Morality more than just about sexuality

It is understandable why those who cherish family values take umbrage against the Ashley Madison dating site. However, can morality be legislated?

Adultery is legal, which shows that underlying the law are other factors that are not always in sync with what some regard as moral values per se.

Would it be preferable to make adultery illegal and thus the basis for taking action against sites and other things that promote it? If so, what brave punishments should be devised against such lawbreakers? Or would people baulk at that, and then we should ask: Why?

It is interesting that public morality is conflated with sexuality. (“Extramarital dating site: Society has right to enforce public morality”; Oct 28)

But the idea of the public good is broader than that.

Public morality, which reflects our collective moral input and then some, includes standing up to economic immorality and other social lapses.

Why is the so-called free market privileged in its consumerism and unethical aspects of profit-making, while heartfelt outcries are enunciated over an adult website?

For Parliament to take action against the latter and be unable to enforce its decisions is to make a symbolic gesture.

However, if more is expected from the Government, should it also take firm and perhaps extensive measures against perceived market injustices and the primacy of the profit motive? Or would that be seen as unwarranted interference? If happiness and staying employed are largely on the individual’s shoulders, why is there excitement over public morality, rather than allowing the individual to be responsible for this?

Would those who decry adult websites condemn market injustices? Is not the adult website phenomenon an extension of free enterprise and the sanctity of the consumer, which apparently drives economic growth?

Which is why having a poverty line, for example, is governance by metaphor. It is important for the Government to identify and act decisively on economic disparity and its consequences rather than make symbolic gestures.

This does not imply legislating morality but ensuring policies, frameworks and practices that allow people to bring to the fore our latency to do what is right, despite what cynics may think.

Sigmund Freud pointed out in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, that people are unhappy fundamentally due to the constraints of social norms and practices that shape moral codes and what is acceptable, and we enhance discomfort by abiding by them blindly. He is not promoting immorality. That we balkanise public morality by the sexual, while leaving the socio-economic to wallow as a rump sphere in itself, shows that psychoanalysis is still relevant today.