Living in the crashing surf of moralities from different cultures, different generations, different vocations, we're having to take a conscious look at something that is usually just automatic, our morality. Not "ethics" which are a sort of philosophy, impersonal and as universal as possible. But morality, the braid of practical decision-making that is actually a discipline of survival. It has nothing to do with sex or other proprieties, nothing to do with fairness or respect, just raw survival. Morality is the decisions one makes that are more likely to keep one alive.
I began thinking this way when I realized how much we are governed by the morality of fertility, which has been evolved by ten thousand years of agriculture, which depends on production. This is why so much of morality is about sex -- that's how one produces babies in every animal from the cows and sheep to the wives or other accessible fertile females.
Morality rules guarantee the extension of a specific inheritance (inaccurately called a blood line since it doesn't depend on blood but on DNA as transmitted through sex) which is a way of making one's own identity survive much longer than one's own physical body. Inheritance is moral before it is legal. Of course, one also expects to pass on one's culture which has nothing to do with sex but with something that might be called "religion," which is a summary of beliefs about what will promote survival.
There are two intertwined other moralities that are relevant and occasionally troublesome in terms of sex, challenging a person's ability to survive and giving rise to many stories. One is a morality governed by the raw animal desire or lust which are governed by the circumstances: lust is a very good thing if one is trying to create offspring, but once the pregnancy is achieved, it must be protected which may mean backing off on the lust. Desire is the more civilized cousin and may only be distant yearning, romantic yearning for the inaccessible.
The inequalities between male and female, accompanied by inequalities in the specific body's hormonal support for the physical state, and by whatever emotion the situation generates, can put a person in danger or at the least endanger the survival of the baby. Thus the hatred of abortion on the part of some women and men, because it is the death of a product, a source of continuation and an "owned" property, though that's not always connected to the protection and nurturing of the new individual. Legally, we try to make people pay for these, obligating the male, assuming that the female will already be in ownership. Babies with no generating or protective relative may be cared for by fosters or by the state in groups, which may or may not work very well. Our world now has a great many children who raise themselves or each other.
Another morality related to sex is that of attachment, which some call "love." Attachment is extending one's identity to include another human or even a group defined by a cause or affinity like a country or a church or even a terrorist group. For gay people, attachment may be to another person of affinity regardless of sex or gender-role. This may interfere with extending one's person through time, although a majority of women will continue to conceive.
Men or women can accept the role of protecting and nurturing, even if the object is not human but of another species. In these cases it is not the DNA part of identity, but the culture dimension that is perpetuated. It may be supportive of physical survival of individuals or groups. As we realize more and more that the survival of humans depends on the survival of ecologies where humans can live successfully, we must extend our moralities to all of existence.
The morality of money can interfere with life-sustaining conditions. In any case, money will not mean survival, though we push at the edges with our cancer cures and regular exercise -- buying time. Consider that Trump is demented, which means death. His children have been neglected and dominated -- their survival will be compromised by enemies.
Prosperity is something different, apart from money, that supports both physical well-being and cultural growth and creation. Once passing through the Neanderthal evolution that allowed the sharing of culture we call the arts, human survival was greatly extended and we began to create new ways of survival: musical composition, grand statues and architecture, memorable paintings, and stories -- the endless Scheherazadian tales we spin, each in our cultural frame of reference. As new ecologies create new cultures, our frame of reference changes content and form, a nearly sexual though only thought process. Killing progress is something like killing the next generation. Hoarding money is dying.
The morality of sports was once based on the idea of physical culture and personal prowess as well as cooperation towards a goal, an attachment. Now it has evolved into a binary competition that causes losing teams to eventually die -- not survive. Players in rough sports like football or boxing also risk their personal survival.
These moralities of money or sports do not meet the disciplinary requirements of survival, though they are not enforced by human codes, written or implied. They are enforced by natural law, like gravity or suffocation or unbearable temperatures. Gambling or letting a sub-culture like the mafia become one's attached culture, is dangerous, which is why they persist only around the edges and are always subject to destruction or at least resistance. The same goes for drugs and crime.
A wild card in this discussion is the ability of mass culture to control survival through something like access to medical care, availability of shelter, and the manipulation of stigma. But culture is always vulnerable to a major change in the planet itself, the ur-ecology. We fancied that our invention of "fire-hearted machines" that burned fossil fuel would overcome any environmental problems, but now we find out it risks the survival of us all, that it is a lust for self-survival that endangers us all.
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