Viewpoint Americans confused about ethics
By EUGENE KENNEDY
Like the passenger sitting next to
you on the airplane, American popular culture eagerly reveals its troubles to
us. Just read a column titled The Ethicist in The New York Times
Magazine every Sunday.
While it is admirable the nations cathedral of newspapers
should offer pew space for the discussion of what troubles the modern
conscience, its mode and manner reflect, rather than resolve, the nations
ethical dilemmas.
First of all, who is able to speak as one having authority on
ethics? That is a difficult question in many universities, medical centers and
in businesses.
An alarming number of ethicists have had little special training
for the job. Some are philosophers in an era in which there is little demand
for them to teach what they know well.
Others, in specifically religious settings, have sturdy roots in
moral theology. In business, ethics sometimes goes hand in hand with private
investigators. Others hold the job by default and do the best they can to find
their way through unfamiliar territory.
Randy Cohens credentials are right out of the American Dream
of itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, he is a veteran
television writer for David Letterman and Rosie
ODonnell.
You could not make up, as they say, the ironic triumph of having
the ethics of a television culture examined by a writer of lines in the closest
thing we have to invisible ink -- late night lists and gags that disappear
without a trace by dawn.
Dont criticize Cohen. His reflections have that bull-session
flavor of college students who read their first Russian novels and try to give
birth to deep thoughts about the world. All America likes a nice guy.
He is, however, just the barker for the sideshow that ensues when
people improvise their decisions because they are cut off from a dynamic moral
tradition. In short, it is awkward if not impossible to take and maintain a
stand in midair.
Ethically impaired, we fail to distinguish between law, morals and
ethics.
Morals are principles that are rooted in and wrested from human
experience as the product of a long search and profound reflection on grounding
and expressing intuitions about right and wrong, such as Thou shalt not
kill, embedded in our common human nature.
Americas sense of right and wrong rested on the
Judeo-Christian tradition before we emptied it from the tabernacle and replaced
it with the sacrament of individual choice.
The law, on the other hand, is not, of itself, either ethical or
moral. It is rather that which is set down by a competent
authority, such as the legislature. Laws are often on the books that are
unethical, such as those passed to cover tawdry political donations.
Good law may be in accord with fundamental moral principles but it
may also be arbitrary, as in setting speed limits, and it may be immoral, as in
Third Reich legislation justifying the Holocaust.
Law does not create basic moral insights. Ideally it gives voice
to them but this usually comes only after a long effort to form the principles
that enflesh a moral insight, such as the immorality of slavery.
The difficult work is always searching out the arguments that win
a change of heart in people. The law, as in our post-Civil War constitutional
amendments, catches up only years later with moral conversion.
Ethics are principles of right or good conduct, or a body of
principles that codify the ideals and behavioral expectations of certain
groups, such as lawyers or physicians. It comes from the Greek ethos,
which means moral custom. They reflect the ideals and spirit of
specific entities and are, therefore, very different from law or morals.
Americas general confusion about these matters is advertised
by the Times columnist who sometimes offers answers based on law,
sometimes tradition and sometimes a subjective sense of what is right and
wrong.
In our own time, can we possibly think that sexual harassment is
wrong because it is against the law? Or because it violates professional
ethics? Have we ever wondered what happens to people if we violate their
intimacy? Or the effect on ourselves if we do? That is the work of moral
reflection in the Judeo-Christian tradition that, like prayer in school, has
been ruled out of modern life.
This confounding of ethics, morals and law is evident in the
belief, held by many Americans, that the Supreme Court authors moral judgments
when all it can do is pass on the constitutionality of laws. Legality and
morality are by no means synonyms except in a country operating in the
relativized space of thin air.
These developments are merely the fulfillment of philosopher
Daniel Callahans 1996 observation: If personal morality comes down
to nothing more than the exercise of free choice, with no principle available
for moral judgment of the quality of those choices, then we will have a
moral vacuum.
Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic
church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and
author most recently of My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martins
Press.
National Catholic Reporter, March 10,
2000
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