The paper doesn't really address the question, or perhaps it does but tries to apply a global generalization to what is personal behavior.
"Although there are no similarly objective historical records of everyday morality—of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist or help their neighbour fix a fence—there are subjective measures of such things."
I think if there is a moral decline it is in how we treat one another, exacerbated by the distance that technology allows us to have.
"Social media made y'all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." - Mike Tyson
It's a funny way of putting forward a very true phenomena: there's less effort and risk involved with saying what you want to say on the internet, leading to people who pick up those ideas and take them further. Ideas can spread like wildfire, easily, with no social or physical threats to curb them.
P
The range is from my younger self trolling and gaslighting Facebook (ashamedly), to people on twitch supporting the legalisation of child pornography and how it relates to marxism. (Which we all must ascribe for some reason).
There would be a great deal less of that, if it wasn't for the internet.
It's a funny way of putting forward a very true phenomena: there's less effort and risk involved with saying what you want to say in a book or pamphlet, leading to people who pick up those ideas and take them further. Ideas can spread like wildfire, easily, with no social or physical threats to curb them.
There would be a great deal less of that, if it weren't for the printing press.
Someone has to print and distribute your book. It has to get through someone, and cost real money. There's still, obviously, a cost element involved.
The internet is automated, it removes that risk.
I can tell you that I had sex with your mother, and there's nothing you can do about it except try and report me to dang. Or flag it to some automated system, which doesn't exist the same for all systems.
A newspaper is a better analogy. Crappier newspapers would die out quicker.
There's always a cost involved. The printing press reduced the cost by orders of magnitude, just as the internet did -- but it's not free, even if it might seem virtually free compared to how much things cost before.
The idea that New Technology is harming us isn't new and it's mostly wrong. It's cheaper for the bigot to share his ideas and it's cheaper for others to share counter-ideas, whether it's via the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, the tape recorder, e-mail, USENET, the world-wide web, social media, etc.
There's _less_ cost and risk with each advancement, but that doesn't mean _no_ cost and risk.
Consider e-mail spam, which is really really cheap to send but it still isn't free. Notably, spamming larger volumes adds some economy of scale but also introduces new costs and risks because the larger volume makes it easier for folks to identify and block the spammer.
> Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.
Whether or not morality is declining, this methodology won’t show it. It’s just showing people set their baseline at birth.
Moral decline over time and no change in perceived morality of contemporaries can both be true. We had a man be celebrated for rubbing his fake tits at the Whitehouse on camera. A moral person doesn't do that and a moral society doesn't celebrate it. Such an act would have been unconscionable and condemned even 5 years ago.
Could say the same thing about a former President publicly admitting to committing crimes, and half of the country not caring. Never before in history have so many people been so openly evil. Maybe the takeaway is that they've actually been that evil this whole time, they just weren't doing it so visibly. I personally would also clearly perceive a difference between being disrespectful and being evil; to whatever degree both could be considered immoral, I'd sure rather the former than the latter.
You misunderstood. People historically viewed themselves to be good, and justified their actions that way. People are now giving up the ability to justify their actions as good, and openly admitting to doing bad things on purpose. Go ahead and check your history books for that ever happening before. You can laugh, but normal people aren't particularly enthused by this turn of events.
Could say the same thing about a former president admitting to having oral sex in the oval office, or pardoning a corrupt multi millionaire on his last days in office. Making this political does not take away from OPs argument.
Not sure how you think I "made this political" if you read the first post. I was just balancing the perspective. I'd rather have a president get sucked off than openly commit acts of treason, if that's the equivalency you would like to draw. If by "OP's argument" you mean the incorrect idea that the topless trans person was "celebrated": (1) the white house literally denounced their actions, (2) I already acknowledged that I believe it to be disrespectful and not particularly immoral, and (3) I consider those to be two different things.
> Could say the same thing about a former President publicly admitting to committing crimes, and half of the country not caring.
Bill Clinton, who admitted to giving misleading testimony under oath?
> Never before in history have so many people been so openly evil.
"History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new." - Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (New Living Translation)
Some people always think they're living through the worst times ever -- it may be the worst times for them _individually_, but it's certainly been worse for others in history.
I'm sorry but is this what morality is resumed to: being moral is not killing, raping or extreme forms of violence?
> "On average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia."
In my humble, uneducated and unqualified opinion, this is a false or at least an incomplete equivalence. You can be "more moral" today by this definition because you're not killing/raping people(i.e not doing extreme things) but can be less moral in day-to-day(average behavior) life by behaving less nicely (i.e the rest of the spectrum, -[extreme things]). This is not even accounting for the >good< things that one does, which is (imo) less common, on average, today.
> "Although there are no similarly [...] measures of such things."
And here lies the problem. On average humans are definitely "more moral" in the sense that they're not doing extreme bad things, so the "upper bound" of "bad behavior" has decreased for most. (A little caveat: as your "average human", because we're still definitely raping, killing, torturing , etc. but with a smaller # of humans). However, you have to taken into account where does the "lowest bound" of "nice behavior" is, or at leas where it's average is. You cannot seriously claim that day-to-day etiquette and good manners are as good as they were in certain periods in the past. The problem is that variance of behavior is harder to quantify due to increased population.
Ultimately this is a problem of viewing morality as a 0-sum game or not: is the moral spectrum between [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] or is it [positive behavior] - [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] ? This is also a cultural POV issue, because one would assume in the west(mainly Christian world) the spectrum would be the latter. So by having the more "complete" spectrum of including positive behavior, one would definitely say morality is declining, like many people do.
> so the "upper bound" of "bad behavior" has decreased for most. (A little caveat: as your "average human", because we're still definitely raping, killing, torturing , etc. but with a smaller # of humans)
To nitpick: How are we so sure that the average numbers have actually declined? Our mental stats for such occurrences tend to come from hollywood instead of actual historical data
For example, in most historical wars a surprisingly small number of people tended to actually be killed. The conqueror wanted to conquer a land with most people intact, because those people would be the ones who would actually produce value on the land which they would then pay to the conqueror as a tax! Land without a labor pool to work it had very little value
The article sets up two options, either morality has been in genuine decline for 2000 years or more and we're still somehow standing, or the perceived local decline is an illusion. Isn't there a third option where the decline is real, proceeds at a faster pace than over several millennia, and leads to the collapse of the civilization of the historical observer? The Bronze Age kingdoms collapsed, the Roman Empire collapsed, and people who dig up these funny examples of people bemoaning imminent decline from thousands of years ago don't usually bring up this part or the dark ages that followed.
> Isn't there a third option where the decline is real, proceeds at a faster pace than over several millennia, and leads to the collapse of the civilization of the historical observer?
If this were true, shouldn't we see intermittent periods of "moral uptick" after the collapse of civilization? Either there has been a steady decline (i.e. the next civilization starts lower than the end of the previous one), or the feeling of decline is false due to the missing opposite.
Don't we? It just looks like a new culture establishing itself instead of something that happens in the circumstances of the collapse. There was the early history of the Roman Republic, High Middle Ages in Europe, the Puritans in America. The Victorian era in England feels like a moral uptick that wasn't an entire new culture or nation.
The question as I understand it isn't whether there is a moral uptick from our point of view, but from a contemporaneous one. During Victorian era people still perceived a constant moral decline.
> and people who dig up these funny examples of people bemoaning imminent decline from thousands of years ago don't usually bring up this part or the dark ages that followed.
Because of confirmation bias. When doomsday prophets are wrong, they're rarely remembered. When doomsday prophets are right, was it because they had insight that others lacked or was it simple chance?
1. Morality of a society is not a single dimension. There are multiple aspects of life in which society could become more or less moral, depending on what activists choose to fight for (e.g. exploiting other's labor)
2. The morality level doesn't have to go straight up, down, or be flat. It can move like a wave (or in some cases, a roller coaster), increasing or decreasing over different eras as people learn and forget the value they derived from certain morals.
I forgot where I read this, but there was some advice an older journalist told a rookie, finding out about all the sh*t that's been going down: "Don't worry, the world's always been falling apart."
Four trends that are challenging to refute at scale are:
- debt, both public and private sector
- demographic cratering
- diminished participation in communities of faith
- increased use of drugs, prescribed or otherwise
Now, to what degree "'twas ever thus", and to what degree that technology has allowed greater focus on sensational aspects of these points would be of interest.
Delving past the abstract and into this paper might or might not illuminate that point. I like the contrarian take, as the "Chicken Little" panic is the easy road.
While there may be trends none of the examples you cite are new, the only thing these trends definitively reflect is that society is changing, which is to be expected.
1) Feudal Society was overwhelmingly debt based with serfs in debt for life or even generations, medieval European society did not collapse but rather changed over time in part due to the unstable nature of this system.
2) not sure what "demographic cratering" refers to here, low birth rate? Low birth rate is a well understood economic phenomenon when a society reaches a position of high comfort and well met needs for its population. I would argue this is a good thing.
3) participation in communities of faith has historically fluctuated, such as during the renaissance era. and high participation is not necessarily a good thing, high religious participation among populations also coincided with religious wars where massive scale atrocities or genocide occurred.
4) increased drug use is generally not even a new trend, if anything just a change in what drugs are used. In use United States, Opioids currently are far less prevalent than nicotine was during most of the 1900's, weight loss fad drugs have been recorded as far back as Ancient Greek society. the increase in prescription drug use over the last 100 years has also coincided with a large increase of the average American lifespan.
Low birth rates seem to affect any group that adopts cell phones, including the non-high-comfort impoverished nations of the southern hemisphere. The only exceptions seem to be the communities of faith like Israel. Unlikely that this trend will be reversed so the problem solves itself over the next few generations.
> One possibility is that morality has, in fact, been declining worldwide for millennia—declining so steadily and so precipitously that people in every era have been able to observe that decline in the brief span of a human lifetime. The other possibility is that the perception of moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible.
What about a 3rd possibility that moral decline is like a barberpole; it really is constantly declining, but as it's doing so new moral standards replace the ones that are falling away at the bottom.
For example, we might see people becoming less friendly with their neighbours, but they've also stopped hitting animals and their children.
27 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 63.4 ms ] thread"Although there are no similarly objective historical records of everyday morality—of how often people offer their seats to an elderly person, give directions to a lost tourist or help their neighbour fix a fence—there are subjective measures of such things."
I think if there is a moral decline it is in how we treat one another, exacerbated by the distance that technology allows us to have.
"Social media made y'all way to[o] comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." - Mike Tyson
(and yes, Snopes says he really did say that)
I dig it.
It's a funny way of putting forward a very true phenomena: there's less effort and risk involved with saying what you want to say on the internet, leading to people who pick up those ideas and take them further. Ideas can spread like wildfire, easily, with no social or physical threats to curb them. P
The range is from my younger self trolling and gaslighting Facebook (ashamedly), to people on twitch supporting the legalisation of child pornography and how it relates to marxism. (Which we all must ascribe for some reason).
There would be a great deal less of that, if it wasn't for the internet.
There would be a great deal less of that, if it weren't for the printing press.
The internet is automated, it removes that risk.
I can tell you that I had sex with your mother, and there's nothing you can do about it except try and report me to dang. Or flag it to some automated system, which doesn't exist the same for all systems.
A newspaper is a better analogy. Crappier newspapers would die out quicker.
The idea that New Technology is harming us isn't new and it's mostly wrong. It's cheaper for the bigot to share his ideas and it's cheaper for others to share counter-ideas, whether it's via the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, the tape recorder, e-mail, USENET, the world-wide web, social media, etc.
There's _less_ cost and risk with each advancement, but that doesn't mean _no_ cost and risk.
Consider e-mail spam, which is really really cheap to send but it still isn't free. Notably, spamming larger volumes adds some economy of scale but also introduces new costs and risks because the larger volume makes it easier for folks to identify and block the spammer.
Whether or not morality is declining, this methodology won’t show it. It’s just showing people set their baseline at birth.
This is so off as to be beyond laughable.
Bill Clinton, who admitted to giving misleading testimony under oath?
> Never before in history have so many people been so openly evil.
"History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new." - Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (New Living Translation)
Some people always think they're living through the worst times ever -- it may be the worst times for them _individually_, but it's certainly been worse for others in history.
"People believe [...] last few centuries. "
I'm sorry but is this what morality is resumed to: being moral is not killing, raping or extreme forms of violence?
> "On average, modern humans treat each other far better than their forebears ever did—which is not what one would expect if honesty, kindness, niceness and goodness had been decreasing steadily, year after year, for millennia."
In my humble, uneducated and unqualified opinion, this is a false or at least an incomplete equivalence. You can be "more moral" today by this definition because you're not killing/raping people(i.e not doing extreme things) but can be less moral in day-to-day(average behavior) life by behaving less nicely (i.e the rest of the spectrum, -[extreme things]). This is not even accounting for the >good< things that one does, which is (imo) less common, on average, today.
> "Although there are no similarly [...] measures of such things."
And here lies the problem. On average humans are definitely "more moral" in the sense that they're not doing extreme bad things, so the "upper bound" of "bad behavior" has decreased for most. (A little caveat: as your "average human", because we're still definitely raping, killing, torturing , etc. but with a smaller # of humans). However, you have to taken into account where does the "lowest bound" of "nice behavior" is, or at leas where it's average is. You cannot seriously claim that day-to-day etiquette and good manners are as good as they were in certain periods in the past. The problem is that variance of behavior is harder to quantify due to increased population.
Ultimately this is a problem of viewing morality as a 0-sum game or not: is the moral spectrum between [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] or is it [positive behavior] - [behaving neutrally] - [extreme bad behavior] ? This is also a cultural POV issue, because one would assume in the west(mainly Christian world) the spectrum would be the latter. So by having the more "complete" spectrum of including positive behavior, one would definitely say morality is declining, like many people do.
To nitpick: How are we so sure that the average numbers have actually declined? Our mental stats for such occurrences tend to come from hollywood instead of actual historical data
For example, in most historical wars a surprisingly small number of people tended to actually be killed. The conqueror wanted to conquer a land with most people intact, because those people would be the ones who would actually produce value on the land which they would then pay to the conqueror as a tax! Land without a labor pool to work it had very little value
If this were true, shouldn't we see intermittent periods of "moral uptick" after the collapse of civilization? Either there has been a steady decline (i.e. the next civilization starts lower than the end of the previous one), or the feeling of decline is false due to the missing opposite.
Because of confirmation bias. When doomsday prophets are wrong, they're rarely remembered. When doomsday prophets are right, was it because they had insight that others lacked or was it simple chance?
1. Morality of a society is not a single dimension. There are multiple aspects of life in which society could become more or less moral, depending on what activists choose to fight for (e.g. exploiting other's labor)
2. The morality level doesn't have to go straight up, down, or be flat. It can move like a wave (or in some cases, a roller coaster), increasing or decreasing over different eras as people learn and forget the value they derived from certain morals.
- debt, both public and private sector
- demographic cratering
- diminished participation in communities of faith
- increased use of drugs, prescribed or otherwise
Now, to what degree "'twas ever thus", and to what degree that technology has allowed greater focus on sensational aspects of these points would be of interest.
Delving past the abstract and into this paper might or might not illuminate that point. I like the contrarian take, as the "Chicken Little" panic is the easy road.
1) Feudal Society was overwhelmingly debt based with serfs in debt for life or even generations, medieval European society did not collapse but rather changed over time in part due to the unstable nature of this system.
2) not sure what "demographic cratering" refers to here, low birth rate? Low birth rate is a well understood economic phenomenon when a society reaches a position of high comfort and well met needs for its population. I would argue this is a good thing.
3) participation in communities of faith has historically fluctuated, such as during the renaissance era. and high participation is not necessarily a good thing, high religious participation among populations also coincided with religious wars where massive scale atrocities or genocide occurred.
4) increased drug use is generally not even a new trend, if anything just a change in what drugs are used. In use United States, Opioids currently are far less prevalent than nicotine was during most of the 1900's, weight loss fad drugs have been recorded as far back as Ancient Greek society. the increase in prescription drug use over the last 100 years has also coincided with a large increase of the average American lifespan.
I would argue this is a good thing.
What about a 3rd possibility that moral decline is like a barberpole; it really is constantly declining, but as it's doing so new moral standards replace the ones that are falling away at the bottom.
For example, we might see people becoming less friendly with their neighbours, but they've also stopped hitting animals and their children.