I have noticed among some folks a tendency to claim that our country is becoming less and less "moral", notably with reference to the Ten Commandments decision.
I, personally, would beg to differ and in fact claim that our society is constantly becoming more and more "moral" in that culturally ingrained prejudice is gradually becoming a thing of the past.
I'm forced to define this within my own Christian perspective: Society has only very recently begun to live up to the second part of Jesus' greatest commandment, to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Is society, in fact, becoming less moral than we used to be? If so, in what ways?

I have to agree with you, Grendel, that society is becoming more moral. Sure, the divorce rate has risen, but that is largely because women have more freedom than they used to. Some of us look back at the 50s and think, wow, our values have really disappeared. But have they? I don't think so.

Our society has been making constant, incremental progress. We no longer have institutionalized slavery. We no longer have Jim Crow laws. We no longer keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. We no longer find it acceptable for people to use racist language in public. We have a constantly increasing concern for human rights, both here and around the world.

What we had at one time, was a society in which the wealthy (or middle class) white male could live in a fantasy land, surrounded by all the accouterments of "values" and "morals," while ignoring the plight of not only all the less fortunate around him, but even the wife in his very own home!

If you look closely at the values which have been "lost," you will find that they are mostly associated with societal structures meant to keep the few on top, and the many underfoot.

I would agree entirely with both of you. We are becoming more inclusive, more egalitarian - far more moral than we were half a century ago when fear and hatred of anyone "different" was ingrained in our society. I would also agree that we are getting ever closer to a genuinely Christian morality. If only more "Christians" practiced what they should be preaching, this could be one of the greatest societies on earth. Sadly, we have a long, long way to go. Hah! Never mind "loving one's neighbour" - when do you think we'll get around to that "loving one's enemies" bit?

The last time I tried "loving my neighbor" the wife got *** NOTICE: THIS WORD IS AGAINST THE RULES. FAILURE TO REMOVE IT WILL RESULT IN A STRIKE. ***.

I have very mixed feelings about this.

I do not deny anything that had been said so far. In a broad sense, the American culture of the early 21st century seems more livable than in previous decades. (We might mention here that the rate of violent crime is down, in most categories. I attribute this to the change in the average age of the population.)

However, perhaps these great gains have come at some cost. Perhaps we are more socially isolated than in earlier times. I frequently observe a lack of basic civility. (I am not talking about formality or "good manners," really, but just not acting like a jerk.) I speculate that this may be due to the sheer numbers of people around, the fast pace of life, and so on.

All in all, I tend to think that people have always been good and evil, and always will be, although the exact ways in which this is expressed may differ.

I think that what you guys are saying is true, and it probably has to do with more media attention to the ignorance and prejudice that we once allowed to be so prevelant in our society. In the 60's, when I was in High School, an all white school, I rarely heard any of my classmates saying anything prejudicial, but I did hear it more often from their parents. Each generation seems to be better than the last with respect to getting along with each other.
On another moral issue, though, that of sex, it depends on who you ask. The Puritans seem to still have a choke hold on some of us. Seems to me if it is consenting adults having fun behind closed doors, it should be of no concern to anyone else.
My wife is very narrow minded about this, she insists that she is the only adult that I can be consenting with.

The fact that society is becoming more inclusive of differing ideas does not automatically equate to a more moral society.

Since we obviously have not been able to agree what morals are and where they come from, I don't think we can answer that question as it is posed.

What we can answer is whether or not society as a whole is closer to a particular morality. We need to do this because we are more inclusive of alternative views.

Are we closer to the Christian or religious morality--probably not.

Are we closer to the moral perspective espoused by moral relativism--I would answer yes.

We will not look at actions (as a society) and say that they are wrong on a moral basis. We seek to be all-inclusive of all viewpoints.

If each person can decide their own morality, then yes we are a more moral society.

In what way? As Mentioned above, it certainly appears that we are closer to living up to Jesus' greatest commandment than ever before. Maybe this doesn't apply to other religions, but from my reading it appears that most if not all religions have some variation of the "golden rule". Within Christianity it is specifically stated that love supersedes the legalistic commandments.

I have to say we are a society of less morals because of sex. Sex is everywhere. TV shows, commercials, movies, music videos, in public, and the internet. In the past, there was more morals because, on TV, the average TV family, like Leave It To Beaver, didn't talk about sex and didn't have sexual moments in the show. Nowadays, all sitcoms have sex in them.

There is so much sex on the internet that it's ridiculous. You can't even look up the disney movie "Bambi" in any search engine without some hits showing things that have to do with sex. It's insane and it is driving morals into the ground.

Music Videos that pop stars make are also full of sexual content.

Last night's MTV awards is more proof of this. Madonna kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera like she did on National TV.

What’s wrong with Madonna kissing another female pop star?

That’s also why the beetles where famous, because of shows like leave it to beaver. Society instead of allowing for sexuality to be understood buried and made it "evil". Unless done how someone wants it. Then the Beatles came to America, and all they had to do was go out on stage and orgy would come soon after, probably fed the age of disco to in my opinion.

Just like a multitude of things our society is changing over time, of course this will lead to different thought or ways of thinking, that some can label immoral or overall not like their own, which by any condition like being an atheist can leave people feeling insecure about themselves if nothing else.

The major founders of most any philosophy like a religion always try to automate life, like don’t covet your neighbors wife or steal, allowing for materialism or the attempt to automate life and or society. The bottom line is we have many versions of such in life plus new stuff, so society as a whole in a place like America i think was doomed for change. Unless we don’t want to look down on people that live in caves still, those people never changed. They also cant support very much human life, but i guess there is a positive and negative to everything. Most likely depends on your perspective huh?

I do know one thing, we have lots of serial killers from the leave it to beaver type of life, i would imagine somewhere in moderation there is a happy middle along with education.

This is just a guess, but I believe that people are going to the extremes on both sides of the morality argument. Something like this:

against traditional morality--l---------------------------------l---pro traditional morality

Now it might be that we are hearing just from extremists at either end. The majority of the people, I am sure, are still somewhere in the middle, and they are just less vocal about it.

I feel weird saying this, but this is the first time I actually agree with Quark!


Now I have not been around very long, but I spent a few days just reading posts. It takes a while to get a feel of people around here try to read all the posts. But back on topic. I had to pick myself off the floor, but in the total. We are more moral and better off today. We often discount many of the things Quark mentioned. I would disagree with his assessment of negative information of what we have lost. Some of what we have lost is very good stuff. I believe it is the pendulum swinging out on those issues and I believe it will return. Anytime you have a push towards a new social standard in our understanding of what is moral. We tend to have a reaction that pushes a little farther than probably is needed.

Some of these would be the dismantling of the family. I am not sure that marriage is as bad off as it first appears. When you look at information behind the statistics, the increase in divorce is more associated with some individuals getting married like it is the flavor of the month, than it is the aggregate getting of people getting divorced. The family destruction seems to come more from work related issues than it does from marriage. ie increased work week, multiple jobs, both parents working, teens working more hours younger. Less civic involvement overall. To much information available. This may be the biggest one. We may not be mature enough as a society to handle all the freedom and information that we get today.

Hello everyone. A pleasure to meet you all.



Morality has to do with the distinction between right and wrong. Being sexually uninhibited may perhaps be more moral than being sexually repressed. The former leads to honesty and the latter can lead to some rather damaging ends.

As for overall morality. I think we're becoming more moral. The Victorian age, sometimes thought to be the most moral, believed entirely in the literal truth of the bible, and was also was the most hypocritical. We ahve a plethora of classic literature dealing with this false morality. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a double standard drives Tess to hardship and eventually murder. In the Way of All Flesh, the less-than-loving Victorian family is held up to ridicule. Gullliver's Travels, etc. The debasing of the poor, the treatment of slaves and foreigners...

How many social commentaries were written then? How many are written now? Doesn't take a genius to figure out that things have gotten a little better.

I was sort of thinking the same thing. GA to you, sex may be immoral. to me however, I see nothing wrong with it, if it is between consenting adults. (though some things may not be my cup of tea. "different strokes for different folks" as they say)

personally I think this is a question of relevance. GA's statement of sex is an excellent example. he see's sex everywhere as immoral. I do not (I view humans as a sexual creature) I assume he would also not condone polygamy and polyamory as moral. I think they are. so to say we are more or less moral then say, 50 years ago, is impossible. to some (like quarkhead)we are more so, to others (like pat robertson) we are less so. morality is too subjective to make a solid determination. I wouldn't necessarily say we are more or less moral the 50 years ago, but DIFFERENT. you should say we have evolved and changed as a society.

Huh. So that ties this issue in with the "is morality subjective" topic that I'm too lazy to link to.

So, a better question is, "what is more moral"? Do you mean getting closer to an ideal or extreme of morality, or having a more complex or rigidly defined morality system? If it's subjective, then its difficult to tell if we're getting "fitter" morals, isn't it?

Two things:

First, I don't the citing the Ten Commandments case really has anything to do with morality. I think it is a shame that people use the removal of that statue from the court house as a talking point when discussing morality. The reason that statue was removed is to avoid a situation where the government must display any statue a 'religious' group wants to put in a court house. Can you imagine if the KKK or neo-Nazis wanted to put something in the courthouse? If you let the Christian church it seems to me that you have opened the flood gates, as the U.S. government is not allowed to support a single religion.

Secondly, I say less moral. I think one of the indicators of this is the use of sex in advertising and entertainment.


Do you think sleeping with 100 other people is right and good?

In my case, certainly. Morality is subjective for the simple reason that our personal feelings dictate how we define morals. It's a social projection of an individual feeling. The fact that groups of people share moral values does not change the fact that they are internally formulated (albeit with the help of external influences.)

As such a society cannot become more or less moral. The prevailing morality can change and will, but we all express our moral values, always have and always will.

For those that think otherwise, what makes you so sure that things haven't just changed? Women were held as chattel while children were often indentured and slavery and servitude was widely practiced during the supposedly moral Victorian age. Is that more or less moral? The only way you can make that decision is through a value judgement: Is the opression of women more or less moral than promiscuity? There is no objective answer to that question, only a subjective one.

Morality: A system of ideas of right and wrong.

Moral relativism (as outline here by Ultimate) is a bunch of garbage. To buy into this philosophy one must abandon the idea of right and wrong all together. Since it is easy to cite clear examples of absolute right and wrong we can discard this philosophy.

Since someone will ask me to name examples, I will.
Wrong: Murdering a child for the sake of killing alone.
Right: Saving the life of a innocent child with disregard for personal safety.

These are absolutes. I challenge someone to argue otherwise. There is no 'cultural' element that could possibly reverse these two scenarios.

So I disagree. A society can become more moral if its citizens are more likely to make the right decision and less moral in the opposite situation.

I do agree that changes in morality over time are extremely difficult to measure as Ultimate says. After all this requires assigning magnitude to different ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, which, in the real of logic, is impossible to do. It would be like comparing two different infinities. You cannot say one is bigger or smaller. They are what they are.

While your conclusion is correct as far as I am concerned, you have an interesting perspective on right and wrong. Something is only ABSOLUTELY right if everyone accepts it as right. The greeks and romans both practiced infanticide at various points in their history on a surprising scale; and their society did not perceive it as wrong. The Spartans in particular practiced this, and they would be apalled that homosexuality is forbidden in the military, and would judge us the way that you would judge them. Do I think that killing children is wrong? Certainly. I am horrified that it has been practiced on a large scale, and am horrified when it is practiced on a small scale; but the only reason it is seen as an absolute value is because everyone thinks the same. (Or almost everyone.)

Your understanding of the relationship between morals and society is flawed. Morals are a construct of a society; there is no universal standard that is imparted on society to which we can measure how moral we are.

Perhaps the Greeks and Romans were simply immoral.

Saying that something is "absolutely immoral" is not equivalent to saying that no one would ever commit such an act.

Maybe we're immoral, and they were more enlightened for grasping the fact that everybody dies eventually. Or perhaps they judged people more on accomplishments than the fact they lived. We aren't necessarily more moral. We just have a greater concept of self.



If a society espoused a philosophy of hedonism, I don't see why murdering a child could not be right, and recklessly endangering your own life to save another could not be wrong. Actually, I remember from my ancient history class, the Spartans would often use a nearby people, whose name eludes me, for weapons practice. Just sally out and start carving them up. They thought there was nothing wrong with that.

Edited to answer campbejm's questionl


That'd be exhausting, and I'd have to visit a doctor afterwards, but I don't see anything wrong with promiscuity between consenting adults. If no harm stems from it, it's not subject to being defined as good or bad. To me, good morals aid society, bad morals hinder it. You could argue that sleeping with so many people would be infidelity, but infidelity, or "unfaithfulness" only really applies to relationships.

I do not think that media exploitation of sex is healthy or moral. I think this might be what goamerica was getting at.

In a sense, we are becoming more moral as we focus on condemning racism, sexism, and cruelty to each other.

We appear to be less afraid to express opposition to war and to repression in many of its forms. That would point to a heightened sense of moral concern.

But the sexual revolution, while it has eliminated some hang-ups, has become license for people to experiment irresponsibly. Sex in itself is not wrong. Sexual practices that do not take into consideration the consequences and hurt others for the sake of the gratification of one party are immoral.

Morality over time goes in cycles. For example, the Puritans gave rise to our founding fathers, who were less interested in codifying morality than the Puritans would have been. The '60's gave rise to the current rise in moralistic posturing.

However....

It seems that showing someone being shot to death on TV is more moral than showing two people having sex on TV. Can't understand that, but whatever.

You'll get no argument from me that there is too much violence on television. In addition, there is too much use of bad language on television during times when young people are expected to be watching. There was a recent Jeannie Moos piece on CNN where there is an organization counting the obscenities and on what shows they are heard, the subject of a study, and I don't remember which organization it was. But there is a lot of it.

But not to take away from your premise; seeing so many murders on T.V. cannot be good on the psyche any more than seeing scantily clad young people on television in compromising situations. The worst thing about these situations is the assumption that these are normal, every day occurrences for a large segment of the population, and not devices to boost ratings.

I'm sorry if you see my views as merely moralistic posturing.

Considering that many people seem follow the media like sheep, I would say we are becoming less moral. Indeed language in the media and society has gotten worse. Violence in the media and in society has gotten worse. Many people don't care anymore. But the bright side is that many more people like myself each year are standing up to the tide of moralless people and saying no to a lack of morality.

How is that so?



Media is reflective of society. And as far as society getting more violent, lets go back to the turbulent 1960's or even further back to segregation and the influential political machine that was the KKK in the 1920's. We can even look at the 1930's and prohibition and the mob. Lets not forget the age of expansionism and the wild west where everyone carried a side arm and murder and self defence were a daily occurence.

People don't question the media. Many people just follow what they're told. A perfect example is cigarettes. People buy cigarettes and don't care if they're unhealthy or not. They see the advertisements and purchase cigarettes like mindless sheep. Actually, they're beyond mindless sheep because sheep have an ability to smell unhealthy products like cigarettes and understand they should avoid them.

Really? People don't question the media? People can't think for themselves? If people just followed what they were told, they would quit smoking, vote Democrat, wear their seatbelt and listen to Clay Aiken. This IS a free country and if I want to smoke a CARTON a day and die of lung cancer, it's MY CHOICE. It's called FREEDOM. And as far as not questioning the media, read my signature below.

Actually, cigarettes companies aren't allowed to advertise on TV, billboards and in major national magazines anymore.