From time to time, I teach my students lessons in ethics, the branch of philosophy that deals with morality and what makes things right or wrong. My intention isn’t to teach them my ethical code. All I reveal about my own beliefs resembles what Jefferson called a “general religion” of “peace, reason, and morality.”
Our ethics debates allow them, and induces them, to practice their English class skills — reading, writing, speaking and listening. I also want them to learn that making a moral decision isn’t like choosing your favorite ice cream flavor. It’s not a matter of taste or whim, not to be settled with a shrug or a coin toss. Moral decisions demand and deserve deliberate thought and careful reasoning.
Since we’ll be working with moral dilemmas, they need to learn that a dilemma is a choice where either option yields an undesirable outcome. Imagine that Tom and John begin falling simultaneously from separate trees. Since I can only catch one of them before they hit the ground, I can only save one. If I choose John, Tom dies. If I choose Tom, John dies. And if I don’t choose either and just stand there or walk away, both die, so avoiding the choice isn’t a solution.
I explain to the class that moral dilemmas can’t be resolved through creative problem solving. That’s because the point of a moral dilemma exercise isn’t to come up with a practical compromise or win/win solution to a problem and eliminate the need to make the moral decision. The point is to force you to confront, make and justify that decision to prepare you to think your way through real moral decisions.
Consider this dilemma facing an emergency room nurse. A security guard runs into her hospital and tells her an injured man is lying in the parking lot a block away. The man is bleeding heavily from a chest wound. The guard insists the man will die without her help. The nurse knows that according to hospital policy, employees who leave the hospital while on duty lose their jobs.
Should she leave and try to help the man, or should she remain at her post?
Some students suggest that she lend the guard a gurney so he can wheel the injured man to the hospital. Others predict they won’t fire her for disobeying the “stupid” rule. Both points are worth discussing, but neither is the point of the moral exercise, which is to force students to deal with the moral decision the nurse faces: Should she leave or stay?
That’s why I tell them that, believe it or not, there are no gurneys, and like it or not, the rule is the rule. Also, there are no other nurses or doctors who can help.
Some students frankly admit they’d decide to keep their jobs. Others just as frankly admit they’d feel too guilty if the man died. We discuss whether the nurse has a responsibility to emergency patients who might arrive at the hospital while she’s gone. What if she needed her job to pay for medicine for her own child? What if she needed the medicine herself?
As we change those and other variables, we refine the dilemma and their consequent moral understanding as individuals and as a class as to what they’d do and why they’d do it. Some of them, like some of us, are honest enough to recognize that they know what’s right but they’re not sure they’d do it.
Children develop a moral sensibility when they’re young. You can’t take my lunch because it’s “mine.” I can’t cut to the front of the line because “first come, first served.” Except when my father had a sore throat and was next at the emergency room, they first took care of the guy who’d cut his arm with a chain saw.
Somewhere along the line I tell them about a hot August afternoon at camp when I was 10. Our counselor was passing out ice pops that we’d been promised at lunch, but just as he handed the last one to me, a young boy ran up in a state of hysteria. He’d been hit squarely in the face with a baseball, and his cheek was already swelling. The counselor grabbed my ice pop, still in its wrapper, held it against the boy’s face, and sent for help.
I was disappointed, but I didn’t think of complaining. I wasn’t the only camper who would’ve responded that way had it been their ice pop. My students always sympathize when I tell them my story, but they show they understand. “He needed it more than you did,” they say.
Today, here in the last best hope of earth, some parents are reluctant to vaccinate their children with what they consider a new vaccine. Let’s excuse their cautious hesitation.
Americans have sickened and died because other Americans have proudly refused to be vaccinated. Let’s even set that prideful, lethal, self-interest aside.
Americans have refused to wear masks even at the risk of other people’s lives, grandfathers and grandsons, mothers and daughters. Americans have threatened the lives of school board members and their families for requiring students to wear masks, threatened physical violence against employees and proprietors for enforcing local mask ordinances.
They call it patriotism.
That disgraceful arrogance and callous indecency, I can’t understand or set aside.
Where are reason and sympathy?
“It’s a free country,” doesn’t mean, “I can do what I want.”
How is it that 10-year-olds on a hot August day and eighth graders in my classroom can understand that, and so many of my countrymen can’t?
A former president proposes the execution of political opponents. A congressman calls his incitement “right on target.” Men and women who claim to be leaders hide behind the false piety of the law to justify immorality.
No one will remember us as the greatest generation.
Reason doesn’t stagger, and sympathy doesn’t grow cold.
We do.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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