You seem to think that it’s true in all cases that morality in current American society is less than it used to be. Let me give you a couple of examples where, at least according to some standards, present-day American society is more moral than it used to be. Child sexual abuse (and any child physical abuse at all) is now considered to be worse than it used to be and the amount of it has dropped. But, you ask, why do we see news stories about it? Well, partly because those news stories are about things that happened decades ago and now we expose those things more than we used to. Also, partly because we’re more willing to take it to court, while in the past it used to just get ignored. Similarly, bullying a child is considered to be a significant moral offense now, while in the past a child who complained about being bullied would be told to quit whining and work out so that they can beat up the bully. Furthermore, compared with American society a hundred years ago, alcoholism is considered to be a bigger moral offense than it used to be. We drink less than we did back then, and excessive drinking is considered a bigger moral offense than it used to be considered. So the moral tone of the U.S. has increased in some ways. Deciding whether the U.S. is more or less moral than it used to be is very hard, because you have to look at many different aspects of the moral code.
This and questions like it have been debated hotly for thousands of years. There isn’t an easy answer, so the fact that you’re having difficulty with it is a good sign. 
First, the distinction between core morality and social glue is worth considering, but I doubt we’d be able to find any definitive line where one ends and the other begins, more of a wide grayish patch between them. Yes, there’s a distinction, but is there a critical difference? The critical difference is between things we dislike but can abide (impoliteness) and things we demand (“human rights”).
There’s a lot of talk about “basic human rights”, but I’d argue that these are things we agree on and not hard universal truths. (There are smart and wise people who agree with me on that, as well as smart and wise people who disagree.)
This is true in ways you probably didn’t mean. There is something called the “moral sense”, it’s our inner assessment or gut reaction to whether something is right or wrong. Many of us here at StraightDope (being scientifically minded) believe that is just an aspect of cognition and emotion that evolved along with out other mental faculties and emotions. The important thing to remember about this “moral sense” is that while we may use it as a guide for morality, it does not define morality. Some things may feel right but our reason may convince us otherwise. (Religious zealots who discuss these issues, like PJ Moreland, seem to ignore this distinction, even though they’re well enough educated to know better.)
Be careful not to try to put everything on a single scale, and thing that we just move the center point (the “sweet spot” of morality) on that scale. All the time, while we’re getting more “liberal” and accepting about some things, we’re getting less accepting and more judgemental about others. It’s a really complicated set of things, based on core values, and when core values change, it’s not a simple case of lighter or darker gray. Colors don’t begin to do it justice. When you mix a bunch of colors, you end up with essentially one color. When you mix a bunch of sounds, they don’t blend. Values are a little more like sounds than color, in this regard.
Welcome to a complicated world. It’s not easy being a Humanist. It’s even harder when you’re not sure what you are (ethically).
Consider checking out Wikipedia’s “ethics” article; most especially “normative ethics” which is about how we should decide what we should do. Use that as a jumping off point to see a wide variety of different schools of thought. A lot of them will seem very similar, yet their adherents would argue tooth and nail between them. It’s not an easy way to learn, or even the most interesting, but it’ll give you a quick look at the layout of the issue, as interpreted by (mostly) Western philosophy. It’ll also make your head spin a bit. But as I said, welcome to a complicated world!
This. As immoral as modern society can be in many ways, it’s head, shoulders (and for that matter, ankles) above the past in terms of morality.
Theft being immoral also seems universal, and reciprocity seems universally moral. Even chimps have instincts about the latter; if Chimp A helps Chimp B, and Chimp B fails to reciprocate later, Chimp A is likely to attack Chimp B in revenge. He didn’t pay back the favor he owed.
There are some people who still cling to the notion of big historical cycles, of patterns of civilization that repeat time and again. One of the ideas often expressed in these theories is that any given human endeavor will progress from innovative, to formalized, to decadent. Per this theory, pretty much everything undergoes “moral decay” simply by the laws of human nature.
SF writer Poul Anderson appeared to adhere to this idea; he wrote about a vast future interstellar empire which was on the cusp of moving from “principate” to “dominate” in nature – think of Julius and Augustus.
Such historians tend to see the U.S. as moving from a Republic to a Democracy, and thus to some unspecified form of Tyranny, but they’ve been saying that for a long time now. Refusal to allow states to coin silver was once seen as a sign of the impending collapse of liberty; today, it’s universal health care.
I think the “big historical cycles” idea is sheerest bunkum.
“moral decay” is just a combination of;
Bad memory of, or ignorance of How Things Were when we were younger.
Discomfort with the fact that things are different from the way we want them to be, or the way we perceived that they used to be.
not to be sappy, but this is all really helpful. it’s kind of what i hoped for by posting this question.
it moves things along for me, in my mind. i felt a lot of dissonance about it, but i’m starting to feel a lot more comfortable about the evolutionary aspect. liberalism is seen through one lens as more immoral, but liberalism also seems to foster more human rights–which i personally think is embracing TRUE morality instead of religious nit-picks.
i didn’t have a very good grasp on it in my head before, but this is all helping a lot.
Not at all sappy. It’s refreshing for someone to post and actually want answers to a question, rather than posting a rhetorical question to grind their favorite axe.
In these forums, the conventional response to being informed or corrected is “Ignorance faught.” I know my own igorance has been faught many times here.
When I think of morality I tend to think in general terms of how I approach situations or people. At what degree do I put my wants, desires or needs over others for instance. Do I make my decisions based on the greater good for all or how I feel it will affect me. When I see kids harassing and picking on a child who is different for some reason it appears sociopathic to me. My general impression is that folks today seem to be a bit more self absorbed but it is really hard to say if that is true or not.
Asking an internet forum to describe morality is a futile endeavour. Entire libraries have been written on the subject and there is still much confusion. The only thing most of us can agree on is that it is wrong to deprive, injure, or deceive someone without good cause. All the particulars are up for debate.
I’m not sure we are any more or less moral than anyone else in history. We can say with great certainty that few other cultures have matched our tolerance for freedom of speech, respect for the rights of others, transparency and accountability of government, sexual freedoms, and so forth. So by many measures, we are far more moral than other cultures.
We also have more pornography, obscenity, drug use, and excesses. We can’t ever really know, but I suspect we have more sexual immorality than ever before. Sure, we aren’t burning down villages (much), but we’ve invented whole new ways to be filthy that other cultures never had access to.
Check out some of the ongoing debates over abortion, gun control, the death penalty, etc. If we can’t decide what is and is not moral, what does that mean for us? Are we a new Ninevana that doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong?
And how can we compare ourselves to other generations? If a person was doing something considered “moral” in that time and place, are we right to call him immoral by our modern (and allegedly enlightened) standards?
That said, America is 147 years without a Civil War. Compared to a lot of nations in the world, we’re doing all right. 
More pornography? Cite?
More obscenity? Cite?
More drug use? Cite?
More excesses? What does that even mean? Cite?
More sexual immorality? Cite?
Whole new ways to be filthy? Cite?
CurrentMorality = InitialMorality * e[sup]-ht[/sup] Where “h” is the Hitler moral decay constant.
ETA: Though some scholars argue that it should be CurrentMorality = InitialMorality * e[sup]ht[/sup] and that the value of h itself should be negative.
man, i’ve been thinking about this for however many days it’s been since you posted it.
you said a simple but (to me) profound thing: morality is just the wherewithal to contemplate how your actions will affect others.
here we are, grasping at the aether, trying to pen an acceptable, universal rule for ethics. but i think you nailed it. it’s just not being selfish and then being able to tangentially apply that sentiment to others, even if there’s no net gain for yourself.
it’s determining how actions will effect others. it doesn’t even have to be a desire–it can simply be interceding in something that you believe will negatively impact someone else. (ie stopping a crime against someone else, or stopping to help a stranded motorist. it transcends “i want this but it will hurt you” and goes into “there’s nothing in this for me, but i still rather it not impact anyone else so adversely”). of course, the more nuanced and complex the effect, the harder it gets to make good judgements. but i would call a morally upstanding individual one who is always being considerate of their actions.
oh, ^that AND they try to decide to do the thing they think impacts the fewest people negatively. people like Bernie Madoff probably had the total contemplation of how shitwrecked he was making other people, but he didn’t choose to do the right thing. he chose the beneficial to him thing.
if that’s an agreeable circumscription of “morality,” it changes the complexion of morality in animals.
i need to think about this more, but it’s pretty interesting (i’m probably stupid for nothing thinking about it in those terms before now).
it would appear honeybadgerDOEScare…at least a little.
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Just wanted to drop by and thank you for the book recommendation. I’m 10% through (according to Kindle) and it’s an excellent read. The chapter summarizing the Old Testament with slightly-different wording was worth the price of entry alone.
You sure? There was a little something called Prohibition back then, ya know.
A hundred years ago is 1912, which is before Prohibition. It’s estimated that the quantity of alcoholic beverages drunken by the average American is now about two-thirds as much as just before Prohibition.
I would maintain that morality is public and rule-based, concerned with appearances - whereas ethics is what you do because it’s right, when no one is going to judge you.
I think society, the intelligent sector of it anyway, is becoming less moral and more ethical, and I think people who believe in authority as the glue of society (many of them religious) are scared to death of what might happen when good conduct comes from respect for individuals and not top-down from some abstract idea of Society.
That in turn follows from bedrock beliefs. You either believe an individual human has some intrinsic dignity, or you believe e’s some kind of semi-expendable garbage-beast absent God’s law, love, or only son.
- your name (from the farside comic) is why my dog is named Doug.
- many religious types do believe what you say–absent God’s “law,” we’d just run amok, hedonistically, probably raping butts and swearing while we do it (on drugs, also to dead people whom we also killed). the idea that people might be able to find it within themselves to just NOT be deplorable just on the fact we shouldn’t, you know. be deplorable really does threaten them. it seems to make them think God serves no other need to exist. personally i find that narrowminded in every direction.
- i recently read a study that the least likely affiliations to condone violence are, counter-intuitively, 1. Muslims, 2. Athiests 3. Agnostics and 4. (most likely to condone violence) Christians.
i’m not sure what to necessarily make of that information, but i do anecdotally corroborate it in my experience. Christians have, in my life, seemed so reliant on self-righteousness that they begin to think their ideas are beyond reproach. they think things like you don’t deserve their help, or that they have carte blanche on raping the environment (God said we cannot “destroy the world,”) and so on and so forth.
so are you saying that morality is a set of mores or laws–and ethics is the actual willful act of treating people with legitimate kindness, compassion and…well. treating them well?
The obvious answer is average happiness, perhaps mixed in with average freedom, but that formula might have to be offset somehow to prevent forms of happiness that derive from abusing any subset of the population.