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Immorality is the violation of moral laws, norms or standards. It refers to an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong. [1] [2] 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.
Callicles and Thrasymachus are two characters of Plato's dialogues, Gorgias and Republic, respectively, who challenge conventional morality. [3]
Aristotle saw many vices as excesses or deficits in relation to some virtue, as cowardice and rashness relate to courage. Some attitudes and actions –such as envy, murder, and theft –he saw as wrong in themselves, with no question of a deficit/excess in relation to the mean. [4]
In Islam, Judaism and Christianity, sin is a central concept in understanding immorality.
Immorality is often closely linked with both religion and sexuality. [5] Max Weber saw rational articulated religions as engaged in a long-term struggle with more physical forms of religious experience linked to dance, intoxication and sexual activity. [6] Durkheim pointed out how many primitive rites culminated in abandoning the distinction between licit and immoral behavior. [7]
Freud's dour conclusion was that "In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has". [8]
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]
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]
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". [20] Nietzsche referred to his ethical philosophy as Immoralism. [21]
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness".
"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whose "case history" was published as Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose ["Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis"] (1909). This was the second of six case histories that Freud published and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis.
This Index of ethics articles puts articles relevant to well-known ethical debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.
In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of ethics, morality, philosophy, and religion. The specific meaning and etymology of the term and its associated translations among ancient and contemporary languages show substantial variation in its inflection and meaning, depending on circumstances of place and history, or of philosophical or religious context.
Amorality is an absence of, indifference towards, disregard for, or incapacity for morality. Some simply refer to it as a case of not being moral or immoral. Amoral should not be confused with immoral, which refers to an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, social behavior, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
Philosophy of sex is an aspect of applied philosophy involved with the study of sex and love. It includes both ethics of phenomena such as prostitution, rape, sexual harassment, sexual identity, the age of consent, homosexuality, and conceptual analysis of more universal questions such as "what is sex?" It also includes matters of sexuality and sexual identity and the ontological status of gender. Leading contemporary philosophers of sex include Alan Soble, Judith Butler, and Raja Halwani.
Might makes right or Might is right is an aphorism on the origin of morality, with both descriptive and prescriptive senses.
Might Is RightorThe Survival of the Fittest is a book by pseudonymous author Ragnar Redbeard, generally believed to be a pen name of Arthur Desmond. First published in 1896, it advocates amorality, consequentialism and psychological hedonism.
Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, who was inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory is a book on moral philosophy by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre provides a bleak view of the state of modern moral discourse, regarding it as failing to be rational, and failing to admit to being irrational. He claims that older forms of moral discourse were in better shape, particularly singling out Aristotle's moral philosophy as an exemplar. After Virtue is among the most important texts in the recent revival of virtue ethics.
In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism or anti-humanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism, traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition. Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, ideological or metaphysical.
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History is a book by the American classicist Norman O. Brown, in which the author offers a radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, tries to provide a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization, explores parallels between psychoanalysis and Martin Luther's theology, and draws on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake. It was the result of an interest in psychoanalysis that began when the philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested to Brown that he should read Freud.
Kantian ethics refers to a deontological ethical theory developed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant that is based on the notion that: "It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will." The theory was developed in the context of Enlightenment rationalism. It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.
Callicles is thought to have been an ancient Athenian political philosopher. He figures prominently in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, where he "presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik". In terms of dramatic action, his function in the dialogue is to provide a counter-argument to Plato's philosophical ideas. The absence of contemporaneous sources external to this single text attesting to his existence has suggested to some that he may be no more than a character created by Plato for the dialogue. In this vein, it has also been proposed that Callicles may have been devised by Plato as he imagined what kind of intellectual he might have become had he not met with Socrates and undergone his formative philosophical life under the latter's tutelage. He is the antithesis to Socrates.
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concern matters of value, and thus comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology.
Order is the planning of time and organizing of resources, as well as of society.
In literature, a moral universe is the moral nature of the universe as a whole in relation to human life, or a specific moral code.
The dictionary definition of immorality at Wiktionary