COMMENT A kindergarten teacher related an unsettling tale to me. She said a pretty little girl in her class, one of her favourites, had come to her one day and complained that she was in pain, and bleeding from her genitals. The girl said that her father had caused it, "with his finger".

The girl's older brother, also attending the same kindergarten, told the shocked teacher that their mother knew about the girl's trauma. The teacher invited the girl's mother to the kindergarten for a private discussion. The mother, a housewife, appeared unperturbed. She told the teacher the girl had simply been playing and had carelessly inflicted the injury on herself.

The teacher was torn between wanting to report the girl's predicament to the authorities, and wanting to avoid controversy in the private kindergarten she had built up over the years.

She could have taken the girl to a One-Stop Crisis Centre in a public hospital, where the girl could have been assessed by a doctor, a social worker and a policewoman. But the teacher had little faith in hospitals. She held the perception that most doctors were unsympathetic.

She could have gone directly to the police, but was afraid she would not be taken seriously. The teacher, from a different ethnic background from the little girl's family, was afraid that she would be shown the ugly face of racism, the contorted mask that all Malaysians have glimpsed in countless facets of our daily lives.

She could have called up a national hotline like the Women's Centre for Change   or the Women's Aid Organisation ,  but she had little knowledge of these NGOs.

She could have discussed this with the other teachers in her kindergarten, but she did not want to rock the boat.

In the end, she did nothing.

Two months later, the little girl's mother told another kindergarten teacher that the girl had been sexually abused by kindergarten staff. Amidst the pandemonium, the teachers confronted the girl's mother again. After some discussion, the mother announced that it had been a "misunderstanding", and that she would not press her allegations further. Since then, an uneasy truce has settled in.

Moral drift

There is an overwhelming feeling of moral decay in our modern society, perhaps fuelled by newspaper reports including articles like this one. Malaysians are repeatedly taken aback by reports of horrific callousness, such as the refusal by local staff at a BHP petrol station in Cheras to lend a fire extinguisher to a member of the public, while Florina Joseph , a Sarawakian woman, burned to death in her car nearby.

nurin jazlin jazimin Meanwhile, the unresolved national trauma over the deaths of Nurin Jazlin ( left ), and other abducted young Malaysians, continues to haunt our lives, and our children's.

One Malaysiakin i reader told me he drove past a ghastly sight on a busy thoroughfare in a large city. He saw a thin, unkempt man, clad only in dirty shorts, chained by the neck to a lamp-post across the road from the main police station. He did not stop to find out more, but he speculated the man may have been mentally ill, and had been abandoned by his family in the hope that the police would find him a home.

Moral drift extends to our institutions as well as individuals. The police and MACC remain in a state of serene and contemptuous denial over their collective responsibility for the deaths of Aminulrasyid Amzah, M Kugan, Teoh Beng Hock, and other defenceless Malaysians.

The law enforcement institutions continue to ignore demands for a meaningful probe into the PKFZ sinkhole. They simply block out the cries for justice from Penan survivors of rape, in the fiefdoms of logging companies in Sarawak.

The judge's bench traditionally provides a moral point of reference - a benchmark, indeed - for all Malaysians. But the judiciary has suffered crisis after crisis, since the sacking of Lord President Salleh Abas in 1988, stumbling from Anwar's show trials to the VK Lingam judge-fixing circus.

Some Malaysians would blame the government for almost any ill in Malaysian life. Others might subscribe to the view, espoused by Thomas Hobbes, that the government is merely a huge lumbering beast, a leviathan, committed only to exercising power to enforce order, and therefore should not be looked to for moral guidance. But Malaysians, and other societies, undeniably follow the example of their political leaders.

If there is widespread moral decay among the top law-makers and law-enforcing institutions, the rule of law inevitably descends into farce, and the government becomes unsustainable. Marcos and Suharto could not enforce their authority when they were morally bankrupt. Eventually, after many years, some moral legitimacy has now returned to the governments of Indonesia and the Philippines.

NONE But our own national leaders exhibit a curious mix of public morality and religiosity, together with private hypocrisy and the darkest stains of murder and corruption. Yet our PM Najib Razak enjoys an approval rating of 72%, according to the Merdeka Centre polling centre. Can this paradox be explained by the effects of the mainstream media and political propaganda alone? Or do Malaysians have a short memory?

Moral compasses

Every horrific report of the suffering of a Malaysian like Florina Joseph or Nurin Jazlin causes some degree of moral hand-wringing, and anxiety over losing our moral compass.

Traditionally, moral guidance has come from institutional religion. But our mainstream religions have obsessed with outward displays of religious piety, and with toeing the orthodox political line. All our religious elders appear to be rudderless, content to be dominated by secular political leaders.

As Malaysiakini's Josh Hong has pointed out, most of Malaysia's religious institutions shun real engagement with our daunting social, political and economic challenges.

As Malaysia embraces the secular, globalised values of the developed world, religious guidance will continue to fade. Do we have a viable secular moral compass?

Some Malaysians might peddle the ethics of utilitarianism, the idea that moral choices must be governed by the expectation of the greatest happiness and the least pain. Jeremy Bentham expressed this as a so-called fundamental axiom: "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong".

Using this reasoning, it would have been acceptable to murder six million Jews in order to make the majority in Nazi Germany happy (whatever "happiness" means).

A large number of Malaysians would argue that there is no such "thing" as ethics, or right or wrong. Every Malaysian makes his own rules. Using this relativist reasoning, we ought to resist being shocked by news of BHP employees refusing to lend a fire extinguisher to the public, or the murder of small children such as Nurin Jazlin.

A minority of Malaysians would point to Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative": that we should make an ethical choice based on what we would expect of other sane, reasonable people, in order to exercise our human, self-governing, free will.

For example, we should honour a promise made, as a duty we would expect of other human beings. Without adhering to our moral duty, Kant argued, other attributes like pleasure, beauty or intelligence would not be worth pursuing.

We must all know someone who is relativist, or utilitarian, or shuttles uncomfortably between the two positions. Does Malaysia have a moral majority, even if this term has become pejorative in the United States? Or does Malaysia have a relativist majority, an amoral majority?