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

[firecat]

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<a href:"https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/">”In 25-Country Survey, Americans Especially Likely To View Fellow Citizens as Morally Bad”</a> 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.
<ul><li>Married ppl having an affair
<li>Using marijuana
<li>Viewing pornography
<li>Gambling
<li>Having an abortion
<li>Homosexuality
<li>Drinking alcohol
<li>Getting a divorce
<li>Using contraceptives </ul>

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)

[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.

[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.

[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.