ABSTRACT
Morality is a heavily loaded term in popular speech today. It is apt to be treated as a set of negative attitudes—a bunch of “thou shalt not’s,” epitomized for many people in the Ten Commandments. To some, it implies a sober restraint, a straight if narrow path. To others it implies a cold constraint, a fettering of the spirit which would be free. When questions of morality are discussed, one of the commonest references is to sex conduct. This is in part still a Western inheritance from the nineteenth century, when ideals of the solid domestic virtues in the bourgeois family needed the prop of decorum, if not prudery. But many moral judgements are positive. Over the whole range, comparatively few are concerned with sex.
