Pew recently released a report entitled “Global Views on Morality” in which respondents in 40 countries were queried on the morality of eight traditional ‘values’-related issues: Infidelity, gambling, homosexuality, abortion, premarital sex, alcohol usage, divorce, and contraception. Respondents categorized each of them as morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or not moral issues at all.

The following table ranks countries by the amorality of their denizens. The percentages who labelled each of the eight issues as not being moral are simply summed for each country:

What Jonathan Haidt terms “WEIRD” societies (read the modern West) tend to the least judgmental, followed by East Asia and the more European nations of Latin America, with sub-Saharan African and Muslim countries the most morally righteous (!). Descartes wept.

Okay, it’s tough to employ the phrase “morally righteous” here without scoffing. These are traditional moral issues whose relevance stretches back millenia into the past–the average Roman living in the reign of Augustus would recognize and have an opinion on all of them as would a builder of the pyramids before him or the subject of the Angevins after him would. A good contemporary SWPL, in contrast, feels that expressing much of an opinion on them is a telltale sign that someone is not a member of the Elect. It evinces a level of cultural sophistication befitting a troglodyte.

The historically novel moral concerns of the Cathedral–most firmly rooted in the West–are quite different, but the Cathedral is scarcely less certain of the rightness of its values than the Caliphate is. In some cases, like infidelity and gambling, it’s not that the Cathedral and the Umma are on opposing sides, it’s that the former doesn’t recognize what the latter does as moral concerns at all. They are merely behaviors people choose to engage in or abstain from. From the Cathedral’s view, there is more morality wrapped up in the question of smoking a cigarette than there is in several of these issues.

Homosexuality is the only real exception among the eight items Pew evaluated, and the homosexual rights movement is largely galvanized by opposition to opposition to homosexuality. It’s anti-anti-gay, as the visceral hate directed at the late Fred Phelps so frequently illustrated, rather than a special fondness for same-sex intimacy that makes the movement attractive.

Parenthetically, the inverse correlation between amorality and total fertility is a moderate .45 (p = .0000000000001). That is, amoral countries do less breeding than morally judgmental countries do. Not surprising, although before running the numbers I would’ve guessed it to be a bit stronger than it appears to be.