ADDED: You have to realize what these researchers were talking about when they talked about "morality." As Axios put it:
The study... focuses on "everyday morality," the kindness, respect, and honesty that most people agree are a reflection of morality.
The researchers also surveyed people in January 2020 and asked them to compare whether people were "kind, honest, nice, and good" in 2020, 2010, and 2000, as well as at various times in the past, including when they turned 20 years old and the year they were born.
Most people agree that "kindness, respect, and honesty" reflect morality? But then we're told that people were not asked about "kindness, respect, and honesty" but "kind, honest, nice, and good." Did the researchers equate respect and niceness? I don't think niceness is a reflection of morality. Do "most people"? Niceness is superficial behavior that may arise from genuine beneficence but could just as well come from a desire to get along and fit in or to manipulate others.
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How a person believes vs how they act: which is morality?
If a bully mentality isn’t prevented- action will follow.
IMhumbleO.
My Grandmother, born in 1881, and who died when I was in college, believed that playing cards were instruments of the devil, so if you call that morality, I think it may have declined.
trans- a state or process of divergence
progressive liberalism (i.e. monotonic divergence)
religion: morality in a universal frame, ethics its relativistic sibling, and law their politically consensual cousin
a butterfly is an egg, is a larva, is a pupa, is an adult, is an insect
"All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now"
Well sure, if you're going to redefine "morality," you can even make it improve!
My daughter is living with her boyfriend. They're not married. They're not engaged. They are in a serious relationship, at least. My parents, in their 80s, are carefully non-judgmental about it, because what was clearly immoral when they were her age is now just fine, apparently. (I don't want to talk about it. I lived with my boyfriend, now husband of 30 years, so I have no room to talk anyway.)
If you say "morality" is refusing to pass judgment on anyone's choices, then sure, there's been not only no decline in morality but a wild upswing.
If you say "morality" is the old thing of "exercising the preferential option for the poor," but you expand it to its modern form in which it's "the poor and marginalized" and you define "marginalized" as "anything other than white male" and "preferential option" not as "helping them first" but as "helping them by acting against others (especially white male others," then we are a very moral society indeed.
In the study, morality was inquired about by asking if people were "kind, honest, nice, and good," so other aspects of morality — such as avoiding gambling and gluttony and lust — don't seem to have counted.
Was being "nice" even considered a matter of morality years ago?
I think being "nice" is more of an alternative to morality.
I've wondered about those polls showing widespread belief in declining morality. The general nature of the polling question allows both holders of the old morality (i.e., pride, lust, envy gluttony, etc. are immoral) and embracers of the new (abortion, zipless sex, drugs and diversity are the highest virtues) to see insufficient morality at present.
Don’t believe your lying eyes and ears.
In the study, morality was inquired about by asking if people were "kind, honest, nice, and good,"
Kindness has definitely declined and is even seen as weakness by many.
Honesty has declined, and again is seen as weakness by many.
Nice today just means behaving the way I want you to.
We can't even agree on what is good anymore. I think laws banning trans surgery and puberty blockers for kids is good, others think laws allowing children to get puberty blockers and trans surgery without the knowledge of their parents is good.
The radical Left will tell you that morality is a tool of the White patriarchy to oppress everyone else anyway.
I think the morality question should or does come in more in the frame of it being morally acceptable to allow someone to believe they can change their gender. At best a person can, at great expense and discomfort, disguise their innate gender but they cannot change it. So, morally are we helping or hurting the person by supporting their change.
Is it morally acceptable to accept someone's weight / body image concerns? Do we think it would be moral to support binging or purging? Is it moral to support someone who weight 115 pounds getting gastric bypass surgery?
That's where the moral part comes in.
I read the McCullough bio of John Adams. John Adams at one point felt that this generation was not up to the standards set by his Puritan forebears. His was the generation of Paul Revere and the Minute Men....Different generations are neither more nor less moral, but are rather moral about different things....I don't think many here are committed to keeping the Sabbath holy, but it used to be a big thing....I read that in Shakespeare's time the major form of entertainment was not The Globe or bear baiting or brothels, but rather listening to Sunday sermons. A top drawer preacher was more in demand than a gifted playwright or accomplished prostitute...I'm an old man. The morals I grew up with are not the morals that are most celebrated today. There were ball players like Yogi Berra and Hank Bauer who behaved admirably on D-Day. Such feats were never even mentioned in the play by play. Look at the athletes whose courage is constantly celebrated today. Lia Thomas or some player who overcame addiction or a broken leg are praised to the skies.
"All you need to make art is your own self"
----
So why then do they need to perform in front of young children? The endorsement by the left of crude sexual performances by these men dressed as women (or non-men as they are now called) tells me all I need to know about both the sexual performers and the democrats. They are in the business of grooming children for abuse. It has become a religious cult for them and many parents are offering up their children as a sacrifice.
I read the McCullough bio of John Adams. John Adams at one point felt that this generation was not up to the standards set by his Puritan forebears. His was the generation of Paul Revere and the Minute Men....Different generations are neither more nor less moral, but are rather moral about different things....I don't think many here are committed to keeping the Sabbath holy, but it used to be a big thing....I read that in Shakespeare's time the major form of entertainment was not The Globe or bear baiting or brothels, but rather listening to Sunday sermons. A top drawer preacher was more in demand than a gifted playwright or an accomplished prostitute...I'm an old man. The morals I grew up with are not the morals that are most celebrated today. There were ball players like Yogi Berra and Hank Bauer who behaved admirably on D-Day. Such feats were never even mentioned in the play by play. Look at the athletes whose courage is constantly celebrated today. Lia Thomas or some player who overcame addiction or a broken leg are praised to the skies.
When I went to my Evangelical college in the midwest in the 90s, we weren't allowed to dance.
They allow dancing now.
Slippery slope into devil worship right there. Morality out the window.
Any study of history shows that people are people, every era has nice folks and horrible folks, and the difference is usually who wields the power to shape what society emphasizes.
I honestly think there's a lot more kindness out there today, a lot less honesty, and people at least want to seem nice and make excuses for when they're not good. We're more immoral in a lot of ways, but we're a lot better with how nice we are to people from different cultures or races.
Morality usually doesn't go up and down as much as it shifts around.
There was a tranny publicly exposing his fake tits at the White House this week.
Also, the leftists equate political disagreement with "hate" so it's not like half the country understands morality enough to even know whether it's in decline.
The university community has a strong commitment to selling the illusion that "declining morality" is an illusion. That "morality" is traditional morality or Judeo/Christian morality. They hope it will pass away without notice.
Moral relativity, of course, flourishes in academe.
Morality? Which president hosted model and activist Rose Montoya who went topless on the south lawn of the White House during a PRIDE event?
A) Bill (blue dress) Clinton
B) Donald (pee tape) Trump
C) Joe (Sniffin') Biden
If you guessed C you would be right!!
One can be nice but also dishonest and bad...
Everyone can be nice when people are looking...what about when no one is looking?
Was being "nice" even considered a matter of morality years ago?
I think being "nice" is more of an alternative to morality.
Good point but maybe "nice" meant conforming to prevailing social custom. There was certainly a divide between people with "good manners" and those who either didn't know or care. "Fonzi" kinda bridged the gap...
Cabinet Secretaries who can't state the fundamental difference between male and female are not "immoral" but their status and view may inform/influence moral or immoral actions by others.
We even had a president some 20 years ago who expressed complete ambiguity about what sex (the fun kind) "is". That certainly green-lighted a LOT of oral sex among young people. In my day, what was mortal sin territory seems to have become more like a hug or good night kiss. Is that a degradation of morality or a degradation of intimacy or nothing at all? I'll go with "B" but others will differ.
For many, morality has become personal. Maybe this is the age of moral anarchy?
There's a numerator AND a denominator.
Morality doesn't decline when you keep removing items from the immoral list.
Tocqueville on modern democracy as compared to earlier regimes: fewer crimes, more vices. A rational person might consider this a good deal. Is it possible we lose some of the highs along with some of the lows?
Examples might be: fewer rapes, more masturbation. Possibly more anal and other varied positions, which may be more wanted by one party than the other. Yes, I know rape hasn't been eliminated. Jean Carroll said for years that she wasn't actually raped; decades after the event she saw the chance to treat some kind of unwanted groping as the same as rape.
Less piracy, more capitalism. Fewer pirates like Joe Kennedy Sr., more people with dubious careers in the not-quite-private sector like Bobby Jr. (for whom I am coming to have new respect). Fewer entrepreneurs, more lawyers. Laws tend to stifle small entrepreneurs, reassuring us that leaders are keeping us safe; nothing is really done about the super-rich.
Fewer children starving in the street, more abortion.
People who pride themselves on being nice aren't necessarily all that nice. A right-wing protest which is almost completely non-violent, like J6 (gun owners leaving their guns at home), is treated as a full-out war on the part of insurrectionists; the antifa and BLM street protests, no matter how violent, are treated as teaching us all a damn good lesson.
Coal mining is seen as evil, perhaps more because of the effect on "the environment," including the lives of rich people in the West, than because of the poor miners and people shovelling coal on its way to being burned. Cobalt and lithium mines are good, regardless of their effect on the environment, and Third World miners and other suffering people are not really considered. Electricity can be denied to Third World people because of environmentalism and in a funny kind of way, humanitarianism. Arguably as much cruelty as the old buccaneer capitalists used to practice, but with a lot of stomach-turning sermons.
A bit like Socrates, it is seen as better to suffer injustice than inflict it--or to hide from oneself one's complicity blah blah blah. Better to live in considerable isolation in a rabbit-warren apartment than deal with, you know, all those people out there. Be nice if at all possible.
Morality is not declining. It's in complete freefall into a bottomless pit of abandoned values and ethics.
Possibly as a general matter but there are pockets of people/industries in the U.S. which would qualify as Sodom and Gomorrah with boatloads of immorality IMHO.
I'm not a lush, but rather an alcoholic. Keep those instruments of progress away from me.
A path strewn with scalped head, torn bodies, cannibalized carbon remains, without dignity or agency to attribute.
Morality is NOT nice. Morals require you to make judgements, some of which are harsh. Is it immoral to bring a child in the world without a stable 2 parent family? Should we ostracize the child and mother, which is not NICE. The child would be considered a Bast%%d, the mother something even worse.
It is not moral for unmarried adults to live and have sex prior to marriage (using the morality of the last 2000+ years of Judeo Christian Thought), and yet we are nice now and do not say anything. In many years past, they would have been called various names and excluded from society.
You cannot equate morals with nice. Morality is used to keep things in check, morality used as a bludgeon to keep people in line and to prevent society from going down dark paths.
They're operating off of a delusional definition of "morality". Of course, so are most moralists...
When you define "morality", you first have to examine its function. What does the intangible thing "morality" do in society, how does it function, what is its defining feature?
What does it accomplish? What does it enable?
Functionally, morality serves as internalized guard rails for people's conduct: I may do this, but I may not do that.
Think of it as shared guard rails along a highway, with individuals careening along in between them. In a functioning society, enough people aren't blowing past those guard rails to cause problems, but in one that ain't? Well, look to San Francisco, where the moral guard rails have been utterly removed. What's one of the first things Mommy teaches Baby? Don't poop on the floor; do it in private, and clean up your mess. That "moral precept" is so strongly inclined in most people that some find it hard to use the toilet outside their own homes.
So, when you talk about "moral decay", what you're really talking about isn't playing cards or whatever, but the really major stuff like "Don't hurt strangers for no reason..." "Don't poop on the sidewalk...", and "Don't take things that aren't yours..."
Democrat-run major cities are experiencing the full-on destruction of the moral foundations of society, indicated by how many of these basic underlying things are being blown into oblivion by the "New Order".
Ain't none of it to the general improvement of people's daily lives, no matter how liberating it is to take a shit on city sidewalks in public. I await someone wearing a three-piece suit and holding a position of eminence to do the same, and see what happens. Will they be charged, I wonder? Or, treated differently than an indigent street bum?
Well... You have sexual deviant narcissists on the White House lawn flaunting their boobs.
Normalizing the abnormal.
Yes it is the face of the Democrat party.
And yet you say the morals are not declining.
Reap what you sow.
Morality doesn't decline when you keep removing items from the immoral list.
Much shorter and pithier me - thanks, Quayle.
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