“The world has grown old, does not enjoy that strength which it formerly enjoyed, and does not flourish with the same vigor and strength with which it formerly prevailed … The farmer is vanishing and disappearing in the fields, the sailor on the sea, the soldier in the camp, innocence in the marketplace, justice in the courts, harmony among friendships, skill among the arts, discipline in morals.”

-- Cyprian of Carthage, c. 250 CE

“Same as it ever was”

-- Talking Heads

I think that if one thinks of social constructs as memes – I mean, not in the common-today-sense of a funny image, but in the original sense of memetics, as something composed of information and analogous to a biological organism that has to spread and have other features that biological organisms do to survive – then that’s not surprising.

If someone subscribes to a particular moral system, then I’d expect that a system that has people concerned about maintaining that moral system and shifts in society away from it will tend to outcompete one that doesn’t.

I guess that study is quite flawed when thinking about morality as a highly subjective value. Things that were highly moral 100 years ago are now seen as barbaric and a person alive 100 years ago would certainly not agree to many moral standards today. Religion comes into play as a conserving agent for morality of generations past, it still changes its interpretation of moral directives over time (at least true for christianity) but this change is far slower than the actual change in society.

So yes, from an individual standpoint, morals are possibly declining if you believe that the morals you grew up with are correct and you do not accept new concepts of morality produced by generational differences and societal change, even more so if you’re religious. Therefore the feeling of moral decline is not something you can counter by saying “you’re imagining it” because all moral is a, to some extent, abstract (read imagined) concept.

I don’t think their take is nuanced enough. They’re talking in black and white terms, like either there is moral decline or there’s not. What seems to be happening is that people who lack morals are often drawn to positions of power over others. This is leading to an imbalance of declining morals in our leadership. It’s not all of us, but when they have control over the situation they’re going to have a disproportionate impact.

Is it really about science?

The article never mentions religion, while religions everywhere present themselves as a beacon of morality.

People believe that morality is declining. Is it? Societies keep (or at least leave) reasonably good records of extremely immoral behaviour such as slaughter and conquest, slavery and subjugation or murder and rape, and careful analyses of those historical records strongly suggest that these objective indicators of immorality have decreased significantly over the last few centuries.

This is a very naive view of morality in a country conquered by religion. Ask a christian if he believes that this is morally fine that his neighbour is gay.

Was conquering north america moral? How many native indian did Davy Crockett murder? He is celebrated as a hero even by Disney, is it moral?

How can you qualify all of this as science material?

People clearly perceive moral decline, but to what do they attribute it? There are two possibilities. The average morality of a population may decline between two points in time (T1 and T2) because (1) individuals who are moral at T1 are less moral when they reach T2 (a phenomenon we refer to as ‘personal change’), and/or (2) older people who were alive at T1 but who died before T2 are more moral than younger people who were alive at T2 but who were not yet born (or who were not yet adults and therefore not sampled) at T1 (a phenomenon we refer to as ‘interpersonal replacement’).

Oh, that’s why, there is T2 and T1, so We can do T2 minus T1. Sure.

The orthodox church in Russia has blessed the weapons of the russian soldiers, so by definition this war is moral. Do your T2 minus T1 in Russia and ask the russian citizen if Russia acts according to morality right now, you will get fantastic results! I’m not sure that your results would have any scientific value though. I’m very disappointed by Nature.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IE96LokdvH8 We weren’t in the MLS at 35 🐫