Immorality
Immorality is the violation of
Immorality is normally applied to people or actions, or in a broader sense, it can be applied to groups or corporate bodies, and works of art.Ancient Greece
Religion
In Islam, Judaism and Christianity, sin is a central concept in understanding immorality.
Immorality is often closely linked with both
Sexual immorality
Coding of sexual behavior has historically been a feature of all human societies; as too has been the policing of breaches of its mores – sexual immorality – by means of formal and informal social control.[9] Interdictions and taboos among primitive societies[10] were arguably no less severe than in traditional agrarian societies.[11] In the latter, the degree of control might vary from time to time and region to region, being least in urban settlements;[12] however, only the last three centuries of intense urbanisation, commercialisation and modernisation have broken with the restrictions of the pre-modern world,[13] in favor of a successor society of fractured and competing sexual codes and subcultures, where sexual expression is integrated into the workings of the commercial world.[14]
Nevertheless, while the meaning of sexual immorality has been drastically redefined in recent times, arguably the boundaries of what is acceptable remain publicly policed and as highly charged as ever, as the decades-long debates in the US over reproductive rights after Roe v. Wade, or 21st-century controversy over child images on Wikipedia and Amazon would tend to suggest.[15]
Modernity
Michel Foucault considered that the modern world was unable to put forward a coherent morality[16] – an inability underpinned philosophically by emotivism. Nevertheless, modernism has often been accompanied by a cult of immorality,[17] as for example when John Ciardi acclaimed Naked Lunch as "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of narcotic addiction".[18]
Immoral psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis received much early criticism for being the unsavory product of an immoral town – Vienna; psychoanalysts for being both unscrupulous and dirty-minded.[19]
Freud himself however was of the opinion that "anyone who has succeeded in educating himself to truth about himself is permanently defended against the danger of immorality, even though his standard of morality may differ".
Literary references
- When questioned by a proof-reader whether his description of Meleager as the immoral poet should be immortal poet, T. E. Lawrence replied: "Immorality I know. Immortality I cannot judge. As you please: Meleager will not sue us for libel".[22]
- On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts: "if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to procrastination and incivility...this downward path".[23]
See also
- Amorality
- Antinomianism
- Anti-social behaviour
- Baudelaire
- Criminality
- Deviance (sociology)
- Disinhibition – disregard for social conventions and norms
- Ethics
- Evil
- Harm
- Hedonism
- Libertine
- Limit-experience
- Bernard Mandeville
- Mann Act
- Morality
- Moral psychology
- Perversion
- Raunch culture
- Repressive desublimation
- Selfishness
- Sexual ethics
- Seven deadly sins
- Sin
- Vice
- Wickedness
References
- ISBN 0 00 472238-8.
- ^ "amoral vs. immoral on Vocabulary.com". www.vocabulary.com. Retrieved 2020-10-14.
- ^ Barney, Rachel (2017), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), "Callicles and Thrasymachus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2023-02-18
- ^ Aristotle, Ethics (1976) p. 102
- ^ B. Kirkpatrick ed, Roget's Thesaurus (1998) pp. 650 and 670
- ^ Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. 158
- ^ Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971) p. 383
- ^ S. Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion (PFL 12) p. 220
- ^ F. Dabhoiwala, 'The first sexual revolution', The Oxford Historian X (2012) p. 426
- ^ Durkheim, p. 410
- ^ S. Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 271
- ^ E. Ladurie, Montaillou (1980) p. 149 and p. 169
- ^ Dabhoiwala, p. 41–3
- ^ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (2002) p. 78
- ^ A. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution (2010) p. 204–9
- ^ G, Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 87
- ^ Eric Berne, Games People Play (1966) p. 70
- ^ Quoted in J. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation (1999) p. 265
- ^ Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 194-6
- ^ S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 1) p. 485-6
- ISBN 978-3-03911-045-2. Retrieved 2023-01-25.
- ^ T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1936) p. 25
- ^ Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2004) p. 28
Further reading
- Bible
- Catechism of the Catholic Church
- André Gide, L'Immoraliste (1902)
- Catherine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (2002)
External links
- The dictionary definition of immorality at Wiktionary