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.

Morals are whatever you think is right or wrong. Its meaningless word. The most self declared moral people you meet will invariably be the most destructive.

I’m a moral pluralist & converted to Unitarian Universalism. Both add depth & detail to how I think about morality:

• Moral pluralism is the stance that many moral systems (deontology, virtue theory, consequentialism, contract theory) help us understand “morality.” If you want to understand the human body, you wouldn’t use just physics, or just biochemistry, or just neurology. You’d have many sciences informing how you understand the totality. Likewise, when dealing with a moral issue, I try to examine it from many theories and look for overlap or consensus.
• My faith has 7 principles, most of which seem common sense to me. Everyone has inherent dignity & value; seek justice & compassion; accept one another and encourage spiritual growth; everyone should have a free search for truth; belief in democratic systems; goal of world peace; we’re interdependent.

I studied ethics & normative theory in college. I do think there are moral facts or truths (moral realism). I reject relativism because it opens the door to human tragedies.

countries are becoming “less moral”

Years ago people used to think that Europe was morally superior to the rest of the world. I don't think they're pushing that line any more. So yes moral narratives are less relevant in geopolitics.

Not stealing and sharing others work without their permission.