Robert Tulip wrote:Haidt’s analysis of actions that are seen as repugnant raises the problem of the moral status of victimless crimes. An action can be permissible and yet have harmful consequences, for example in degrading personal sensitivity and pushing the boundaries of what a person sees as okay, which is a common critique of pornography. A similar line of reasoning could apply around gambling, drug use or advertising of junk food.
I had wondered myself whether harm could apply in a couple of senses in the context of victimless crimes. The first is similar to what you observe, which is harm to the social fabric. It's possible that a subject asked could cite no particular victim, yet have a notion that general harm is occurring. If the subject has a sociocentric worldview, it could make sense that he/she would regard harm as having a wider scope than the individual level.
The second sense is harm to the person doing the behavior. If what that person is doing may harm him or indicate need, the best reaction doesn't seem to be a shrug of unconcern. I don't know about getting more mileage from Haidt's sex-with- chicken example--it would be of extreme low incidence--but it's likely that such behavior indicates that the man is distressed, socially isolated, perhaps mentally ill. In such a case, should his behavior trigger a helping response, rather than avowal of his right to do whatever he wants? I agree, though, that condemning his act as immoral would not benefit anyone. It would only push him outside the circle of moral regard and thus of the community that might help him.
Often people will say that the pleasure produced by these activities outweighs the moral risk of any hypothetical harm. This qualitative argument highlights the problem of purity, that in traditional conservative morality excluding such perceived corrupting influences is seen as central to protecting personal moral sensibility and values from the slippery slope to depravity.
Shielding group members from bad or corrupt thoughts and acts is the reason behind social separatism. We see the mild separatism of Christian evangelicals and the pronounced separatism of the Amish and Hassidic Jews. They all put up barriers against the mainstream out of the perfectly reasonable fear that their way of life won't survive if they mix with secular society. In these cases, it's interesting to observe how the "thou shalt nots" serve to preserve group identity. Things such as not owning cars, for the Amish, are given moral weight only because owning them would be a slippery slope on the way toward invalidating the only true guide for human life, the Bible.
In the case of homosexuality, it is entirely possible that legalizing gay marriage sends a social signal that such unions are entirely morally equal to heterosexual marriages where a man and woman commit to raise their own children to the exclusion of all other sexual liaisons. Advocates see this signal as desirable. As a result children are taught that it is just as morally legitimate and worthy to aspire to a gay marriage as to plan to have children with a lifelong partner.
It always seems stretched to me to imply that advocacy of gay marriage will lessen the popularity of hetero marriage. Homosexuality will always be a very minor sexual orientation, after all. I also don't see the basis for saying that same-sex marriages can't be lifelong partnerships, especially in view of infidelity by married men and women and their 50% divorce rate.
The context here includes social attitudes to the morality of reproduction. There is a growing view that planetary overpopulation is such a serious moral problem that committing to a personal relationship that is deliberately childless has equal moral value to a family relationship whose purpose includes to perpetuate the species. This may serve as a background unconscious factor in the gay marriage debate. The idea that it is okay to see cultural transmission through the family unit as morally dubious is a new way of thinking produced by the view that humanity is a plague upon the planet and so the personal footprint has to be minimized by having smaller or no families.
Wizards vs. prophets again. As Mann tells us, in the early going, prophets were singularly focused on the problem of growing numbers, especially in Asian countries and others in the third-world, while wizards were always confident that natural limits to population didn't exist, because of the ability of science and technology to extend those limits. Prophets today, however, realize that it's personal consumption more than population that drives resource depletion and global warming. That puts the onus more fairly on Americans and other Westerners, whose footprints are at least several times larger than those of Indian villagers.
Possibly you are correct that pressure on the environment is a factor in couples deciding to have fewer children. Why is it bad for our species to have this self-awareness? When we talk about moral and spiritual progress, isn't a part of that going to be acknowledging that more of us is not better for the rest of life, if it even is for us alone? At any rate, other social factors are relevant in declining family size.
Public debate on family subsidies through taxation sees claims made that having children is just a lifestyle choice, with expressions of disapproval toward large families. The personal sacrifice that parents make to raise their children is seen by critics of fertility as stupid and wasteful, rather than as morally praiseworthy. An underlying assumption here is that everyone is responsible for planning for their own care in their old age by putting enough money aside rather than expecting help from their own children. Both sides of this debate see the other as selfish.
Maybe public debate in Australia is different from that in the U.S. I haven't been exposed to the level of criticism of families that you apparently have been.
The actual outcome of such new thinking about the moral value of childlessness is that it mainly influences rich individuals who can provide the flexible work demanded by major corporations and governments. Over time the moral critique of child-rearing produces a reversal of the older demographic structure whereby richer people used to have more children than poorer people. There are inevitable cultural and economic implications when people with the greatest personal capacity to teach their children choose to remain childless.
I don't know about the reversal you speak of. Children used to be seen as useful contributors to family farm income, and these families might have been just getting by. More children equalled more workers. Then, too, I wonder about the validity of the notion that if the best and the brightest don't reproduce enough, the greater reproduction rate of the less successful will bring down national vitality.
