Is There an Illusion of Moral Decline?
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
It is for example about universally answering the question whether it is good/bad to give someone a bad time for having been born with some characteristics they couldn't influence. E.g. left handedness — is it okay to prevent left handers from using their left hand to do things? Probably not (yet, a while ago this was seen as morally right). The only argument people had against left handers was "it is weird" and the more it became clear that forcing left handers to be right handed can have severe consequences and that a certain percentage of the population is always left handed the clearer it became that it was wrong to try to change them.
In that case the moral person is the one that "just follows the tradition" but ends up being spectacularly wrong. Always thing about the questions universally, e.g. are people born into this (do they have a choice), is there harm from them supressing what they are born into? Is there harm to others in them being themselves? Ethics will guide you towards a good answer, morals will not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
While it is at times useful to recognize that people have different moralities, sometimes very different, you seem to suggest that people answer questions of right/wrong and moral decline in a way that can't really be "correct". That is, that moralities are subjective and ethics is objective.
Every individual has their morality (perhaps not very developed yet) and that is that. We can't really verify universal truths around anything, unless mathematical in nature. What you call "ethics" isn't the objective truth of right/wrong, but just your perception of overlapping moralities. "Seen as morally right" by who? The majority? When did the sandhill shift to not oppressing left-handed people?
If you want a semblance of objectivity, get every individual to agree to your answer (through words only). Maybe there are objective values and maybe some people have discovered some of them, but we'd never know unless we become gods, in a certain sense. I'm certainly not one, so I'll stick to agreeing and disagreeing with other people. Society is just a word used to describe how people interact with each other. There's no development of a morality from subjective to objective or vice versa in the engine of society. Why someone holds the morality they do can be a productive question, but at the end of the day, one person's morality is just that.
Might be because:
A) I am not a English native, and not plugged into any US discourse about the topic
B) I studied philosophy and I studied it in Europe, where these definitions might have been used differently. Ethics have never been my focus, so I am not an expert here.
On the topic of universality: You rightly say that this is a somewhat illusive goal (as in: reaching a set of rules that everybody has to objectively agree if only they were reasonable). However that was never my claim. I simply said that instead of just inheriting your moral rules from tradition, culture and your ancestors it is superior to try to embed those rules into your own subjective rational framework in order to test those rules under a somewhat consistent "framework". And there are some guiding examples how sich a framework could look (e.g. Kant with his categorical imperative). Imagining universality is a good trick here to give your framework a check: "what if my standards were everybodies standards"? If you hate what comes out as an answer you should probably rethink your own opinions.
IMO there are just too many people that hold totally inconsistent views. The key questions is: How can one expect others to bow to ones moral claims, if your views contradict each other or if your moral claims are always strong if they affect the outgroup and waved away if they affect your ingroup or yourself? It is next to impossible to find common ground with such a person, because they are not interested in finding good rules, their interest is to rule.
Society is about finding some form of consensus on what is "commonly" acceptable and what isn't, which is why people that don't even try to think in an universal ethical framework are somewhat problematic. Of course not everything needs to be subject to rules, but some rules will reduce conflicts between the different groups and individuals. Now morals are not the same as these rules, because they don't have to be enshrined in law, but the border is fluid here.
Morals are a fluid thing. My Wehrmacht-serving grandfather for example would say talking about one's feelings is weak and therefore morally wrong and this was a common view in his generation. I would say talking about one's feeling is hard and not talking about them is a sign of a weak person. He fucked up his whole family by insisting to look strong, my father was strong by breaking with the morals of his father.
Yet he was the man that could never face what he did, never talk about what his real ideology was, he could never face how bad of a father and husband he was. In fact his eating disorders and his silence took 4 generations to heal. If only he could have faced his past and lived in the present, strong men — in my world — can do precisely that.
The point is that generational differences exist and very often a simple "the young people do it different" will become a "the young people are morally corrupted" — because the alternative would be to face your own weaknesses and demons or question how your society has done things up to this point.
Men being afraid to look weak (something that only bothers men that feel weak) is a huge driver of all kinds of problems, even today.
When was this magic era of grander moral heights we’d be “declining” from?
IMO rich people try to keep this meme viral as a social control device. Lament the potential threat to their figurative status as a decline in morality when the public is merely uninterested having their outputs expropriated to prop up some figuratively rich nobody
Where does one walk in American suburbs?
Church membership declined from 75% → 50%
Premarital sex rate went from from 20% → 75%
Trust in government went from 75% → 20%
Prime-age-male-labor-force nonparticipation rate quadrupled from 3% → 12%
Marijuana use went from 4% → 49%
and
> [..] they find a marginal trend for people to rate morality worse 40 years before their birth than 20, which doesn’t fit a rose-colored glasses effect but does fit an imprint-on-your-own-birth-year one.
In other words: convincing, but just lies, damn lies, and statistics :-)
Your phrase that "none are moral issues" really just means "none of those conflict with whatever morality I hold".
Here is a quote I like from Descartes.
"But I believed that I had already given sufficient time to languages, and likewise to the reading of the writings of the ancients, to their histories and fables. For to hold converse with those of other ages and to travel, are almost the same thing. It is useful to know something of the manners of different nations, that we may be enabled to form a more correct judgment regarding our own, and be prevented from thinking that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational, a conclusion usually come to by those whose experience has been limited to their own country."
Wearing pants increased from X% → Y%
Eating pork increased from X% → Y%
Drawing pictures increased from X% → Y%
Reading Harry Potter increased from X% → Y%
Using the stove on Saturday increased from X% → Y%
See? These stats prove morality is in decline!
I'd argue that the conclusion to be drawn is that morality is so subjective that the very idea of a moral decline is nonsense, not that these numbers prove a moral decline. (I actually do think a moral decline is happening, but in my view it's more along the lines of increases in tribalism, factory farming, militarization of police, the industrial prison complex, wealth inequality, etc.)
It might indeed be nonsense to talk about a moral decline with someone who disagrees with the moral values held by oneself. It seems the only productive thing to talk about between two such people would be the reasons they disagree on their values and which values are right, and I'm not sure HN is the best place for those conversations.
So I just felt people who agreed that those original statistics indicated a moral decline and those who disagreed were talking past each other and no discussion of quality would come from it, unless the root disagreement were addressed. Apologies if I spoke out of turn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism ("moral anti-realist" == "meta-ethical relativism"?)
> This view contrasts with moral universalism, which argues that, even though well-intentioned persons disagree...there is still a meaningful sense in which an action could be more "moral" (morally preferable) than another
Absolute moral relativism sounds terrible, but I also don't like the idea of being very constrained in my beliefs and actions. I don't think we can truly consider anything other than mathematical constructs to be objective, but I think that there are a few moral values (violence bad, blah blah) that all societies should follow, and everything else is fair game. In effect, there would be a few core principles that all other enforceable moral principles (which are tantamount to laws) are derived from, and everything else is to be judged in the court of society or not at all. There would also be a provision to allow units of organization (homes, businesses) to set reasonable contracts to uphold additional moral values. I think an escape hatch along those lines is most flexible without possibly violating the core values.
I came up with some of that on the spot. Feel free to express (polite!) criticism.
Good, churches are places of fake morality. If your institution sexually abuses minors for decades and you are still a member, it is not those leaving who are morally wrong..
> Premarital sex rate went from from 20% → 75%
Which is bad, because the place of fake morality said it is bad. I am with one girl for 20 years now and will never marry her. I don't see why any institution should have any bussiness in what I do here. I know why they do it tho: Control someone's deepest desires and you own them fully. This is why religions often try to regulate sex: power.
> Trust in government went from 75% → 20%
Might have to do with the fact that more people are literate, that the government has done not much for the small person since that time and we now have Internet. I don't see how "trusting the government" is morally good under any definition of the word.
> Prime-age-male-labor-force nonparticipation rate quadrupled from 3% → 12%
Can have a ton of reasons, e.g. that a typical today job will not sustain even the most modest of lifestyles, while decades ago you could feed a family from it. But we trust the government so this will all be fixed, right?
> Marijuana use went from 4% → 49%
Why is it morally wrong to smoke weed? What would you bring up next? The precentage of exposed ankles? It is morally wrong to smoke marijuana and drive a car, it is morally wrong to smoke marijuana in front of a kid. But just smoking it for your own pleasure is neutral (and I am a non-smoking person).
For more detailed evidence, just hit Peter up on the next pride parade. =)
Adam Smith wrote that none of his theories, about free trade and specialization making everyone richer, could not work if the society was not moral enough. If everybody will cheat as soon as there's an opportunity to do it and get away with it, nobody can be trused and trade caeases to exist - and specialization and comparative advantage with it. So, morality is actually crucial for economic growth.
It could be 25%, it could be 51%. Once we get past a certain threshold of bad actors in the marketplace, trade is impossible. We don't know what the exact limit is, but we're best served keeping that number closer to 0 so we don't have to find out.