In simple terms, there are a lot of moral concepts from the West that we Nepali people have adopted and started treating as 100 percent true.
I am not talking about basic ideas like individualism being better than group thinking in many situations. I am talking about something deeper. Think about the top 10 worst things a person can do, things we would clearly label as immoral or evil. You will find that some of those were not considered that bad in Nepal before, but over the past 30 to 40 years, they have become seen as extremely wrong.
So I ended up with one issue but two moral viewpoints. The West says it is highly immoral, while older Nepali perspectives say it is acceptable.
Because of that, I tried to look at these problems through science. Science cannot tell us directly whether something is morally right or wrong. For example, it cannot declare that killing is immoral, but it can show that killing causes pain and harm. From that, we can reason that we do not want actions that create unnecessary harm to ourselves or others, so we can conclude that killing is immoral.
When I applied this approach to different issues where Western morality says immoral and older Nepali morality says fine, I found something interesting. In some cases, both perspectives seem flawed when you look at the consequences. Science often points toward a different solution that is generally better for everyone.
So this suggests that Western morality is not always correct, and neither is traditional Nepali morality.
That raises a question. What is the point of switching from one moral system to another if both can be wrong in important ways?
I could be more specific about the exact issues I am referring to, but they are extreme and I would rather not get into trouble discussing them directly. You can interpret about it yourself. Consider the worst things a person can do. Some of those, in older Nepali contexts, might have been seen as acceptable, while a more evidence based view suggests that both the Western and traditional views can miss the mark