Changing Moral Codes

I read a commentary today and it had ideas I wanted to pass on to you. So here goes. Essentially, it involves moral thinking, specifically how troubled young people are today at thinking and talking about moral issues they face. University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America that asked them open ended questions about right and wrong, about moral dilemmas and about the meaning of life.

Almost all of the young people, aged 18-23, failed to say anything sensible on these matters. The study's author said, "When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two thirds of the young people either couldn't answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot."

Kind of sad to see them so lacking in any cultural tie to a set of ethics. Smith said that most of them hadn't even given serious thought to some of the principal ethical questions they would face in life. "When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn't enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.", said Smith

A typical response to the questions was that they hadn't thought about it before or that the answer depended on what the person being asked felt (what in the 1960's was termed "situational ethics"). The conclusion of the study is that for most young people believe that what is right or wrong is not determined by the moral code of the culture, but rather by the individual choosing what he or she thinks best. The "Who am I to say what's right? It is up to the individual" was a typical response from among those people interviewed.

So are young people just doing what makes them feel good or makes them happy instead of learning the society's code of ethics and applying those? As Smith said, "They have not been given the resources by schools, institutions and families to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations." But that would be the fault of society for trivializing itself to them and for not inculcating them.

I wonder if in fact this generation has not learned the culture's ethics, that for them, the moral precepts of the past have become separated from moral sources, and instead are replaced by the individual doing what "feels" good. This would imply the individuals have replaced the society's models with the individual model for moral choices. Morality has always been inherited and shared, but is it true that now the younger generation thinks of ethics as something that emerges in the privacy of his or her own heart? If that is true, it is a moral dilemma for us all.