Is alcohol consumption a big moral issue?

We all know the answer to this question, in the sense that we recognize that consuming alcohol is a moral issue for quite a few people, for any one or more of several reasons (which I will not go into here). However, since not all people feel like this, we can note that this topic sometimes appears as a question in formal social surveys. Here, I will look at one such global survey, from 10 years ago.

The survey was from the Pew Research Center, of the USA. They conducted a 2013 Global Attitudes questionnaire survey, where they asked 40,117 respondents in 40 countries what they thought about eight topics often discussed as being moral issues (including: premarital sex, contraceptive use, abortion, extramarital affairs, and gambling).

The survey question of interest to us here was: “Do you personally believe that drinking alcohol is morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or is it not a moral issue?”

The survey results for this question are shown in this table. The data are shown as percentages of those people who responded to the question (so the three numbers do not add up to 100%). Values greater than 50% are highlighted. [U = morally unacceptable, A = morally acceptable, N = not a moral issue.]

In many ways, the results are pretty much as we might expect. Muslim- and Hindu-dominated countries have many people (>50% per country) who consider alcohol consumption to be morally unacceptable, while European countries tend to find it acceptable (>25%). However, in reality, alcohol consumption is actually not seen as a moral issue by most Europeans (>40% per country), especially in France, Italy, Greece, Britain, and Spain, plus Canada, Australia and the USA. This, also, is perhaps not very surprising.

Interestingly, the Japanese stand out from all other countries because they apparently do find it to be a moral issue, but one that is acceptable to them. This is not necessarily a reference to consuming wine, of course (eg. saki)! Next come the Germans, who are presumably referring to both beer and wine as being acceptable.

So, alcohol consumption is a moral issue only in part of the world, but in those places where it is an issue then it is usually unacceptable. For most alcohol drinkers, it is apparently not a moral issue (unlike some of the other questionnaire topics listed above).