embrace not just those with whom we identify, but also groups who used to be ignored or marginalised. To borrow from Ng Kok Hoe’s critique of how Singaporeans undervalue the welfare of migrant workers, it is about closing the mental gap between “we” and “those people”. Moral progress is about internalising the Golden Rule, to treat others as if they could be us.
In these times of war and genocide, it may seem naive to think that moral progress is possible. But we shouldn’t underestimate how far human society has already come over the longer sweep of history. Indeed, we are major beneficiaries of such revolutions of conscience.
For example, when Singaporeans first got one-man-one-vote in 1955, this automatically also meant one-woman-one-vote, even though the world had viewed sharing democratic rights with the so-called weaker sex as an outrageous idea 50-100 years earlier. That’s moral progress.
When Singapore secured self-rule in 1959 and sovereignty in 1963, it was a bloodless process, partly because by then it was no longer conventional wisdom that the White man had a god-given right and responsibility to rule over the rest of the world. Europeans were finding it harder to sell that old assumption even to their own people. Moral progress.
Elites and public opinion were once fine with slavery and sexual violence, and saw no harm in children being put to work in mines and factories. In contrast, we have grown up in a world that considers all such practices both immoral and criminal. Moral progress.
These quantum leaps in social consciousness were not the result of some spontaneous mass conversion or eureka moment. They were painfully slow, and resisted for as long as possible by those with vested interests in the status quo. Even religious authorities did their part to absolve society of guilt — reassuring Whites that seizing lands and stealing children from natives, for example, was fully consistent with Christianity.
Therefore, advocates for the rights of groups considered less than fully human had to endure decades of ridicule and repression before they were recognised as right, and before constitutions and conventions tilted toward justice. In countless cases, change did not occur in their lifetimes.
A good society would have the humility to acknowledge such debts — that norms we take for granted had to be struggled for by past generations. And it would have the decency to pay it forward. A critical mass of conscientious citizens would be looking around them, asking: Who’s still left out? Whose lives are systematically discounted when we do our policy trade-offs and cost-benefit analyses? How can we ease others’ suffering and give them equal dignity and the gift of inclusion in society?
Today, there are Singaporeans who are trying to get us to confront such questions. They include advocates for the rights of migrant workers; people with disabilities; death row inmates; former political detainees; and victims of distant genocides.
Some of these issues involve genuine ethical dilemmas; others may impose costs that taxpayers are unwilling to pay for. We should not expect all government leaders and ordinary citizens to become instant converts to all such causes before Singapore can be considered a good society. However, recalling that a good society is a process of becoming and not a final state, what we are entitled to demand is that Singapore should allow and encourage open debates around such issues.
Yet, in almost all the examples I have cited, their champions are treated as threats to stability; they are censored, harassed, and blacklisted by the state as well as by establishment institutions such as the mass media and universities. Many Singaporeans seem to buy the state’s line that these activists are militant wokes — troublemakers to be shunned and suppressed.
History should give us pause. All the examples of moral progress we benefit from today, like the idea that Asians are capable of running their own countries, were yesterday’s militant woke causes.
Good leaders?
This way of thinking about a “good society” is different from what currently passes for moral deliberation in Singapore’s public discourse. The government has tried to focus minds on the question of identifying, inducting, and appreciating “good leaders”, and on the need for citizens to exercise their civic responsibility, especially through voluntarism and philanthropy.
People’s Action Party politicians, aided by a chorus of commentators, also project an image of being whiter than white. By this they mean that they will follow not just written laws but also a more stringent moral code. One shouldn’t overstate this. It seems true in the case of extramarital liaisons, but there are other areas, especially concerning how they reward themselves and manage conflicts of interest, where establishment elites indulge in behaviours permissible under Singapore laws and regulations but that many Singaporeans consider morally questionable and that other political systems would classify as improper.
Overall, though, Singapore has been fortunate that PAP ideology contains a strong ethos of public service and being ultimately accountable to the electorate through regular elections. Furthermore, since the Goh Chok Tong era, leaders have regularly called for a more gracious and compassionate society. We have seen Prime Minister Lawrence Wong moved to tears when recounting anecdotes about Singaporeans helping one another in times of need. Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, no softie, even wrote “Compassion” into the title of the book he released this year. Our leaders evidently have some appreciation of the moral dimension of national life.
Nevertheless, society should not be outsourcing its moral reasoning to the state, even a state that is made up of more-or-less “good people”.
First, the state has a job to do that is both much broader and more narrowly functional than being the custodian of a nation’s conscience. Voters expect their governments to address their here-and-now problems, and not prioritise the accumulation of brownie points. So, expecting the state to be the main engine of the nation’s moral progress is unrealistic.
Second, all states are plugged into a global neoliberal order whose defining feature is that it separates people from the moral consequences of their everyday decisions. Our relationships are transacted primarily in seemingly value-free dollars and cents. In Marxist terms, our capitalist system alienates us from one another, from other societies, from the biosphere, and even from our own humanity. We cannot expect our states to escape this logic. We have to develop our own capacities for moral connection and reasoning.
Third, history makes it obvious that power tends toward moral corruption. Even religious institutions — which, unlike the state, are supposed to be totally dedicated to god and conscience — are not above abuse. Consider the impunity enjoyed by generations of clerics discovered to have abused children. Humans in a position of authority are skilled in excusing their bad behaviour when given the opportunity to do so.
It’s not that the powerful are worse people than those with no power. We are all guilty of clouding conscience with convenience. We are all prone to hypocrisy. It’s just that the more unchecked power people have, the more dangerous is their hypocrisy and the more society needs to build defences against it. Knowing this, a good society would not allow the powerful to monopolise or foreclose its collective deliberations about right and wrong.
Valuing dissent
Singapore’s capacity to become a good society is weakened by a political culture that prizes social stability. This has its benefits. Moral progress is not one of them. It is a culture that confines Singapore within what psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg called “conventional morality”, where being good is equated with obeying existing laws, respecting authority, and doing one’s duty to maintain the social order.
Since prevailing laws and norms everywhere are always shaped by power, and the powerful are unreliable arbiters of social good because they have the most to lose from changes to the status quo, the highest level of moral development in Kohlberg’s framework is “postconventional”. That would be when people do the right thing based on universal ethical principles such as justice and equality, even if it conflicts with current social norms and the laws of the day.
Moral progress, therefore, ultimately requires spaces for exchanging diverse perspectives, even those that challenge convention and provoke offence. Media, universities, and Parliament should be serving this function, but they do not.
The PAP government believes that, as the elected custodians of Singaporeans’ interests, it should have the loudest voice in the public sphere. It should get the chance to set the national agenda. This is a reasonable expectation. What’s more dubious, though, is its current practice of monopolising debates by silencing and delegitimising alternative viewpoints through an elaborate system of censorship and self-censorship.
In the media, the volume of government news is understandable given the impact that the state has in Singaporeans’ lives. But there is no good reason why opinion pages and analytical features in the mainstream media should hew so closely to the official line, with writers and commentators seemingly selected on the basis of a proven record in not irritating officials. In higher education, there is no valid reason why Singapore’s top university should have a screening mechanism that discourages exposure to speakers who are deemed controversial. Or why the government should operate a secretive vetting system that blocks universities from employing Singaporeans who have been involved with civil society organisations.
The Nominated Member of Parliament system was supposed to add diversity to the House but it too is a victim of the government’s mission to maintain the status quo. A good society, contemplating its massive population of unenfranchised guest workers, could, for example, allocate an NMP seat to a spokesperson for these vulnerable migrants, precisely because this is a constituency that is not part of the electorate that elected MPs answer to.
The government’s tight management of the public sphere has resulted in an establishment that is remarkably homogenous in the content and tone of their public statements. Individuals representing non-approved causes, even if they have unique expertise and experience in their field, are shut out of higher-status spaces such as the boards and standing committees of government agencies and the Straits Times op-ed pages.
Why, through a phalanx of coercive and administrative means, does the establishment systematically suppress counter-hegemonic views? The state’s guardians of the public mind probably would not admit that they do it because they know they would lose a fair-and-square policy debate. So, they resort to a set of predictable tropes, such as that these issues are “emotive”, as if the public cannot be trusted to process them rationally.
To gain public attention, activists resort to more unconventional means of getting attention — like three women walking on a pavement to deliver a letter, or one man holding up a smiley-face sign, or students quietly laying out shoes in an open space. This then opens them to another common line of attack. They are labelled as strident and extreme and performative, even though by global standards they are about as dangerous as Japanese fans at the World Cup finals.
The activists are not the main victims. The real losers are the Singapore public. The systematic sanitising of our public sphere and demonising of activists shields us from exposure to conscience-pricking debates, and thus denies us the opportunity for moral growth.
The Law of Future Shame
A good society would learn from history a pattern that could be called the Law of Future Shame — that some of every generation’s attitudes and actions are doomed to be despised by their grandchildren.
To minimise the risk of future shame, a good society would recognise that even good leaders and a decent public are fallible. A good society therefore leaves room for self-doubt and doesn’t short-circuit moral debates. It understands that dissenting views that provoke and annoy may be offering us the chance to be on the right side of history.
When we are trying sincerely to be a good person, we know that if our conscience never niggles it is probably because we have silenced it, not because we are perfect. What is true of individuals is also true of society. A silent conscience is a danger sign, even if it feels good in the short term. Singaporeans should want to be a good society, not a feel-good society. But our political system risks lulling us into such a state of self-satisfaction that we reject the collective responsibility of trying to achieve moral progress for our nation.