You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

[firecat]

”In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad” by several authors

The details about which countries line up where on the individual issues that Pew chose to use in its survey is interesting, but what really strikes me about this article is the list of issues itself.

• Married ppl having an affair
  
• Using marijuana
  
• Viewing pornography
  
• Gambling
  
• Having an abortion
  
• Homosexuality
  
• Drinking alcohol
  
• Getting a divorce
  
• Using contraceptives

How did they come up with this silly list and what does it have with morality? At first I thought it was based in monotheistic religions, but there’s only one overlap with the Ten Commandments and I don’t remember anything about most of those in the New Testament either. (I don’t know much about the others.) All of the things in this list are either completely morally acceptable (contraceptives, being gay) or are unacceptable only insofar as they often lead to harming others (alcohol). Whereas murdering, stealing, and telling lies about other people should be in any list of potentially immoral behaviors. Because “does it cause lasting harm to others” is the most important determinant of what’s moral and immoral. At least that’s how it looks from here.
/soapbox

How does the concept of morality fit into your life?

Comments

Ps

[jesse_the_k]

Your html is borked (feel free to delete this comment)

Re: Ps

[firecat]

Thanks, fixed

[jazzfish]

(yr href has a : instead of =)

Been thinking some about that as I argue with my parents about Minneapolis.

1) I want some conscious moral/ethical guidelines to tell me what to do, so I'm not acting on instinct / old programming and doing things that it turns out I don't like very much.

2) The world is a complicated place requiring a great many judgement calls; I can't possibly lay down rules for every situation, and having inflexible rules will get me in more trouble than having no rules at all.

3) Therefore, I need some simple principles that I can generally stick to.

I've ended up at a couple of things that sound like truisms because they've been through the cultural wash so many times.

One, the big one, is "choose to be kind when possible." This runs back to the golden rule, though I'm fond of Hillel's "that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this is the whole of the Law, all else is commentary."

One is "the purpose of a system is what it does," which is necessary to enshrine as principle for me because I have a long-standing tendency to take systems and authorities at their word. (Corollary: "a systems is defined not by its rules, but by how they are enforced.") As a personal principle I guess it can be defined as "intent isn't magic."

One is "none of us without all of us," which is more often honoured in the breach but provides guidance nonetheless.

I don't have an unanswerable source for these, other than 'we all do better when we cooperate.' I'm okay with that too.

[armiphlage]

"that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this is the whole of the Law, all else is commentary."

Not being neurotypical, I sometimes have to modify this to "that which is hateful to youR FELLOW, do not do to your fellow".

[firecat]

Combining them with an “or” covers more situations (but not all)

[jazzfish]

Ideally yes! But when one doesn't know one's fellow, one can always fall back on oneself and one's own responses as a guide.

[firecat]

I love these! "the purpose of a system is what it does" is super important and not usually expressed very well, that’s the best description of the principle that I’ve seen

[jazzfish]

It really is a great phrasing. Credit where due: coined by Stafford Beer sometime prior to 2001; introduced to me in those words by ckd.

[sraun]

Looks like a Moral Majority / US Conservative Religious Right list of 'these are immoral things'. They all look like things the Southern Baptists are against, which is one of my yardsticks for what that part of the political/religious spectrum is going to be against.

Note: I do not think that any of these are always immoral. Add "to excess" to several of them, and "lying about" to others, and then they're bad.

[firecat]

Yeah you’re right about where they seem to come from. And about what might turn some of them immoral.

[adrian_turtle]

I've seen the bar chart summarizing that study, showing that less than half of Americans think our fellow citizens are morally good while more than half the people of other countries think THEIR fellow citizens are morally good. I did not realize how the study had defined morality, or that they had defined it at all. I was thinking about a phone call I received from a poll-taker more than 20 years ago. She asked if I thought the country had become morally better or morally worse in the last 5 years.
"Do you mean 'moral' like civil unions or like Abu Ghraib?"
She said she wasn't allowed to discuss the questions, but she could read it again if I wanted. I could interpret it however I liked. Answers were tickyboxes: strong agree, weak agree, weak disagree, strong disagree. I could have given her a don't know/no answer and found out what the next questions were, but I decided not to waste either of our times.

How did they come up with this silly list and what does it have with morality? At first I thought it was based in monotheistic religions, but there’s only one overlap with the Ten Commandments and I don’t remember anything about most of those in the New Testament either.

Hebrew scriptures specifically permit divorce. Jewish law (which is substantially more complex than Torah!) encourage it under some circumstances, and also encourage abortion under some circumstances. Hebrew and Christian scripture BOTH permit drinking alcohol, though Islam forbids it. A certain amount of gambling is normative Catholic practice. Maybe they got the list from the Baptists?

Because "does it cause lasting harm to others" is the most important determinant of what's moral and immoral.

That's a very liberal way of thinking. In the Esteemed Journal of I Think I Saw It Somewhere, there was a study of how conservatives define morality in terms of "does it follow the rules?" Both modes of thinking often define the same actions as moral or immoral, and you need to look at edge cases to see the difference. Like, a liberal might think it's usually immoral to drive drunk, but ok in the edge case if they were confident the road would be deserted so nobody would be hurt. Or a conservative might think it's usually immoral to drive with a blood alcohol above the legal limit, but the legal limit was recently lowered a bit and that's just silly. They don't recognize the authority of that law.

[kshandra]

...the Esteemed Journal of I Think I Saw It Somewhere...

Oh, I'm saving this.

[firecat]

"Do you mean 'moral' like civil unions or like Abu Ghraib?"
Great way to describe the problem with that question.

conservatives define morality in terms of "does it follow the rules?"
Oh yes, I think I saw that in the same journal once. That makes me nuts, because WHICH RULES? But I suppose someone could look at my definition and say “what counts as lasting harm”? so neither definition is clear-cut.

Like, a liberal might think it's usually immoral to drive drunk
So do a lot of people conflate “not a good idea” with “immoral”?

Buddhism does list many of those as no-nos, especially for monks. But they also include a bunch more (e.g. eating meat)

[adrian_turtle]

I don't think there is, or can be, any rubric for defining moral behavior that does not run into uncertainty and conflicting definitions when (uncertain and conflicting) human beings try to put it into practice. Which rules, imposed by what authority? What social contract? What people are included in society? Does risk count as harm? Should we recognize tiny immorality in causing tiny harms, even if we decide it's worth doing anyway, or is it better to say there is nothing immoral about it at all?

So do a lot of people conflate "not a good idea" with "immoral"?

There is usually a great deal of overlap, though not conflation. In my experience. The Pew survey referred used drinking alcohol as an example of immoral behavior. In my social set, drinking is not considered immoral. Excessive drinking may be a bad idea that will give you a hangover and not do your liver any good, but that is morally neutral. (How it relates to the virtue of hospitality is beyond the scope of this discussion.) DRIVING drunk is a different matter, as it endangers others. I know that not everyone draws their moral boundaries in the same places. And this particular example is a bit abstract for me, as I have a seizure disorder that makes it imprudent to either drink OR drive.

[firecat]

Good example, social drinking vs. drunk driving, to draw a line between not a good idea and immoral.

[jesse_the_k]

Followed the link, and I'm not so impressed with their survey protocol. In the US, they provided three categories:

• not a moral issue
• morally acceptable
• morally wrong

While everywhere else, the third question was "morally unacceptable." I can't explain why, but morally wrong conveys more disapproval and is more sin-adjacent than morally unacceptable.

As far my morality, jazzfish summarizes better than I could!

[firecat]

I can see how “unacceptable” might come across differently from “wrong”.

[silveradept]

That list of actions reads straight out of the playbook of what many entities that call themselves "evangelical" (read: still salty that they have to hide their bigotry instead of using it as an election platform) would consider to be strong moral sins. (Excepting perhaps the drinking.) As you note, there's not a whole lot of overlap ebtween these and the things that are actually in many of the writings, or even that could be extrapolated to be prohibitions against the things with justifications in the writings.

I also tend to think of morals as things between a person and their deity, Higher Power, or otherwise superhuman Entity, and ethics as the things that are between a person and another person (or other people) in a society. This usually makes morals a matter of orthodoxy and ethics a matter of orthopraxy. (Even if the morals also have orthopraxis components to them, like "when you did these things to the least of the people, you did them to me as well.")

All of that is to say that while I may have abandoned the moral compass of my youth, having disagreements about the orthodoxy, I have retained those components that lead to good ethical practice, and have added to that with things that are useful and that I believe are good ethical practice. I can only hope that if there is judgment after this mortal existence, that my commitment to ethical practice will garner me a spot in a compatible afterlife, and that I will not have my essence devoured by Ammit, or sent to the place reserved for the devil and his angels, or any other such bad end.

[firecat]

Interesting distinction between morals and ethics. I think of ethics as having to do with behavior, and morals as concepts leading to decisions about which behaviors are ethical. I can see it your way too, but that would mean atheists don’t have morals, unless evolution counts as a supernatural higher power. That makes me feel a little twitchy. :)

[silveradept]

People have been accusing atheists of having no morals for decades, as a reason to persecute them, so yes, I can see where that might make you twitchy. (They've also been saying that atheists believe in evolution as a god, to make the same arguments about how it makes atheists unsuitable people to hold any kind of authority.)

I think your conception of morals as guiding beliefs for ethical behavior works fine. I'm just hearing yammering voices of my past declaring that because those morals didn't come from a Supreme Being who is intrinsically better than all of us, they can't possibly be effective or good morals. (This is a lie, for clarity, but that is what I expect to hear deployed against someone who claims to be moral without the necessity of a higher power.)

[firecat]

They've also been saying that atheists believe in evolution as a god

Yeah, I know people who worship Unca Chuck. :)

I don’t have a problem maintaining an open mind about the existence of an entity that shapes the universe through random mutations. But overall I think the random mutations work by themselves and god is people telling each other stories. (That sort of god is very powerful, don’t get me wrong. It’s not supernatural or supreme though.)

because those morals didn't come from a Supreme Being who is intrinsically better than all of us, they can't possibly be effective or good morals.

Yeah, I wouldn’t make any claims that evolution provided humans with *only* effective and good morals. But I’m not aware of any major religions that have done that either.

[silveradept]

Certainly not, if you narrow the claim like that to only good and effective morals, although there are more than a few fools who would argue that their god-given morals are all good and effective, no exceptions. (Those people should be given wide berths, so that they don't have anyone in their orbit to hurt.)

Stories as explanations of the world and trying to make some form of order out of chaos are very powerful, and history is littered with the examples of the power of a good story.