Moral Standards- are they really getting worse?

It's hard to gauge something like "moral standards" or "personal ethics", and since our society is constantly changing, does our standards for decency get eroded? Looking at our society today, it seems that the world in general is a better place to live. The world community seems to reel in rogue nations, and great cruelty is a great call to action as long as it is on a large scale and in the media. But our society seems to be moving to a middle ground where you can be "too nice" and at the same time, recognizes the truly bad behavior. "Too nice" seems absurd, but these people are derided as naive or out of touch. The middle ground, where it seems most people want to be, is slowly shifting away from ideal ethical behavior.

While researching my initial assumption, I found a study of American Teenagers in 2008 by the non-profit Josephson Institute. In the study, almost 30,000 teenagers were asked a variety of questions regarding lying, cheating and stealing behaviors.

Here are the results,

30% admitted to stealing from a store in the past year (35% boys/26% girls)
83% admitted to lying to their parents about something significant
64% admitted to cheating on a test

But apparently, the teenagers did not feel these were very serious dishonest acts as 93% of the students felt they were satisfied with their character and 77% felt they were better at doing the right thing than most people.

You may be wondering, as I was, how this compares to prior years and each result was 2-4% worse than just 2 years ago. It has been a trend since they have performed these tests.

Teenagers are not the only segment of our society where ethical behavior is an issue. In studies by groups such as "Business for Social Responsibility" and the "Institute of Business Ethics", as well as countless published research by psychologists show that our ethical behavior is declining in the workplace.

All of this research leads me to believe that our impressions are grounded in fact, the moral and ethical standards of our society are slowly eroding.

In all cases where they choose to measure it, the "harmless" lying, cheating and small scale stealing does not hurt the self image. We see ourselves as having fine character and our behaviors as ethical. We are slowly becoming a society of moderate morality. As long as we aren't "that bad" we are "basically good people". We are desensitized to minor ethical flaws because they have become so prevalent, so normal and so expected, that we are suprised when a person tells someone else that they just dropped a $20 bill out of their wallet.

I want to change this, I want people to tell me when I drop $20 out of my wallet, but most of all I want my daughter and other kids like her to grow up knowing what the right thing to do really means.