Archive: Whose Ethics?

Our Society cannot agree on common values on which common ethical standards must be based.

By Charles Colson

Last summer everything seemed to fall to pieces on Capitol Hill. The speaker of the House of Representatives resigned in the face of 69 counts of ethical violations; the House Whip quit rather than endure an investigation into his alleged wrongdoings; and an Ohio congressman was convicted of having sex with a minor. Volleys of ethical accusations and counteraccusations reverberated throughout the Capitol, holding government business hostage in the process.

One business Congress did handle, however, was the bailout of the savings and loan industry, which had been looted by hundreds of unscrupulous operators—a “$150 billion calamity,” according to the Washington Post. And in testimony before congressional committees came the news that Housing and Urban Development agents had for years skimmed millions from HUD real estate sales—as Time put it, a massive giveaway not to the needy but the greedy.

Meanwhile, out on the street—Wall Street, that is—junk bond king Michael Milken, who made more than one billion dollars in salary, was indicted for securities fraud.

The scandal epidemic has led everyone from fundamentalist preachers to Norman Lear, who has established a foundation to study business ethics, to agree that the nation is floundering in an ethical swampland. Stand on any soapbox today and passionately cry, “What our nation needs is ethics!” and you will be heartily cheered.

But what no one seems to realize is that while we all want ethics, ethics are meaningless unless based on some value system. And the problem is, our society cannot agree on common objective values on which common ethical standards must be based.

The dilemma was illustrated at one of our great academic institutions, where John Shad, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, donated $35 million to the Harvard Business School to establish an ethics department.

That was two years ago. And while we assume Harvard as given it the old college try, at this writing it seems that the university has only come up with one rather flimsy sounding “values” course; otherwise, Harvard is still sitting on the Shad grant, unable to find an ethicist to head up the department.

The quandary was well expressed by Harvard President Derek Bok in an article in Harvard Magazine (May/June 1988). Bok describes Harvard’s origins: After the school was expanded from a training ground for ministers to include other students, Massachusetts law mandated that “the president [and] the professors … shall exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of youth committed to their care and instruction the principles of piety and justice and a sacred regard for truth.”

Bok speaks almost wistfully of returning to such absolutes by which to formulate ethical decisions. But he hastens to note that faculty members react “with tepid interest and outright skepticism” to the idea of teaching any kind of ethics.

So, concludes Bok, an ethics course today “seeks not to convey a set of moral truths but tries to encourage students to think carefully about complex moral issues … not to impart ‘right answers,’ but to make students more perceptive to ethical problems when they arise.”

In the absence of “moral truths,” Bok reaches the only conclusion he can: He outlines an idea of ethics but leaves the question of whose ethics will be adopted wholly unanswered. He tries to raise an ethical standard, but he has no flag to fly upon it.

Harvard’s problem parallels that of our society at large. Our nation demands ethics but abandons the objective moral base on which any real standard of ethics must logically rest. Our society deplores the proliferation of scandals yet rejects the basis for an ethical code designed to restrain the human passions that cause those scandals.

The life and death truth of the matter is this: Ethics cannot exist in a vacuum. If ethics are relative—the ’80s version of the ’60s pop “situational ethics”—then who is to assert one ethical standard as superior to another? In an age that celebrates tolerance as its supreme virtue, no absolute standard of right and wrong—which by definition excludes other standards—can be adopted. Nor can any satisfactory code of ethics.

If a consensus in our society really wants ethics on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in the worlds of business and academia, we must be willing to base those ethics on a firm foundation. And in Western civilization that foundation has been 23 centuries of accumulated wisdom, natural law, and the Judea-Christian tradition based on biblical revelation.

Until we look again to these classic sources, Harvard will continue to waste both its $35 million and the hearts and minds of its students; Capitol Hill will continue to be a playground for opportunists rather than a place of service for statesmen; and our culture at large, loosed from any absolute foundations of morality, will continue to drift helplessly in a moral quagmire, all the while pitifully pontificating about the loss of ethics.

Reprinted from Jubilee, October 1989. Copyright 1989. Reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries, P.O. Box 17500, Washington, D.C. 20041.