Immorality#Sexual immorality

Callicles and Thrasymachus are two characters of Plato's dialogues, Gorgias and Republic, respectively, who challenge conventional morality.{{Citation |last=Barney |first=Rachel |title=Callicles and Thrasymachus |date=2017 |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/ |encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |editor-last=Zalta |editor-first=Edward N. |edition=Fall 2017 |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |access-date=2023-02-18}}

Aristotle saw many vices as excesses or deficits in relation to some virtue, as cowardice and rashness relate to courage. Some attitudes and actions{{snd}}such as envy, murder, and theft{{snd}}he saw as wrong in themselves, with no question of a deficit/excess in relation to the mean.Aristotle, Ethics (1976) p. 102

In Islam, Judaism and Christianity, sin is a central concept in understanding immorality.

Immorality is often closely linked with both religion and sexuality.B. Kirkpatrick ed, Roget's Thesaurus (1998) pp. 650 and 670 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.Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. 158 Durkheim pointed out how many primitive rites culminated in abandoning the distinction between licit and immoral behavior.Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971) p. 383

Freud's dour conclusion was that "In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has".S. Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion (PFL 12) p. 220

{{Also|Sexual ethics}}

Coding of sexual behavior has historically been a feature of all human societies; as too has been the policing of breaches of its mores{{snd}}sexual immorality{{snd}}by means of formal and informal social control.F. Dabhoiwala, 'The first sexual revolution', The Oxford Historian X (2012) p. 426 Interdictions and taboos among primitive societiesDurkheim, p. 410 were arguably no less severe than in traditional agrarian societies.S. Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 271 In the latter, the degree of control might vary from time to time and region to region, being least in urban settlements;E. Ladurie, Montaillou (1980) p. 149 and p. 169 however, only the last three centuries of intense urbanisation, commercialisation and modernisation have broken with the restrictions of the pre-modern world,Dabhoiwala, p. 41–3 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.Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (2002) p. 78

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.A. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution (2010) p. 204–9

Defining sexual immorality across history is difficult as many different religions, cultures and societies have held contradictory views about sexuality. But there is an almost universal disdain for two sexual practices throughout history. These two behaviors include infidelity within a monogamous, romantic relationship and incest between immediate family members.{{cn|date=February 2025}}

Other than these two practices, some cultures{{which|date=February 2025}} throughout history have permitted sexual behaviors considered obscene by many cultures today, such as marriage between cousins, polygyny, underage sex, rape during war or forced assimilation, and even zoophilia.{{cn|date=February 2025}}

Michel Foucault considered that the modern world was unable to put forward a coherent moralityG, Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 87{{snd}}an inability underpinned philosophically by emotivism. Nevertheless, modernism has often been accompanied by a cult of immorality,Eric Berne, Games People Play (1966) p. 70 as for example when John Ciardi acclaimed Naked Lunch as "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of narcotic addiction".Quoted in J. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation (1999) p. 265

Psychoanalysis received much early criticism for being the unsavory product of an immoral town{{snd}}Vienna; psychoanalysts for being both unscrupulous and dirty-minded.Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 194-6

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".S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 1) p. 485-6 Nietzsche referred to his ethical philosophy as Immoralism.{{cite book | last=Von Tevenar | first=G. | title=Nietzsche and Ethics | publisher=Peter Lang | year=2007 | isbn=978-3-03911-045-2 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yf445ypX8D0C&pg=PA55 | access-date=2023-01-25 | page=55}}

• 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".T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1936) p. 25
• De Quincey set out an (inverted) hierarchy of immorality in his study 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".Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2004) p. 28

{{Columns-list|colwidth=20em|

• 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
• Morality in Islam
• Moral psychology
• Perversion
• Raunch culture
• Repressive desublimation
• Selfishness
• Sexual ethics
• Seven deadly sins
• Sin
• Vice
• Wickedness

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• Bible
• Catechism of the Catholic Church
• André Gide, L'Immoraliste (1902)
• Catherine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (2002)

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Category:Morality

Category:Concepts in ethics