The original question was 'Where is the morality of the young people going?' - now I think about it some more, I'm led to wonder at what point people stop being 'young'. Who are these generic 'young people' - are they just anybody younger than anyone who poses the question in the first place? And is their morality only questionable because it is different?

Morality is essentially a product of necessary commonsense behaviour in a civil society. The Ten Commandments were rules to prevent the diminished people of Israel from falling into biological chaos (and to retain social cohesion). They are very strict (and with little room for clemency or discretion - lying is as serious a crime as murder) and they essentially impose order. The concept of tempering justice with mercy only emerges in the New Testament. Throughout human history, crimes which were punishable by the most terrible ordeal or death have ceased even to be crimes as societies have altered.

It does seem to me that the subtext to the original proposition is (more or less) 'why don't those under an (undefined) age of majority behave according to a set of rules which have never been fully adhered to at any point in history?' - a question which more or less answers itself.

It is 120 years or so since Nietzsche commented that 'God is dead - and we have killed him' - in other words the morality derived from religious observance has unwound and become moribund. Human society has no morality of that sort any more (at least in western secular nations - Islamic societies are still very much bound up in a divine morality). That is not to say that the desire for moral guidance from above (in some form) does not still exist. One could see the Russian Bolshevik experiment as exactly that (since it elevated the writings of a political economist to the level of a near-religion) - and the liberal societies of the western world as a humanist moral reaction to it.

In the broadest sense, the question is - 'where is the morality in Godless world?'.

Dan smile