Our changing moral judgments
More Americans are finding certain behaviors morally acceptable that are still widely considered unacceptable. In other words, approval (though still low) of these behaviors has been creeping up:
While a select few actions remain deeply taboo for much of the country, there has been an increasing shift to moral acceptability for some of these over time. Such actions include suicide (which 19% of Americans call “morally acceptable”), polygamy (16%) and cloning humans (15%).
Will they follow the route of once-disapproved-but-now-widely-approved behaviors such as premarital sex or gay/lesbian relationships? Or will they continue to remain in the dungeon like—and the low score of the following may surprise you, as it did me—adultery, which remains in the basement?:
On the other hand, “married men and women having an affair” has remained at the bottom of a list of 19 moral behaviors Gallup has measured, with only 8% considering it morally acceptable.
Not only is adultery at the bottom of the list, but I would wager it’s the most highly disapproved behavior that is most widely engaged in.
Or is it? Researchers have long had trouble gauging exactly how much hanky-panky is going on within marriage, but there are indications that it’s less widespread than commonly thought:
Taken together, in any given year, it looks like the actual likelihood of your relationship suffering from cheating is low ”” probably less than a 6 percent chance.
But over the course of your entire relationship, the chances of infidelity may rise to as much as 25 percent. Twenty-five percent ”” over the course of an entire relationship ”” is a far cry from the 50 percent number we hear from many so-called professionals and services trying to sell you something.
And to put cheating into perspective too, the relationship (or one of the people in the relationship) needs to be lacking in something.
Well, that’s a pretty low bar. Who isn’t lacking in something?
Another interesting fact is that these days, adultery is the only behavior on the list that is considered highly unacceptable (approval under 20%) by Americans 18-29; only 10% in that age group say it’s okay. That figure is similar to the disapproval rates in other age groups.
Most Americans now have no problem with out-of-wedlock births, at least in the moral sense (I’d guess there’s more practical disapproval than moral disapproval at this point, but the survey didn’t ask about that). This Gallup article from 2013 tracks some of the changes in a host of areas since around 2000, and it has been huge.
But most of the more recent changes in a 2014 poll have been among Democrats rather than Republicans. In other words, those who perceive that Democrats have moved more to the left, at least on the social dimension, are correct. The right has stayed surprisingly stable:
In the 12 years Gallup has asked this overall question, Democrats have become significantly more tolerant on many issues, while independents generally show a smaller shift in the same direction and Republicans’ views have changed little. The percentage of Democrats who say an issue is morally acceptable has increased for 10 issues, including abortion, sex between an unmarried man and woman, extramarital affairs, cloning humans, divorce, cloning animals, suicide, research using stem cells from human embryos, polygamy, and gay and lesbian relations.
In some cases, the change among Democrats has been substantial. For example, in 2003, 52% of Democrats said having a baby outside of wedlock was morally acceptable, and 40% of Republicans and 61% of independents agreed. This year [2014], 72% of Democrats, a 20-percentage-point increase, say it is morally acceptable. Meanwhile, Republicans have seen no change, with 40% still saying it is morally acceptable, although a higher 50% viewed it as morally acceptable last year. Independents have also not seen a change, with 60% saying having a baby out of wedlock is morally acceptable this year.
Republicans are slightly more accepting of gay and lesbian relations, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce than they were in 2001, when these questions were first asked. Independents’ views on the first two issues (but not divorce) also have seen small shifts, but neither group has seen changes as drastic as those among Democrats.
I find that exceptionally interesting. However, we don’t know whether Republicans have toed the line, or whether those who used to call themselves Republicans but who shifted to the more accepting point of view have shifted their political allegiance to Democrat as well, leaving the more socially conservative within the Republican camp.
Generally, the changes have been among the old as well as among the young, so it’s not just the relentless drumbeat of the left in the school system that’s causing the shift.
If you were to track approval/disapproval of these things over a much longer time frame, my guess is that you would detect a slow increase (such as is now occurring with polygamy, for example) and then a sudden surge of approval, until it reaches a critical mass and the behavior is no longer considered a problem. That’s what probably happened with birth control, which now has the highest acceptance of all: in 2014, 90% had no moral problem with it.
Will acceptance of polygamy follow a similar sharply upward trajectory, or will it go the way of adultery, which has hardly changed in its approval figures over recent years?
Debauchery was fun in rome until it was not fun…
those poor fishes being thrown off the cliffs
There is now movements to extend things even farther…
with the funniest reactions coming from the people that made it all happen, like germaine greer getting upset elton johns “wife” putting her/his name as mother of the ivf children they have… (elton will regret this given divorce laws)
yes, greer destroyed marraige and hated motherhood like all good feminsits, and now doesnt like that the men are becoming mothers.
Caitlyn.
On topic … no? 50 Shades ….
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg. Abraham Lincoln
Maybe the way people think of these things has changed too. For instance people now may be thinking of having a child outside marriage is better than having and abortion and then continuing with a pretty free sex life. This is very different from a woman who gets pregnant, is left by the man, and then decides to have the baby and care for it responsibly while looking for a lifelong partner.
Older people may now know someone who had an affair when going through a rough period and then returned to marital fidelity as opposed to someone like Bill Clinton.
Premarital sex within a relationship is different from hookups.
Perhaps the change has to do with some people seeing a behaviour as situational, and thus understandable, versus a desirable norm. These questionaires don’t give much opportunity to discuss your thinking on a matter. Maybe the change also has something to do with not wanting to damn a person for a mistake so long as they seem to realize that what they did was not a good idea.
This isn’t so surprising. Assuming it’s consensual, polygamy has no victim while adultery does.
Seems Americans have come down with an affliction to which the French seem philosophically (genetically?) disposed – Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner (to understand all is to forgive all), i.e., to entirely understand, to sympathize, to empathize, demands forgiveness. I take it as being a form of “there but for the opportunity go I” — and dealing oneself, from the bottom of the deck, an ante hoc ‘get out of jail free” card (just in case).
BTW, The movie Funny Face (Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn) comically alluded to the philosophy – tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner — as Empathicalism and Professor Flostre as its expositor.
A majority of the population accepts sacrificial rites (e.g. elective abortion, euthanasia) as morally tolerable. They believe that selective exclusion (i.e. “equal”, “no labels”) is morally progressive. They have accepted a post-normal “science” that is no longer a frame-based philosophy. The vote for catastrophic misalignment between wealth and debt.
Anyway, once human evolution from conception/fertilization was denied; coupled with denigration of individual dignity (e.g. class diversity); and normalization of dysfunctional behaviors was a point of pride; progressive corruption and dysfunction were inevitable. A dysfunctional convergence can only be delayed through redistribution schemes and marginalizing/neutralizing the [native] population.
That said, secular opiates are extremely effective to suppress integrity and conscience. Far more than religious/moral philosophy to promote self-moderating, responsible behavior.
Artfldgr:
Is Elton John the “mother” or “father”? In the progressive age of confusion, where gender has become fungible, and biological/normal women are taken out of the kitchen to be exploited as womb banks (and taxable assets), this is a poignant question.
This article by Quin Hillyer, “At Sea in an Alien Culture where normal is defined as deviant,” basically describes the way I feel these days:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418830/sea-alien-culture-where-normal-defined-deviant-quin-hillyer
“At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.”
http://www.people-press.org/2012/05/15/assessing-the-representativeness-of-public-opinion-surveys/
There is a self selection bias in polling comparable to on-line (opt in) surveys. Take them with a heaping tablespoon of salt, some pepper and maybe a nice merlot.
Roy Lofquist:
Polls aren’t perfect; they never were. They are mere guidelines.
But election polls are often quite on target, despite low response rates. Pollsters are not dummies, nor do they wish to be discredited when elections don’t turn out as predicted. They have a number of methods for checking to see if their responders are representative despite the low response rates.
Every single election I read how the polls are invalid. And yet they very often turn out to be pretty on target. So I tend to think it is a big mistake to discredit them in general.
I think adultery is the exception because it’s something everyone can imagine happening personally, committed either by them or by their spouse. And it’s personal in a way that can be very, very hurtful.
I don’t think polls even come close to getting it though. Dems, sure. They have quit God, much as many Jews have. They have been stapled together, so… go figured. Not even anti-Semitism seems to be able to unstaple those two.
The thing is, for example, with babies out of wedlock? Consider the option… abortion. On a simple scale, having the baby outside of marriage is much preferred to an abortion in my book. Murder or shame, though? Easy, shame must be endured… on whoever’s part. The optimal is for a woman not to get pregnant outside of marriage. But that isn’t defined by the questions, none that logic tree of it is. And it is never followed through. So 40/60 Republican… if they thought it through more thoroughly, might even end up being much different in that light. Some realize it is a trick question, either way, but there isn’t a solid way to couch around it. So the numbers are junk science.
People may think they’ve changed their values, but the Left changed them via control techniques. The people think they had a choice, they didn’t really get as much of a choice as they thought.
I would guess the youths find adultery unacceptable because they have seen it up close with their parents. The other dysfunctions, not so much.
Anecdotal, but there have been some articles recently on The Federalist by children of same-sex marriages, and they disapprove of it.
…”is a far cry from the 50 percent number we hear from many so-called professionals and services trying to sell you something…..”
Call me skeptical…. So these experts are more expert than those other experts, who are trying to sell me something. And their research was to ask people if they had engaged in an extramarital affair. Very scientific, because everyone knows that whenever you conduct this kind of survey, people tell the truth. Especially people who are cheating, because they’re very likely to be truthful about having an affair. Does this actually pass for science in some alternate universe?
A better survey would be to go to divorced people and court documents, and see how many filed for divorce based on infidelity. I’m pretty sure you’d find a lot higher incidence of infidelity there than to ask married people if they’re cheating.
Then, there is Bernie!
I withhold my moral judgement because at this point, what difference does it make?
Them US womyn bought 25 million copies of 50 Shades out of 100 million sold. Maybe Bernie was onto something ….
Matt_SE:
It is actually not the _dysfunction_ that is the primary criterion. Rather, it is _consent_. The “new” morality frames everything in terms of consent (present = good; absent = bad).
The “old” morality typically views consent as a *necessary*, but not as a *sufficient* condition that would qualify an action as moral. That is why some consensual activities can be considered as immoral (e.g. homosexuality) even if “victimless”; and why some non-consensual activities can be considered as moral (e.g. preventing a would-be suicide on account of a value of human life, even if the human whose life it is does not value it).
The “new” morality is actually very straightforward and predictable. Consensual activities are *in principle* good, so there is no problem with homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, prostitution and pornography, surrogacy motherhood, assisted suicide, euthanasia according to a previous written will, etc. The only truly grey area is where children are involved, such as the question whether children’s rights are harmed if they are intentionally placed into a single-sex household – but that problem is being solved by “gender-neutralizing” the society (so no more “fathers” and “mothers”, but only “parents”). Abortion is also framed in terms of consent – there is no such thing as a “right” to another person’s bodily resources (incl. a womb) except with their continuous consent to such a process. So however you look at it, all of the ethical problems are discussed from a, sensu stricto, *amoral* perspective, with no firm values.
That is why, from these people’s perspective, abortion is assimilated to a fundamental human right (on account of the woman’s bodily autonomy – always and under all circumstances and at all points during the process), but an opposition to homosexual “marriage” amounts to paternalism at best and oppression at worst. These people are not inconsistent within their own ideological matrix. They have just reduced all of morality to idealistic, almost mathematical notions of autonomy and consent.
A “good” person in this “new” morality, if taken to its extreme logical consequences, does not interfere with a suicidal person’s “autonomy”, negotiates out all of his preferences in his dealing with people, never contrasts somebody’s “lifestyle” or other choices unless those specifically violate a contract they had with *him* (not with other people).
Most young people today are actually ethically libertarians, when you think about it. That is why infidelity is wrong (a breach of contract), but various deviations of pornography and prostitution are fine, as long as everyone involved wants to be involved, regardless of how much they damage society, directly and indirectly.
Thank you, Anna.
That’s what they say, but that’s not what they are.
Neo said:
“In the 12 years Gallup has asked this overall question, Democrats have become significantly more tolerant on many issues,…”
I’m glad Neo qualified that statement because supposedly tolerant Democrats are some of the most intolerant people in the World. When it comes to sexual promiscuity without consequences for the promiscuous the modern left are still somewhat liberal otherwise they are often very controlling and very much into totalitarianism. The taboos on the left are stringently enforced and anyone who violates them is swiftly punished by public shaming at the minimum and by personal destruction or even death at the worst .
Anna has an interesting take on what passes as the new version of morality although I question whether adherents of the new morality are really that rational or that consistent. When confronted with traditional morality, Hedonists may rationalize that anything which is consensual is permissible but in reality much of their “consensual” behavior injures other people who have not given their consent. For example, abortion injures the fetus who has definitely not consented to be aborted. Homosexuality in private might be based on mutual consent but forcing gay marriage on other people as it has been done definitely does not entail consent from the people who have been forced to accept an entirely new definition of the word marriage.
Anna,
Thought-provoking comment.
Cloning humans does not really belong to this list, since it never has been done and most probably is not even possible. Stem cell research moved from embrionic stem cells and nucleus transfer, that proved to be a blind alley, to more promissing alternative of induced pluripotent adult cells, that are not omnipotent and can not be used for cloning. The whole meme of cloning humans belongs to science fiction, not to empirical reality.
They’re looking for masters, not liberty or independence. Why else would people buy into the Left’s hedonism and 50 shades of grey. Those methods are designed to produce slaves, not independent citizens or warriors. Hedonism revolves around the opposite idea of mortification of the flesh, where a person is not supposed to control their impulses, emotions, or instincts. Far from nobody controlling hedonists, hedonists are extremely easy for any external factor to manipulate.
Consent is a function of free will, and there is no free will allowed for slaves and livestock. They are talking about a function that the Left was going to get rid of, and some of them know it deep in their rotten hearts.
Consent is a function of free will, and there is no free will allowed for slaves and livestock.
Are we being farmed like cattle?
We are.
Anna,
A complement or perhaps element of a strictly consent-based value system is radical tolerance, which as Dennis points out, becomes intolerant in practice.
You point out an aspect that is often given short shrift in Right advocacy, but is a main focus of Left activism in the culture/politics contest: the frame-setting, foundation-laying underlying premises and principles. Issues don’t live in isolation.
The Left does the work. They lay the foundation and reinforce it to prep their issues.
I would presume that the reason adultery is still so unpopular and disapproved of is because it involves deception and because it is the one thing here that could effect nearly everyone or anyone. Polygamy is still a bit exotic for most folks and births out of wedlock increasingly are on the horizon but still seem like a haphazard and difficult choice that is not common. Well, to me they seem like an “accident” still but maybe I * am * old fashioned. But adultery is something no one wants to happen to them. Maybe that’s why it is so unpopular. The other things feel more complex.
And, I guess out of wedlock births are becoming fairly common which I still think is a negative thing. I am surprised when others don’t concur. There are exceptions in that there are women I know who are heterosexual and make that choice and have very high level professional jobs where they have the money and means to have kids but — really, that is an exception. It is still a choice that tends to land most people’s children at a disadvantage and more prone to life dysfunction. I am shocked it is gaining traction at all.
Liberty Wolf:
Yes, adultery is up close and personal, and involves betrayal. It doesn’t take much to imagine it happening to anyone, either. Even if a person isn’t married, but is in a committed and monogamous relationship, infidelity is usually very painful.
More interesting to me is the question of whether people think open marriages are immoral. That adds the idea of consent as an issue (which commenter “Anna” has so eloquently described as a large factor in moral equations for many people today).
Back in the fifties, I wrote a college paper about how people establish their values or morality. I coined the term cultural osmosis, since most don’t actually think them through, they absorb them. We went from cowboys, detective stories and twin beds to the artistic content we have today. We also saw the influence of religion become less and less, with little to replace it. Over the years I’ve become even more convinced about the influence of the arts upon society.
I agree with many here that Anna has pinpointed what is really going on, and, relative to your question, neo-neocon, I think you are right that people would find the consent aspect of an open marriage the key delimiter. Hopefully people still find deceit morally wrong, and adultery is deceit.
Adultery and pedophilia will probably remain the last taboos. I find the fact that adultery remains on the list fascinating since the left has proclaimed sex to be something no one has the right to judge in any way, shape or form. It’s personal – so – why should a partner be offended by their partner having external relationship sex urges? If the cheater still has feelings for the original partner or wife/husband, who is to judge them if they engage with another? So, clinging to adultery seems somehow narcissistic if you think about it.
Janetoo:
There is a very popular sex-advice columnist, Dan Savage (who himself is gay), who advocates the idea that infidelity should be an agreed-on part of heterosexual marriage more often. See this and especially this. As I said, he is very popular (especially with young adults) and I think his writings may have some influence. I also think it’s an example of trying to bring an attitude more common in the male gay community into the mainstream.
I do think the younger set are already agreeing to this “open” relationship arrangement in their “dating” lives. My daughter tells me about how long distance relationships are handled in her peer group (she is 28) and it involves “love the one your with.” I can’t fathom why this does not destroy the original relationship (thinking back to my own youth – it would not have worked) but she swears by it.
Janetoo:
They have been indoctrinated into feeling what they think they should feel and not feeling what they think they should not feel about it.
They have been indoctrinated into feeling what they think they should feel and not feeling what they think they should not feel about it.
I’d say deconstructed: Art of the Painless Coup.
There’ll be a reaction. Hopefully it won’t go the way of the White Russians ….
Anna’s take would be a rehash of the old “if it feels good, do it” (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else). That sounds plausible for the younger generation, and I remember this sentiment from years ago.
IMO, this is incredibly short-sighted and why I’m not a libertarian.
Libertarians seem to be interested only in rights, and not at all in responsibilities.
Over the years I’ve become even more convinced about the influence of the arts upon society.
It’s difficult to separate the art from one’s culture, and it is the culture that dominates civic awareness, not so much the laws. For example, if an invading force destroyed the rule of law, the culture would still exist to resist the invaders and their laws. It’s not about the rule of law but the rule of the culture.
Western culture has been destroyed from the inside out.
Art is the heart of one’s culture and the education centers for children are the mind. With both destroyed, a weak non existent spine cannot hold up the roof.
Janetoo They’re working on pedophilia, the Left with their Hollywood subversion and the open borders with Cuba and other 3rd world traffickers in human resources.
Originally, a woman devoted her life, body, and mind to the clan or family. The respect she had for the leader was such that nothing else could get leverage on her, where even death was to be preferred over betraying her clan’s orders. The men would have a similar loyalty to their women, in the form of risking their life to protect them. So the women were said to bite their tongues out and drown in the blood if captured for nefarious purposes by enemies (sort of like the Romans did when captured) and the men would risk their lives to protect them from external enemies. Blood, honor, and authority.
This kind of society is very difficult to subvert by strangers or foreigners. Which is why the Left had to change some things.
Instead of a woman having most of her loyalty and authority taken up by her partner, the man, they fragment the loyalty so that women can feel just as much obedience to a male Democrat as they can to their fathers, brothers, lovers, etc. It distributes the emotions by fragmenting the relationship.
This makes men and women easier to mentally dominate using lower order techniques.
Most people think the issue is about some kind of consent or relationship quality. That is not the point of the Left’s black ops and propaganda.