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Asian values
From Debatepedia
The debate over "Asian values" was a powerful example of the larger relativism debate surrounding Human rights in the 1990s. The central political leaders were former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and former South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kim Dae Jung. The debate has lessened in intensity since the turn of the century, but nevertheless persists as a powerful indictment of global human rights norms.
]Proponents of Asian Values
Arguments supporting Asian values have their roots in wider literature suggesting that because cultures ought to be judged relatively, a global human rights system is either unjust or ineffective. The most famous proponent of this system was Prime Minster Lee, who, in a well-known interview with Fareed Zakaria in the magazine Foreign Affairs, argued that human rights are incompatible with Asian values of, among others, community, order and Confucian filial piety. The individual, on Lee's view, ought to be understood in the context of the family, itself a "building brick" of the larger society. On this view, Western-style democracy and human rights have the potential to be destructive of these Asian values. As evidence, Lee points to high levels of drug addiction and divorce in Western countries. Lee makes clear that he is not anti-Western, but simply favors Asian values for Asians and Western values for Westerners. One suggestion made during the interview to help mitigate the destructive influence of Western human rights is that male heads of family ought to have more weight in voting systems - thus bridging Western democracy with Asian realities. Lee has since apparently recanted many of his views, but nonetheless the underlying logic of the arguments remains appealing to many.
]Opponents of Asian Values
Opponents, such as former South Korean President and Nobel Peace Price recipient Kim Dae Jung or Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen object to Lee's argumentation.
Kim, a veteran of the democracy movement in his country, in his response to Lee in Foreign Affairs makes several powerful arguments against Lee's vision. First, he argues that culture is fluid and that the economic development of East Asia is engendering inevitable cultural changes, namely toward individualism. Second, Kim lambastes Singapore's policies of outlawing smoking, spitting and gum chewing to demonstrate that Lee's claim of Asian governments being minimalist when it comes to individual behavior - thus preferring the family as the unit of order - is factually incorrect. He concludes by implying that “Asian Values” are a self-serving smokescreen used by authoritarian Asian leaders to keep control over their societies.
Sen provides more important argumentation in his article for The New Republic Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng don't understand about Asia. First, Sen argues that there is no evidence to suggest that authoritarianism really does aid economic development. This is consistent with Sen's first break-through economic study of famines on the sub-continent argued, among many other points, that a democratic system can act as a check against the misappropriation of food resources. Second, Sen looks into various Asian traditions to show that democracy and human rights can have roots in Asian writings and that the West has no philosophical monopoly on human rights. Furthermore, Sen points to the heterogeneity of "Asian values" and the massive size, history, population and diversity of the continent to suggest that asserting that "Asian" values are inconsistent with democracy or human rights is, at best, an overstatement.