Ask Lemmy

As others have said, "morals" are whatever you believe to be right/good vs bad/wrong. Generally speaking, morality is a completely separate concept from law, with law defining what's acceptable and morality defining what ought to be.

For example, theft (taking someone's property) is illegal, but "stealing someone's idea" is immoral. Rape is illegal, whereas extra-marital sex (i.e. cheating) is immoral.

I personally have two separate moral codes:

• religious beliefs - these only apply to me and those who also subscribe to my beliefs
• philosophical beliefs - generally govern my political beliefs, as well as my interactions with people outside my religion

I'm not going to go into depth about my religious beliefs (they're quite extensive), but my philosophical beliefs are fairly simple and stem from the Non-Aggression Principle from libertarianism: initiating force against others is wrong, all else is largely fine.

This code is relatively vague, so people can certainly arrive at different conclusions coming from the same base principle. For example, I'm against abortion on the basis that the fetus has rights, but I'm also against enforcement of abortion on the basis that the mother has rights. So my political position is that performing an abortion should be illegal (say, for a doctor) outside the first trimester and outside "medical necessity" (the doctor needs to take both lives into account), but legal in the first because during the first trimester the risk of natural miscarriage is sufficiently high that the mother's privacy would need to be violated to determine if one was performed and for what reason. Likewise, it should never be illegal for a woman to seek an abortion because the woman has autonomy over her body. Enforcing a ban on abortion against the woman is aggression, violating a woman's privacy to determine if an abortion was performed is aggression, and killing a healthy fetus is aggression, so the least aggressive policy is to allow abortion while privacy concerns are high and while desire for an abortion are highest, and disallow it otherwise since the fetus has the highest chance of survival. My religious morals say that abortion is always wrong, just for the record.

When people say the world is losing its morals, they're generally talking about religious morals, which many people don't separate from philosophical morals. I have both because I don't think my personal morals should apply to you, but that there should be a common set of morals for interactions between us.