There is no one-to-one relationship between self-control and morality.
Pending thought & review
Let’s say that I am a chronic over-eater, a glutton, to this lot, I am ‘sinful’, but what if I would never engage in adultery, theft, the harming of another, or what have you. What if I abstained from all ‘sinful’ behavior, save ‘gluttony’. To this group I am the same as say, a murderer or a baby raper. To them, simplistically speaking, one sinful behavior leads to others, which is an incorrect assumption and faulty correlation, at best. Perhaps in extreme cases, like Henry VIII, excessive food consumption can be loosely correlated with other ‘sinful’ behavior, but one must bear in mind that his other propensities for excess is what lead to him becoming gluttonous, not the other way around. Gluttons are typically self-harmers, not the harmers of others. In this case, he just ran out of other excessive behaviors to engage in and therefore turned to food.
..illustrate that there is a conceptual and empirical separation between self-control and morality. If self-control is also a sufficient cause of immoral behavior, then knowing only whether self-control is high or low reveals little about the morality of the behavior to come unless there is information regarding the context.
A broader, and less moralistic, view suggests that the capacity for self-control evolved in an environment that presented hominids with difficult challenges. Mastery of these challenges required the comprehension and the weighing of qualitatively different kinds of considerations, such as personal values, visceral desires, and the moral standards promoted by the group, among others. The simple equation offered by BA, according to which self-control equals morality and morality equals self-control is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.
