I’ve been thinking a lot about morality lately, and wondering where it went. I feel like morality in the United States has been in decline for many years. But is it? Well, that depends on who you ask, where you look, or how you view it. If it is in decline, can we change the direction?
According to a Gallup survey in 2023:
Just because people believe it doesn’t make it so, according to psychologist Adam M. Mastroianni, Ph.D., who says that the decline in morality is an illusion. “Our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. Two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline.”
Mastroianni explains the two phenomena: “First is the biased exposure effect. We know from previous studies that humans pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, and the media reinforces that tendency by focusing on bad news. Because we’re mostly exposed to negative data about society, we get the impression that moral behavior is at a low. Second, we’ve got the biased memory effect. When people think of positive and negative events from the past, they’re more likely to forget the negative ones or misremember them in a positive light. The negative events are also more likely to lose their emotional potency over time.”
In order to get a better understanding of morality I looked it up in the Cambridge dictionary: Morality, noun, is a set of personal or social standards for good or bad behavior and character. It is my belief, however, that most people simply think of morality as the ability to tell right from wrong; and having the ability to interact and get along with others peacefully.
I then wondered where we get this set of standards of good and bad behavior or character. Do they come from laws and the government? Do they come from organized religion or God? Or could they be an integral part of human nature?
When I started digging into it I learned that babies show signs of morality as early as three months of age, well before they can learn it from socialization or rules. Research by Dr. J. Kiley Hamlin, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has shown that babies can distinguish between good and bad puppets by favoring the ones exhibiting nice behavior to other puppets and shunning the ones exhibiting mean behavior. At 12 months old, babies have a sense of fairness and expect that when cookies are passed out everyone will get the same number. By 18 months, toddlers will show compassion to someone in emotional distress by offering hugs, pats, or toys. All of which implies that humans are born with an innate sense of morality.
If we are born with morality, then we don’t need government or laws or an institution of religion to tell us what is right and what is wrong.
As I noted in my post, "A Restorative Secular Philosophy That’s Applicable to Everyone," even Jesus said that people know — without being told — the difference between what they like and what they don’t like, and that they shouldn’t do to others what they wouldn’t like done to themselves. He also pointed out that laws and rules take away a person’s knowledge and experience and subsequently their confidence in their own goodness and ability to do the right thing, as well as, provide justice, empathy, and mercy to others.
Personally, I’ve always been attracted to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which is similar to the Golden Rule, because it states simply that a person is free to act as they choose as long as they do not initiate force, or the threat of force, against another person or their property. The NAP does not mean that we cannot defend ourselves; we absolutely have that right because we are born with the right to life.
There’s a natural logic or reasoning as to why humans understand the difference between right and wrong even as young babies. It is because we are born with the right to life which means an individual owns his or her life and body. That right in turn gives the individual the right or freedom to pursue and produce the sustenance or property necessary to maintain their life and body. The time and labor put into producing life sustenance creates property. It is from the right to life that the concept of property rights is derived. Therefore if someone takes your property, they have taken your time and labor, and therefore a portion of your life and freedom. Shouldn’t taking a portion of a person’s life be considered an attack — an assault — a crime?
So where does the problem come in? Why do people feel like morality is in decline? The problem is that people have to be trained, indoctrinated, or propagandized to give up morality.
The problem begins with the government and the media. The problem is not that we feel like morality is in decline by our fellow citizens but by our government and media. When the government and the media lie to us or share information that doesn't align with our experience, it feels like honesty and integrity for America as a whole are eroding. Perhaps President Herbert Hoover said it best back in the 1930s when he observed, “When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.” Lying creates a kind of trickle-down corruption and the average citizen’s reasoning can quickly become: “If the government can, then why can’t I?”
Judge Andrew Napolitano has observed that erosion of integrity showing up in the law itself, “[Formerly] every definition of crime used the word ‘harm.’ Eventually, ‘harm’ became ‘wrong.’ At common law, the only crimes were malum in se, acts that are wrong in and of themselves, such as aggression against a person or property. Eventually, crimes became malum prohibitum, wrong because they are prohibited. The former is the natural law, the nonaggression principle that prohibits all — even the government — from initiating or threatening force or interference. The latter is big government run wild, which defines whatever it wants as wrong.”
The question remains, how can we restore morality in the United States? It might happen faster if our leaders and media outlets — with their massive platforms — would start practicing it better. Fear keeps the politicians in power, and it helps the media sell advertising.
I don't believe morality is in decline because people are inherently good. I see it every time there is a disaster with people freely helping others out of the goodness of their hearts. Therefore it is up to the individual to role-model better behavior, and create a positive vibration around them.
When people abandon fear and raise their state of consciousness to the level of courage or higher (see the scale in my post "It Takes Courage to Change"), they will become influencers to the people around them. When people resist the divisive language of the fearmongers, they can come together as communities, and change the world. It was done in the 1970s when people unified to end the War in Vietnam and overcame the lie (see Gulf of Tonkin Incident) that started it. It can be done again.
References
Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/506960/views-state-moral-values-new-low.as…
Nature 2023 June, The illusion of moral decline by Adam M Mastroianni, and Daniel T Gilbert https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37286595/
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-illusion-of-moral-decline by Adam Mastroianni
Hamlin, J. K. 2014. The origins of human morality: complex socio-moral evaluations by preverbal infants. In New Frontiers in Social Neuroscience, ed. J. Decety and Y. Christen, 165–88. New York: Springer. https://psych.ubc.ca/profile/kiley-hamlin/
https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2016.00003 Our Brains are Wired for Morality: Evolution, Development, and Neuroscience
Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer:
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-tre…
AP Covid-19 mortality rate: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-970830023526
Falsehood #1: Crime is Down
During the George Floyd riots of 2020, The Guardian newspaper reported that 25 Americans were killed during those protests. According to Insurance Business Magazine the damage from those riots in 140 cities cost the insurance industry two billion dollars.
The FBI statistics for 2022 (the most recent year available) state that overall crime (violent and property crime) for the US is down with exception of the western states where they show a slight rise in crime. Hidden deep in the report it tells that less than 63% of police departments, which account for only 65% of the population, submitted crime data. Several large cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago did not submit crime data at all to the FBI.
The Coalition for Law Order and Safety released its April 2024 report called "Assessing America's Crime Crises: Trends, Causes, and Consequences, which shows that crime has risen dramatically over the past few years and may be worse than the official statistics claim. Authors of the report note that several police departments have redefined the classifications for certain violent crimes making them misdemeanors instead of felonies which change their status to non-violent crimes. Add to that the 2022 National Retail Security Survey which revealed a 26.5 percent increase in retail crime which caused retailers like Target, Walmart, Macy’s, Best Buy, Walgreens, Starbucks, McDonalds, and others to close outlets because of the high losses. Retailers lost a combined $94.5 billion to theft. Finally a report from The Loss Prevention Research Council which states that many individuals and businesses do not report crimes because they believe nothing will be done about it.*
* Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. personally experienced the truth of this 30 years ago while working as an investigative journalist. “I interviewed an Atlanta Police Department captain who told me, ‘We don’t investigate burglaries and car thefts because we consider those to be victimless crimes.’ I asked, ‘How are those crimes victimless?’ He replied, ‘Because insurance pays for it.’ I then asked, ‘Doesn’t that make the insurance companies the victims.’ And, he replied, ‘Nobody cares about insurance companies.’ I then said, ‘I’ll bet they will when their rates go up.’ But, he didn’t have anything else to add.”
Falsehood #2: Inflation is only 3.5%
When the US government tells us that inflation in the United States was 7.0% in December 2021, 6.5% at the end of 2022; 3.4% at the end of 2023; and 3.1% in January 2024, people know this is not true because they can see from their own food, housing, and energy costs that prices are rising much higher than that. Forbes Magazine reports that overall prices from January 2020 to December 2023 rose 19%; food prices are up 25%, energy prices are up 26%, and the prices for shelter are up 21%. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for hundreds of grocery items have increased more than 50% since 2019; and as of April 2024 a grocery cart of staples that cost $100 in 2019 now costs $137 (an overall increase of 37%). Fast food prices have risen 50% to 100%. A recent study from Finance Buzz found that between 2014 and 2024, fast food menu prices went up anywhere between 40% to 100%. McDonalds raised prices an average 100% while Popeyes, Taco Bell, and Chipotle raised prices 75%.
There are the signs of poverty that people can see with their own eyes such as the growing tent towns of homeless people in our major cities.
Falsehood #3: Covid-19 is a Pandemic
The following lies were told by government and the media (all have been proven to be false):
- SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu.
- Everyone is at significant risk to die from Covid-19.
- No one has any immunological protection because SARS-CoV-2 is completely new.
- Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
- Closing schools, parks, churches, and businesses, while quarantining the healthy, will stop the virus.
- Face masks will protect everyone.
- Covid vaccines prevent you from getting sick and will stop the spread of the infection.
- Covid-19 is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
According the AP: “THE FACTS: As of July 23, 2021 there were more than 34.3 million known cases of COVID-19 in the United States and 610,370 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That means the case fatality ratio -- or the portion of known cases that result in death in the country -- is 1.8%. In other words, on average, 98.2% of known COVID-19 patients in the U.S. survive. Because the true number of infections is much larger than just the documented cases, the actual survival rate of all COVID-19 infections is even higher than 98.2%.”
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