Is morality a luxury? this seems to be the case especially when one travels to "3rd world " countries

sometimes survival does not allow much room for moral judgement. e.g. vegetarianism, child labour etc.

Each culture has its own truths according to circumstance or power.
at least the kind we are concerned with in the west.

although many people have different out workings of morality, they still share a common morality. for instance, abortionists and anti-abortionists agree that murder is wrong, but they disagree on whether abortion is murder

morality is an illusion.

Morality can often look like luxury or even foolishness, since it usually clashes with narrow self interests in the immediate term...... however, viewed from a longer term point, it is not only preferable but actually essential for collective wellbeing and cooperation of a society and hence, important for all the members within it.... any society that discards morality is bound to disintegrate and depreciate in the longer run such that no member can escape the inevitable ill effects...... in my view, the erosion of morality is the cause rather than the symptom for the strife and poverty in the third world, although I must point out that clubbing the entire third world into such a state of affairs is rather an unwarranted and hasty generalization. In my view, today the level of morality in the affluent countries too is not much to speak of, is it? Erosion of morality is a much wider malaise today than pinning it down on excuses like survival, regional culture or even education. It is, plain and simple, the result of stark materialism right across the world and cultures.

more to the point, to who's morality to you make your statement based on??
all to often we judge other culture and ideas based on our own morality.
i think it is horribly wrong and narrow minded to do that.
the best example i can give of that is that in some countries it is punishable by law to be seen kissing in public.!!
in others it isn't , does that make the country where that law is in place more moral than in those don't!!!
do countries who require as a moral and religious principle that women should keep their heads covered or their faces any more or less moral than those that don't??.
do we judge morals based on a Christian bible , or the quarun, the bohgavadita(didn't spell that right).
or any other philosophical /religious text.
to try and impose what is moral on another culture regardless of how right you think you are is wrong.

Yes, in that morality (and it's cultural sibling, ethics) are a human invention. That cultural invention allows humans to share "protocols" and shared means of transactions. And that same invention also stipulates the violations of protocol and transaction, and the penalties for those violations.

One might expect that as cultures generate more wealth (stuff to exchange like wheat, mates, labor, skills, property, etc), the more elaborate will be the moral codes associated with that culture. And in fact, that is what the evidence shows. As cultures become larger, they develop ever more extensive legal codes (which are just the formal way of expressing moral codes). Primitive cultures have fairly simple, if stringent codes. Feudal societies have a bit more. And nation-states have more still. The richer you are, the more morality (at least in terms of quantity) you can afford. As for moral quality, that may be a different issue-- not sure. Although I do suspect that quality of moral sentiment is something the rich tend to enjoy more often than the less fortunate.

I agreed with the poster above, small I think was his name, up to a point. But when he began to blame the victim for their lack of good fortune, he committed a gross fallacy. And he also contradicted himself by saying that 3rd world people suffer materially because of their lack of moral quality, but that advanced nations don't do any better because of their material wealth. You can't have it both ways, sugar!