Immorality  

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"The Hicklin test asks "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences."--Sholem Stein


"Immoral means not moral; inconsistent with rectitude, purity, or good morals; contrary to conscience or the divine law; wicked; unjust; dishonest; vicious; licentious; as, an immoral man; an immoral deed."--Sholem Stein

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books") is a list of publications which the Catholic Church censored for being a danger to itself and the faith of its members. The various editions also contain the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling and censorship of books. The aim of the list was to prevent the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors and to prevent the corruption of the faithful.
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The Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books") is a list of publications which the Catholic Church censored for being a danger to itself and the faith of its members. The various editions also contain the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling and censorship of books. The aim of the list was to prevent the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors and to prevent the corruption of the faithful.

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Immorality is the violation of moral laws, norms or standards. Immorality is normally applied to people or actions, or in a broader sense, it can be applied to groups or corporate bodies, beliefs, religions, and works of art.

Contents

Aristotle

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.

Religion and sexuality

Immorality is often closely linked with both religion and sexuality. 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. Durkheim pointed out how many primitive rites culminated in abandoning the distinction between licit and immoral behavior.

Freud's dour conclusion was that "In every age immorality has found no less support in religion than morality has". See Sigmund Freud's views on religion

Sexual immorality

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. Interdictions and taboos among primitive societies In the latter, the degree of control might vary from time to time and region to region, being least in urban settlements; however, only the last three centuries of intense urbanisation, commercialisation and modernisation have broken with the restrictions of the pre-modern world, 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.

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.

Modernity

Michel Foucault considered that the modern world was unable to put forward a coherent morality an inability underpinned philosophically by emotivism. Nevertheless, modernism has often been accompanied by a cult of immorality, as for example when John Ciardi acclaimed Naked Lunch as "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of narcotic addiction".

Immoral psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis received much early criticism for being the unsavory product of an immoral town - Vienna; psychoanalysts for being both unscrupulous and dirty-minded.

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".


Literary references

  • 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".
  • 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".

See also

See also




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