rate of moral decay

Great Debates
1

TL: DR–is there a standard model for rate of moral decay?

are we more immoral now as a society than in the past?
IS there a universal measure for morality?
is that measure reliant on religious ideals, or is morality a general human standard?

we’ve discussed here before how people have decried ethical degeneration since the beginning of civilization.

so my question is: is it a tractable stat? is there a metric for moral/amoral/immoral levels of general society? crime rates seems like the go-to stat, but too many laws are not based on actual morality-- jaywalking isn’t immoral but it’s a crime stat. out of date tags, speeding, not wearing a helmet or seatbelt, (maybe) marijuana–all crime statistics, none morality based. obviously murder and violent crime, incidents of theft, rape, etc are good crime stats for morality.

my line of thought is two-fold: historically, i can see some pretty TERRIBLE acts on the wide-scale that were magnitudes worse than things are now. flip side–we can benchmark “moral allowances” to the status quo (known as the slippery slope).

so on one hand, living during the Holocaust–people must have thought evil ruled the world. Revelation Believers must have though the beast was coming at any moment. in some points of history, things have been really, really, REALLY bad.

when you add up that we 1. reflect on by-gone eras with maudlin fondness and 2. everyone has done that since literally forever and 3. honest evaluation of the past shows how cruel people have been–it sure looks like thing are either only as bad or actually better now.
on the flip side, there are datapoints for new benchmarks in moral slip.

once was a time couples slept in two beds on tv. now we’re up to the point “shit” can be said on basic cable as well as much more explicit sex and violence.
some of the best shows on TV glorify moral equivocation (breaking bad?!) and my god, the net. the internet has opened a world of exposure to terrible, incomprehensibly awful things. so i would say there’s clearly more exposure to immorality now than ever-- *tho i can’t track if it impacts people’s own behavior. *

/b/ is both the butthole of the internet and a launchpad for moral activism against atrocious acts such as kiddie porn. conflicted

…

so are we exposed to worse things–or are we finally just being honest about reality? are we allowing more and more unethical or immoral things into the status quo, or were those things never actually immoral to start with?
people had dirt, filthy sex in the 50s, 30s, 10s–with or with tv ever factoring in. are we more perverted now that we see it more often in media?

we have more sex and violence at more easily accessible points–in higher saturation–and i think the general sensitivity of the world has become more and more obtuse. but i don’t necessarily see a slip in actual morality as much as i see a relinquishing to liberalism.

but liberal doesn’t mean immoral per se.

some points:
[ul]pot legalization: do gooders consider it the harbinger of moral decay. is it? or did we just criminalize something unjustly? is marijuana use actually an issue of moral fundamentals?
[/ul]
[ul]
[li]exposure: people had crazy, lusty sex even back before tv existed. does seeing it make people more immoral? or are people pretty even-keel perverted no matter what? [/li][li]america is progressively becoming more liberal–is that reflected in a comparable ratio of immorality? we are one of the last westernized conservative nations–are we just beholden to a quaint notion of what is moral?[/li][li]my dad said when tv came out, it was declared evil and satanic by his church. eventually, that “moral issue” was dissolved by the church and accepted as just part of life. is that the kind of thing that is happening with morality? it’s not that we are increasingly worse people–it’s that we started out villainizing things wrongly to start with. saying they’re not wrong anymore isn’t embracing decay; it’s admitting we were being a little uptight to start with?[/li][/ul]

the net seems like a pretty seedy place. but it’s pretty on-par with your average interstate truck-stop bathroom wall (oh the things they write there).

part of this consideration is fueled by the american idea that we are morally off-track and that is what is wrong with our nation on whole. the conservatives are claiming obama’s win is due to the fact lazy, immoral people want to mooch and be depraved. and god has forsaken us because we embrace this.

my dad is in a tailspin over it all since tuesday. yet when i confront him to name that one president in history who was morally upstanding, beyond reproach–who governed the nation with Christian Law and got EEEVERYONE to be more moral and wholesome–he goes silence. so whatever era it was when america WAS morally on track can’t be quantified. he can remember when it was better–but cannot back that memory up with a point in history.

i honestly can’t tell if we are worse now or better. i can debate myself forever, but maybe i’ll shut up and see what you think now.

2

We’re more moral than in the past. We used to engage in slavery and treat women as little more than property.

Where and how people have sex just isn’t terribly relevant to how moral we are so long as it’s all consensual.

3

Go check out a book called “The Better Angels of our Nature” by Steven Pinker. He addresses these issues in great depth.

Here is a New York TImes book review of it, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

4

i think there could be another facet to perception:

we have more access to more news, faster, all the time–it’s like a waterfall of constant information. so naturally we’re hearing more bad things by virtue of hearing more things altogether.

stuff like the canadian cannibal–this junk goes viral now. in the past, you might have caught it in some paper or on some newscast. but nowadays it’s next to impossible to NOT hear it. it’s blasted at you from every internet frontpage, social media conversation and all else. we seem to, in general, have more info of all kinds thrown at us–so naturally that makes it seem like more bad stuff is happening when really it could be that the same amount of bad junk is happening as always–we are just way more aware of it all now.

5

it looks like he’s got a few books that i will be checking out.

but does it only correlate violence?
or morality in general?

i guess that’s my quandary–i’m lost trying to establish morality by some standard model.
violence, for sure–but what about the rest?

full disclosure: i grew as a preachers kid. i used to be FEARFULLY unwilling to doubt morality. i used to think it was governed and defined by religion, and sans that motivation, immorality would hold sway.
i am so, so far outgrown from that now…sometimes i doubt if morality is an actual thing–are animals moral? they’ll eat their babies if it’s for the greater good.
if we’re animals, are we held to a higher mark due to the fact we can cognitively consider the implications of our actions?

or is the only truly universal morality survival?

6

The question you’re asking us is hopelessly vague. You tell us precisely what measurements you want to use for morality, and then we can tell you how society today stacks up against previous times. Otherwise there’s nothing for us to answer.

7

but that is the question:

that’s what i’m trying to figure out: are there some universally applicable moral imperatives? if so, what are they and how do they track historically? or are they solely subjective, with no fundamental application, therefore unable to stat?

8

Asking whether there is a universal moral code is entirely different from asking how the present compares with the past in morality. It’s possible to believe in a univeral moral code while believing any of three things - that we are more moral than in the past, that we are less moral than in the past, and we are equally moral than in in the past. One book you might want to read that argues for the universality of morality is The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. My point was that you were asking us to compare morality today with morality in the past. How can we do this unless you give us some sort of measurement for morality? It’s possible to believe in universal morality while thinking that there is no overall way of measuring it.

9

Surely a society that is less violent and less discriminatory can only be described are more moral. Of course, it’s easier to act morally when your needs are being met.

Good luck with that, no-one else has managed it. (Some have claimed to, hubristically.)

Most people would say not, and reject pure utilitarianism. It seems that our sense of morality is largely instinctive. However, it should be treated with caution. Contradictory responses to thought experiments such as the Train Dilemma show our moral judgement is not reliable.

10

You’ll be glad you did. I’m a big fan. I especially like how he criticizes apologists (for many different policies) who criticize science that they think undermines their political agendas. He likes to point out that we shouldn’t base our moral and ethical values on whether or not some fact happens to be true or not, because if the fact turns out to be true, should that change our policy? (Example: if rape is instinctive, does that make it any less punishable?)

I suspect that the civiziliaztion-old crying out for “the immorality of the youth” is due to the simple fact that morality is not absolute, and that changing mores looks to the older generation like lost mores.

There is no objective standard for morality, unless you subscribe to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. But, that would be a value choice. (smug smirk)

There is no universal standard for morality or ethics or “right vs wrong” or “good vs bad” or “valuable vs worthless”. Various religions posit frameworks for these things, and if you subscribe to a religion, you may believe that there is an objective standard for morality, as dictated by the deity or philosophy of that religion. Of course, it goes without saying that that’s not “universal” in that it’s not accepted by all. No major religion is accepted by even a majority of people. The closest we come to that is if we lump Islam and Christianity into a heap, we get about 1/3 of the people, maybe 2/5. (Add the Jewish, too, but it won’t change the numbers much.) While Islam and Christianity share many values, they are also very different, and even where there’s theological agreement, the values of the people differ considerably.

So, if what people think matters, there’s no concensus.

If you believe that ONLY what people think matters, then that makes you a Humanist. There are some pretty good attempts at approaching basic value questions from the Humanist standpoint, starting with the assumption that human lives matter, and what people value matters. But Humanists share an even less slice of the humanity pie than Islam/Christianity.

Even if you pick a major religion, you’ll find there’s a sliding scale for right and wrong, as the theology changes over time, and also as the people change (and those changes get reflected in the theology.)

11

THe problem with “pure utilitarianism” is that it’s undefined. You can’t really do the math, because there’s no way to figure how much of X’s pain equals how much of Y’s pleasure. That’s assuming you agreed that utilitarianism is, theoretically, the best – which most people do not.

I’ll admit that I use utilitarianism as an acid test of sorts. If a proposed ethical system doesn’t look reasonable from a utilitarian standpoint, I’m not likely to favor it. That’s why I’m a capitalist today but not forever.

But even if we could do the math, I fear that any attempt at pure utilitarianism would fail the above test. Any attempt to decide every detailed question by “is everyone happier directly after I do this?” is guaranteed to fail miserably at achieving the objective, and suffers from lacking any principles other than the one question.

12

yes. they are absolutely different questions. once you establish what the universal moral code is, you can apply it to history and start charting data.

but if there’s no objective moral law for humanity, we can’t chart it. but if it’s only subjective belief as to what is moral–we can’t chart it. we’d be chasing a moving target.

obviously there is going to be a wide variety about what people believe is moral. but that has no bearing on if it really is an objective moral law.

like i said about tv–some groups thought owning and watching was tantamount to canoodling with satan. clearly their idea about tv is only a subjective belief–not a moral imperative.

so i am asking what these moral imperatives are–OR if there even ARE any–or if morality is entirely subjective.

i think undue violence towards others is seen as fundamentally immoral. but i really struggle to find anything beyond murder as a universal objective moral code. don’t kill, don’t take people’s stuff, i guess.

maybe it is too convoluted to even discuss.

i nearly just listed “don’t lie to people” as a moral imperative, but then i remembered a documentary i saw about how lying is a necessary, crucial function of development and serves biological and psychiatric needs.

13

dontbesojumpy writes:

> once you establish what the universal moral code is, you can apply it to history
> and start charting data.

I disagree. It’s possible to believe in a universal moral code and yet to believe that it’s impossible to draw a chart of how it’s changed over time. One thing that’s noticeable is that different societies emphasize different parts of the moral code, even if they agree generally on what is moral. It’s possible then for some societies to be better on some aspects of the moral code and for other societies to be better on other aspects of the moral code. How do you decide which aspects are more important? Furthermore, there aren’t good records throughout history for how moral various societies are. Among other things, societies often lie to themselves about how moral they are. Also, for some aspects of morality, there’s no possible measure. Partly this is because morality is an internal thing, not something that shows on the outside. For all these reasons, you’re wasting your time trying to determine whether we are more or less moral than past societies. This isn’t really relevant to the question of whether there is a universal moral code.

14

i’m going to try to explain a little better where i get lost in this and why i am asking.

for the sake of illustrating my point, we’ll discuss saying Shit on tv.

used to be, that was not ok. it wasn’t acceptable by mainstream society. most people considered it offensive and saying it was a minor issue of morality. (MINOR).

but they relaxed the rule, for no other reason but ubiquitous use, so now you can say it on tv.

the right thinks “MORAL DECAY!”
but given enough time, it becomes even MORE ubiquitous and eventually settles into acceptable status quo.

so when i take a step back, i wonder if that is the way all ‘moral’ issues will go–that they will become more and more relaxed over time until we can say *fuck *or whatever else on tv, too–

part of me dismisses it as non-morality; people were offended by the taboo but it’s not at all immoral…just rare in common use, thus offensive sounding. ubiquity fixes that.

but then i think “so is this how ALL morals work? that we just progress more and more, becoming more liberal and more liberal, and eventually–what? equivocating killing? or thievery? or are there some moral laws that are foundational, ones that anchor humans and will never shift, not ever?”

i hope that makes sense. i cannot tell if we are on a slippery slope with morality, progressing ceaselessly towards endless liberalism that ends where nothing is really right or wrong–
or
if all this grey area stuff is just nonsense when you get right down to it–because there’s underlying human mores that remain steady.

15

If you are looking for truly universal morals, not killing or harming someone in your tribal group is about it. Everything else has evolved over time. Incest taboos also, maybe, but remember the Pharaohs.

Aristotle, who thought about these things, would consider anyone who made decisions with equal input from his wife foolish and best and immoral at worst. The early Christians, who expected subservience of the wife, were clearly operating from the same code.

How would you even propose to test that some moral code was universal?

16

Use or tolerance of rude language is an example of moral decay?

Well fuck me like a dead whore, I did not know that. I have long felt that “rude language” goes in cycles, and what may be unspeakable to one generation is everyday conversation to another, while a different facet of life becomes considered unseemly.

17

i legitimately don’t know. my suspicion is there’s some “goodness” at the core of what’s right and wrong. societal glue. some underlying moral truth at the core of humanity.

and that everything else is fluff–how close your wife follows you walking on the street, how long you keep your hair, what beverages you drink, words you use, people you nail (and method of nailing them)—all moral fluff, with no bearing on whatever the glue is.

that’s my suspicion. but i’m lost in nebula of it all.

maybe morals are evolutionary just like everything else, so charting morality over time is impossible.

maybe the yardstick always changes. maybe it’s not that we are living in a more immoral time–maybe it’s people are looking at it from the old measure.
that makes a little sense. we allow more and more liberal things on tv, but we make up with it with a newfound sense of compassion and humanity towards each other–more tolerance, a new age of acceptance with a moral emphasis on equality.

contrast that to less liberal stuff on tv in the 50s yet total social intolerance and inequality.

someone who has lived through both eras would have a disparate view of moral decay; he can see we now do the thing we used to think was wrong, but might fail to notice that in turn creates new moral behavior in opposite ways from the past.

i guess straddling the two, it’d be easy to look back and perceive “more morality” back then…

yeah, words are about the least morally impinging things people do. but it served a silly, but apt, analogy for the slippery slope.

i think you might be on to something, tho. it’s a tug of war. we are more openly tolerant of all kinds of things but straying away from condoning violence. i’m starting to grasp that morality will probably always be in a state of flux. which means that perception will last forever.

18

Tom Sawyer is a great example.

19

[Nitpick] In the past people used their shift key, truly a sign of moral superiority. [/Nitpick]

It’s hard to read your posts without caps. Please consider using mixed case for legibility sake.

20

I think that one could make a case that the more “religious” a society is the less moral it is. Religion imposes a set of behaviors that are arbitrary and irrational and condemns or punishes those who do not comply. Moral standards have wide acceptance while religious standards vary greatly.

There are few if any societies that see murder, theft, and deception as acceptable. But what is religiously acceptable in one society is not necessarily acceptable in another. So we have some religions that require hair to be cut, some to never be cut, others require it to be covered, while some see it as an affront to wear a hat in a place of worship. Historically immorality has come when one group tries to impose these irrational and arbitrary standards on another. Men vs women, white vs black, Christian vs Muslim, Protestant vs Catholic, etc.