Some years ago, in my high school chemistry class, the teacher set us working on acid-alkali reactions. As we began mixing the two components, the solution started to seethe and the test tubes got warmer and warmer. After a while the reaction fizzled out. The acid and alkali had neutralized each other, leaving behind nothing but salt and water.
Our teacher then began his own experiment. Starting a similar reaction in a large flask, he dropped in a few flakes of platinum foil, small shiny squares like bits of metal confetti. The reaction nearly exploded. It bubbled madly, casting off a furious discharge of vapor and heating the flask until it was too hot to touch. Within seconds it was over, the reagents consumed in far less time than in our test tubes.
When he emptied the flask, we expected to see only liquid. To our surprise, out came the platinum bits. They were the same size they had been when they went in. Nothing had eaten into them. Nothing had dissolved them. Nothing had even dulled their finish. They were untouched.
Through that simple experiment we came to understand the meaning of the word catalyst. As a catalyst, the platinum never enters into the reaction. It simply provides a surface on which the reaction takes place. But something in its structure speeds the reaction immensely. When it’s all over, everything in the surrounding environment is different. The once-powerful reagents, transformed by the interaction of their opposite natures, are irreversibly altered. The catalyst comes out unchanged.
Explaining this phenomenon, our teacher added one more comment. The catalyst, he said, comes out unchanged only if it goes in pure: Put in an impure catalyst, he said, and it will be eaten up by the intensity of the reaction.
In that simple morning’s work, we grasped not only an important scientific concept but a powerful metaphor for the human condition. Wherever humanity comes to a decision point, it seems, we’re surrounded by reactions. Some bubble along slowly. Others churn and froth. Some produce good results, while others create noxious poisons. Some are hardly noticeable. Others shake the rafters and spew out sparks.
That is nowhere more true than in ethical decision-making. Core values are like moral reagents: They sometimes clash together with plenty of energy and fervor. There are no conflicts as challenging, long-lasting, or intractable as those that grow out of moral issues. Yet there are no more important issues to resolve than those on the ethical landscape.
There are times, of course, when the prudent teacher douses the experiment, rinsing out the flask before things get out of hand. And there are times when moral reactions, as they threaten to turn into white-hot arguments that melt the walls of their containers, need to be stifled. But that’s not usually the case. Most of the time the tough choices we face could use a little catalysis. Most of the time, when the end result is desirable, the process deserves a good nudge.
Ethical thinkers are catalysts. The moral viewpoint, however gently added to a situation, has an uncanny way of stimulating the process. Positions that were uncertain take on a new sharpness. Attitudes that were grudgingly congruent can suddenly diverge. People who once whispered can begin to shout. That can be unnerving. As the ethical battle rages, all sorts of stench can erupt—and all sorts of sludge can precipitate to the bottom. But it can also be exhilarating. There is nothing more satisfying than to see apathy overcome, stagnation broken, and decisions made that absolutely transform their surroundings for the better. And there is nothing more comforting than to feel some assurance that such decisions, when arrived at through ethical processes, constitute the highest level of right we can reach.
Ethical fitness makes ethical thinkers. If you’ve come this far in this book, you’ve invested a fair amount of energy and time in your own ethical fitness. Don’t be surprised, then, if the result is sometimes volatile. Like it or not, you’re becoming a better catalyst. The ideas you cast into the discussion—sometimes without even opening your mouth—form the surface upon which things happen. You’ll speed things along, and you’ll come out unchanged—if, that is, you go into it with your purity intact.
What is purity? These days it’s a puzzling word, confounded with overtones of goody-goody moralists and self-righteous busybodies. At bottom, however, it describes a condition we all long for. Clean air, fresh water, sharp focus, unadulterated friendships, honest motives, straightforward answers, untainted candidates—we crave purity at every turn. In the chemical metaphor of the catalyst, pure simply means unalloyed, uncorrupted, unmixed. In ethics, it means adhering to core values, exhibiting moral consistency, being true to one’s ethical compass—and avoiding hypocrisy at every turn.
In my experience, nothing chews up would-be ethical thinkers faster than hypocrisy. Why? Because, lacking that central purity, they can’t avoid becoming part of every reaction they enter. Perhaps they only mean to provide the surface for the catalysis. But bit by bit they erode, lose luster, get used up.
How do you protect purity? I once bought an old French horn, which I greatly enjoyed but never learned to play very well. I wanted it to shine. If it was polished and then lacquered, I was told, it would keep its shine without any effort—though the lacquer would soon yellow with age. Or I could leave it unlacquered and keep it polished myself. In that case it would take lots of work. But it would always shine more brightly than its lacquered neighbors.
Some people seek to protect purity with a veneer of protective film. That’s fine for looks, but it destroys the catalytic properties: Varnish the platinum, and you might as well drop a plastic bag into the test tube. The only way to protect purity, I suspect, is to work at it. Ethics, as I said earlier, is not an inoculation. It’s a process. I’ve never met anyone who has good judgment simply because he or she once had good judgment. They have it because they keep exercising it. That’s what ethics is all about: practice, exercise, and doing right at every turn.
To an age waffling in relativism and awash with political correctness, the demand for ethical exercise may seem a tall order. Why bother? If ethics takes all that effort, why not just settle for compromise? Why does it matter that we’re ethical?
The answer has a lot to do with the age we’re entering. Successful moral leadership for the twenty-first century will be grounded in centuries-old concepts of ethics that may never change. Yet it will also be flexible, adaptable, and inventive. Why? Because the moral landscape of the future will be shaped by three conditions our ancestors could not have imagined.
First, we will face entirely new ethical issues.
Second, we will live in an age of increasing moral intensity.
Third, we will experience unprecedented pressures to drop out of society and make a separate peace—to carve out moral enclaves disconnected from the ethical issues of the world.
Let’s examine these one by one.
On the evening of November 2, 1988, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Robert Tappan Morris, sat down at his computer terminal at Cornell University and committed what some pundits have called the crime of the century. Finding a security flaw in the computer programs of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) network—an international grid of telephone lines and satellite hookups created by the Department of Defense in 1969 to link governments, corporations, and universities—he launched a “worm” into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program began sending itself through the network, growing like a tapeworm through the sixty thousand computers of the system until it soaked up so much of their memory that they began to crash. Today, viruses with cryptic-yet-inviting names—like “Melissa” or “ILOVEYOU”—are all too commonplace. At the time, however, Morris did something no one else had yet done: He broke into and paralyzed a major computer network.
Now viruses with cryptic-yet-inviting names are all too commonplace. More than two decades later, we’ve hardly had time to adjust to the new threat and are already inundated with it. Expect more of the same: as technology advances, so will the perils of having power in the wrong hands—and these days they could belong to anyone—all that’s needed is a laptop, Internet access, and a little “hacker” know-how.
Morris had no criminal record, no motive for revenge, no scheme for economic gain—and no discernible moral restraints. “It was a mistake, and I am sorry for it,” he told the court. His father, one of the nation’s leading computer-security experts, called it “the work of a bored graduate student.” Time called it “one of the most sophisticated and infectious computer viruses the world has yet seen.” U.S. District Court Judge Howard Munson, in the nation’s first prosecution under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, handed Morris a light sentence that included community service and a $10,000 fine.
Was Morris an oddity, a unique exception, a wacko in an otherwise normal world of computer enthusiasts? Probably not. The frontier of technology, like all frontiers, has among its citizens a distinct breed of intellectual gamblers, gunslingers, and grubstakers. For them, the moral issues pale to insignificance before the lure of discovery. The fact that something can be done is, for many of them, reason enough to try it. For these hackers, the fact that no one has ever done it before—nor thought hard about the ethical consequences involved—places a peculiar responsibility upon these discoverers. Some pause to assess the moral landscape before proceeding. Others simply gallop ahead.
A society that develops ideas at only moderate rates can perhaps afford to let its ethics catch up with its inventions. But in the twentieth century, as the futurist Alvin Toffler explained, the pace of change has accelerated exponentially. Noting that the history of humankind has spanned eight hundred “lifetimes” of sixty-two years each, Toffler writes that “only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the eight-hundredth, lifetime.” These words, accurate when he wrote them in 1971, are even more true today.
Result: The sheer growth of inventiveness has created ethical questions that simply did not arise in the past. Already, entirely new dilemmas face us at every turn:
What will this pace of change mean during the current century? In 2004, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems predicted that by 2030, “we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today.” Since computers are now as ubiquitous as the electric motors that run our hair dryers, clocks, and toys—and almost as cheap and easy to replace—they already have a profound impact on the way we live. If Robert Morris’s worm is any indication, they will also open vistas of ethical complexity we can’t even imagine.
When Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian helped Janet Adkins end her life in 1990 by using his “suicide machine,” he was doing nothing new. Socrates himself was assisted in his suicide by those who gave him hemlock to drink. What makes Kevorkian’s work different is the demographics of aging. The fastest-growing cohort of the American population is the over-eighty-five crowd. Similar increases in longevity are occurring worldwide. While many of these people are in excellent shape, increasing numbers are alive without their health. Facing the prospect of life maintained only by biological interventions, sometimes in great pain and often feeling hopeless and alone, more and more of them may express a wish to die.
The ethical issues surrounding euthanasia—“an easy death,” as my dictionary defines it—have been well explored by others. The point here is simply to note that the invention and use of illegal machinery for euthanasia—and the publicity surrounding it—cranks up the intensity of this issue in ways that the physicians of our grandparents’ generation never had to face. Here and there, perhaps, they encountered an elderly patient who asked them about suicide. These days, Kevorkian’s grim machinery attracts a growing list of customers. Maybe, the public is asking, such machinery is not only relevant. Maybe it should be legal. After all, as of April 2005, two-thirds of U.S. adults believed a doctor should be allowed to end a patient’s life if he or she wishes it, is dying, and is in severe distress.
As once-esoteric concerns over euthanasia are lifted from their academic context and plopped down on coffee tables around the world, they join scores of other ethical issues pressing in upon us for attention. Reason: the extended reach of the global news media. There is nothing new in the subjects the media cover: There have always been wars, famines, plagues, and disasters, and they have always had grisly effects on populations. But only now can we see them played out in our living rooms every night. Problems that once did not trouble us—since we didn’t know about them—now wring us with moral anguish and outrage. Fifty years ago we would not have cared about civil war and starvation in the Congo—because we would have been ignorant of it. Now, having seen it, we cannot live with ourselves if we don’t take action. Multiply that single case by dozens of others, factor in all the e-mail appeals for help from worthy causes, add up all the genuinely new ethical issues now facing us, and it’s little wonder we live in such an age of moral intensity.
In the donor community, where foundations and charitable organizations fund nongovernmental organizations and volunteer groups, that now has a side effect called compassion fatigue. Faced with so many requests from so many worthy organizations engaged in such profoundly moral battles, our ability to care risks being numbed. Rather than be overwhelmed, we tune out. Earlier ages may have had an easier time of it: They merely had to support good causes. Our task, as former president Peter Goldmark of the Rockefeller Foundation used to observe, is harder. It’s no longer enough to fund causes that are merely worthwhile. Our job is to back causes that are essential.
The danger, of course, is that unless we find mental and emotional structures for addressing these causes, we may well become ethical tortoises, retreating into our shells rather than facing a world of such moral intensity. Or we may simply try to respond to ethical overload by longing for its opposite: a simpler, easier world where moral issues exist in an ordered framework. That longing should come as no surprise. In humanity’s social progress, strong movements often launch trends toward their opposites. By the early 1980s, the lunge into a high-tech world had already produced what author John Naisbitt called “high touch”—the explosion of interest in handmade crafts, one-of-a-kind objects made in age-old methodologies and materials. Hard rock, blanketing the airwaves with often-incomprehensible lyrics and jarring rhythms, has provoked new enthusiasm for country music with its storytelling diction and mellifluous harmonies. Hiking—one of the slowest ways to get anywhere—has never been more popular than in an age of high-speed travel. Despite the convenience and thrift of plastic containers, consumers still now pay a premium for milk in glass bottles.
These opposites all have in common a return to more traditional ways, as well as a desire to come out and be separate from the unfulfilling materialism of modern life. Put those two powerful impulses together with a charismatic leader, and the results can be ghastly. That was the story when, on April 19, 1993, David Koresh and his followers touched off their fatal conflagration at his compound in Waco, Texas.
Koresh, whose tangled and mystical biblicalism caused his followers to hoard large caches of arms on their isolated farmland retreat, had triumphed over a bungled raid on February 28, in which several federal officers were killed. Then came the long standoff. Finally, impatient with stasis and concerned for the welfare of Koresh’s several hundred followers—especially the children—the feds moved in. As they did so, a wind-whipped fire apparently set by Koresh’s Branch Davidians erupted into truly Texan proportions. Within minutes, Koresh and his legions perished.
Separatism doesn’t always end that way. But the incident at Waco points up three ethical issues that will increasingly tear at the fabric of civil society as the twenty-first century continues to unfold:
These three trends—toward new inventions, higher intensity, and greater separatism—are already shaping the ethical landscape. Neither fuzzy relativism nor dogged absolutism has proved capable of addressing them. Nor, for that matter, has any compromise between those two poles. Perhaps the American poet e. e. cummings said it best when he noted that “joy is a mystery at right angles equally to pain & pleasure, as truth is to fact & fiction.” The ethics that will shape our future is not to be found on some sliding scale where fact shades into fiction or pleasure into pain—or, cummings might have said, where relativism shades into absolutism. Like joy and truth, the most practical ethics for the future century will be found in a dimension perpendicular to the political tugs-of-war and academic tiffs over absolutism, liberalism, family values, outcomes-based education, and the dozens of other hot-button words surrounding the ethics debate. That does not mean ethics is a mystery. It means only that it’s not simply a set of politically correct views on specific issues, or a particular moralistic stand, or a bully flag planted in the sand. It’s a way of looking at the world. It’s a process that helps us come to terms with our toughest dilemmas. It’s not a compromise; it’s a lens.
In the end, our ethics defines the way we participate in the community around us. Yet it’s also a deeply personal construct, developing powerful standards and practices in each of us. It calls upon us to be impartial. Yet it demands that we be engaged—that we have, in other words, a point of view.
Lest this book appear to hint at the values-neutral relativism so corrosive to ethical endeavors, let me share in closing my own point of view concerning the four dilemma paradigms. These four are, of course, statements of right versus right. So there is no invariably “right” side to each one. But imagine a level playing field, on which both sides have equal weight and nothing in the situation drives you more toward one of these sides than toward the other. All things being equal, here is where I tend to come down as I encounter these four paradigms:
Values Clarification
A once popular but controversial approach to moral education, values clarification seeks to help students identify their own beliefs. It is rooted in the work of Louis Raths, who with coauthors Merrill Harmin and Sidney Simon explained the process in their highly influential book, Values and Teaching, published in 1966. Raths, as Simon later wrote, was “not concerned with the content of people’s values, but the process of valuing.” He set forth seven steps for helping students become aware of their own values, grouped under three headings: prizing one’s own beliefs and behaviors, choosing freely which ones to follow, and acting consistently upon those choices.
Simon, with whose name values clarification is now usually associated, developed and promoted the methodology. He set it forth as “a process for selecting the best and rejecting the worst elements contained in the various value systems which others have been urging [students] to follow.” Often working in groups, and guided by a teacher who listens carefully, the students work through a number of strategies or games intended to help them clarify their values.
It is here that the controversy arises. Values clarification has been strongly attacked for promulgating an “anything goes” atmosphere, where the teacher remains neutral, uncommitted, and accepting of all expressions of values regardless of their moral implications. (In fairness, Simon points out that the teacher should share his or her own values with the class at the appropriate moment—always with the proviso, however, that “the particular content of his values holds no more weight than would anyone else’s.”) It is also condemned for some of its classroom exercises—like “The Fallout Shelter Problem,” in which students must decide which often people is to be saved from a nuclear attack by taking refuge in a shelter that holds only six, or the “Cave-in Simulation,” in which students must determine which of their own group, facing an imaginary collapse of an underground cave, should be allowed to survive based on each one’s reasons for wishing to remain alive. These exercises, while generating lively discussion, are sometimes criticized for suggesting to students that ethics is a highly competitive game of winners and losers, taking place in an imaginary world unrelated to their own.
Used widely in classrooms in the late twentieth century, values clarification—along with the moral discussion approach promoted by Lawrence Kohlberg—has been the subject of intensive evaluations of its effectiveness in changing values-based behavior. Analyzing that body of research, James S. Leming concludes that “the moral discussion approach works, and the values clarification approach does not.”
The world, of course, hardly ever presents a truly level playing field. All things are rarely equal. An action that is right in the abstract may seem less so in the push and pull of human interchange. That’s where the tough choices arise.
By themselves, these four paradigms won’t make those choices for us. It’s hard to imagine a leader who succeeds simply by staking out one side of a paradigm and doggedly adhering to it no matter what happens. That’s not to say people don’t try: In a society schooled on quick fixes and educated by sitcoms that solve everything in half an hour, there is an undeniable temptation to find a formula and live by it. Too often, however, these Johnny-one-notes of the values chorus miss the point. Clinging to one value to the exclusion of others, and failing to assess the complexity of the issues surrounding them, they substitute thoughtless moralizing for moral thinking.
And for that there is no longer any room. More than ever, our age is making short shrift of those who preach without acts, indulge self-righteousness without humility, and chastise others’ wrongs without understanding their own. A morality of repetition—mouthing unexamined values inherited from a ghostly past—is rapidly giving way to something new.
What’s coming? That will depend in large part on our responses to the world around us. What’s coming, unfortunately, may be a resurgent morality of relativism, in which core values fall into cynical disrepute and cold-blooded self-will finally drives out all vestiges of honesty, love, fairness, responsibility, and respect.
On the other hand, what’s coming may be a new morality of mindfulness, in which the light of ethical reason and intuition dispels shadows, builds firm conclusions, and leads to goodness, worth, and dignity.
We will not survive the morality of repetition: The future’s choices are simply too tough. Nor will we survive the morality of relativism: There is too much leverage these days behind even a single unpunished act of evil. We’ll survive by a morality of mindfulness. We’ll survive where reason moderates the clash of values and intuition schools our decision-making. There’s no better way for good people to make tough choices.