Immorality
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.
Not to be confused with Amorality or Immortality.Ancient Greece[edit]
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]
Religion[edit]
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]
Modernity[edit]
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[edit]
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]
