Looking to Its Roots

By Ezra Bowen

"Most ethics become important when the roof falls in." So said TV Producer Fred Friendly recently as he plunged into the making of a PBS series designed to examine the tangled state of American ethics. His task could not have been more timely or more daunting, nor could his comment have been more appropriate. Large sections of the nation's ethical roofing have been sagging badly, from the White House to churches, schools, industries, medical centers, law firms and stock brokerages -- pressing down on the institutions and enterprises that make up the body and blood of America.

Surveying the damage, Church Historian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago sees a "widespread sense of moral disarray." Once, notes Bryn Mawr Political Scientist Stephen Salkever, "there was a traditional language of public discourse, based partly on biblical sources and partly on republican sources." But that language, says Salkever, has fallen into disuse, leaving American society with no moral lingua franca. Agrees Jesuit Father Joseph O'Hare, president of Fordham University: "We've had a traditional set of standards that have been challenged and found wanting or no longer fashionable. Now there don't seem to be any moral landmarks at all."

At the same time, the collapse of standards brings ethical issues to the forefront. Many Americans feel a need to start rebuilding the edifice, to re- evaluate the basis of public morality. In so doing, says Joseph Kockelmans, professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, "people may finally begin to take responsibility for their lives, instead of just being sheep."

The need to do so is widely recognized. In a recent poll for TIME conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman,* more than 90% of the respondents agreed that morals have fallen because parents fail to take responsibility for their children or to imbue them with decent moral standards; 76% saw lack of ethics in businessmen as contributing to tumbling moral standards; and 74% decried failure by political leaders to set a good example.

Lawyers are often seen not as guardians of the law but as sophisticated manipulators who profit from rule beating. Even the ethics counsel for the 313,000-member American Bar Association, Lisa Milord, concedes that all too many lawyers "are looking out for their own interests rather than the integrity of the legal system." The A.B.A. notes that in 1985 state courts imposed sanctions ranging from disbarment to probation on 2,396 errant practitioners, an increase of 44% since 1981. Doctors, wandering through ethical thickets freshly grown from a technology that gives them daunting new powers over life and death, are held in low esteem by many who see them as self-serving money chasers. Dr. Richard Kusserow, inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claims that physicians' peer- review boards, out of concern for the profession's good name, tend to sweep ethics complaints under the rug. "They protect each other's incompetency from the public," he says.

This protective obsession with self and image, say behaviorists, also permeates family living. Carlfred Broderick, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, says increased emphasis on what he calls "personhood" -- as opposed to duty -- has helped to unravel traditional family obligations. Gary Hart's and Evangelist Jim Bakker's misadventures, for example, can be seen as manifestations of the personhood cult. The focus in such cases, Broderick emphasizes, is on self, under the banner of personal & fulfillment. "Individual rights play a significant role," he says, "and that's where the tension arises" in today's families.

Irene Goldenberg, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, concludes that the cult of personhood has brought about a more selfish view of the "responsibilities in a marriage," including the responsibility for divorce. Goldenberg adds that the diminished sense of commitment has seeped down to children, leaching out old feelings of loyalty to the family. In consequence, she says, today's children are "taking care of themselves first."

As the home becomes a less stable and more selfish place, many people have begun to blame the schools for not taking over the traditional family task of inculcating values. Secretary of Education William Bennett describes many U.S. public schools as "languishing for lack of moral nutrition." Such concerns are shared by Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who believes values should be a "topic in all aspects of a student's life." But as Murry Nelson, associate professor of education at Penn State, puts it, "Who is to decide what are the 'right' values?"

Church groups have tried to fill the values vacuum by energetically preaching a return to conventional standards. James Laney, president of Emory University in Atlanta and an ordained Methodist minister, notes that the "churches are stirring" to promote a moral revival. None have been more successful than the Protestant Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Donald Shriver, president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, says that the many people who are looking to religion for moral authority "find it in the message being preached and in the community of the church."

As with other professions, however, Laney points out that "in some cases their agenda has been narrow and self-serving." For example, right-wing Evangelicals and Fundamentalists in Alabama and Tennessee have demanded that certain books be banned from classrooms for advocating "secular humanism" at the cost of biblical teachings. "They've appointed themselves to be guardians of public morality," says Presbyterian Minister Morton McMillan of Tupelo, Miss. These sects have been tarnished by their own troubles with moral guardianship, as in the PTL's Jim Bakker scandal or in Oral Roberts' dubious (though successful) plea for $4.5 million from his TV faithful lest God make good an alleged threat to "call Oral Roberts home."

The Vatican, too, raised a storm last March when it issued a document calling for legal restraints on medical manipulation of human birth, including in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and termination of flawed fetuses. Moral traditionalists of all faiths cheered. Biomedical science, they claimed, must not intrude on natural life processes. But many liberals sided with Michigan Lawyer Noel Keane, a pioneer in arranging surrogate agreements, who reportedly declared, "I think the church is a little out of touch with reality." The document has prompted serious debate, but so far it has moved the country no closer to a consensus on some profound ethical dilemmas. To whom, for example, does a child of surrogate birth really belong? Should a malformed fetus or infant (or any other patient in extremis) live or die? Who will make these decisions? And, more broadly, does ultimate moral authority lie with institutions such as church and state to codify and impose? Or, in a free society, are these matters of private conscience, with final choice belonging to the individual?

A strain of righteousness lies deep in the American character. As John Gunther wrote in Inside U.S.A., "Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea." That good idea combines a commitment to man's inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man's obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today. Meanwhile the compulsions to repent and punish sin remain just beneath the skin, erupting like fever blisters in times of stress and producing a rash of reforms. Inevitably the compulsions tend to disappear as quickly as they surface, leaving the root causes of trouble intact. As Democratic Congressman Leon Panetta of California puts it, "There comes a backlash to these reforms." Thus, after the Watergate scandal of the early '70s, both the Government and the people turned back to business as usual, somewhat relieved to let the country run itself again -- as many feel it should do.

Lacking a universal code, many people have tried to substitute specific rules. Says Ethicist Daniel Callahan, co-founder and director of the Hastings Center think tank near New York City: "When most people talk about morals, they are concerned with laws and regulations and codes." When laws do not exist to regulate a particular situation, "we assume it is pretty much every person for himself."

Along with these selfish tendencies toward evasion, a yearning exists for the good old days when, supposedly, people knew what was expected and did it. Yet many agree with Martin Marty, who says, "I don't think there ever were any good old days" in the sense of a more moral America. As the Rev. McMillan puts it, "I don't know when these good old days were when they talk about morality in Mississippi. There was a lot of teenage pregnancy back then, but it was black girls being impregnated by white men. Black people were being lynched, and nothing was being done about it."

Because society tolerated such immorality, argues the Rev. Charles Stith, a Methodist pastor and president of a citizens' group called the Organization for a New Equality, "by appearance, life seemed simpler." He adds, however, that the social and technological advances of recent decades have "touched every part of society, and that gives the appearance of things falling apart. But we are really in the process of constructing a new morality in which freedoms we struggled for will be counterbalanced with a sense of responsibility, so that the freedoms don't become excess." In groping for this new morality, warns Emory's Laney, the country must accommodate present realities, not reach back for old dreams. "Moral preachments and demands for a return to the old ways should not cause us to be less appreciative of a decreasingly homogeneous society."

A critical first step for building new standards, suggests Donna Shalala, a political scientist and president of Manhattan's Hunter College, is to turn the emphasis from self to society. "If we want to survive," says Shalala, "we will have to reach some consensus about the behavior of individuals." Strong concurrence comes from John Silber, president of Boston University, who blasts what he sees as today's self-centered hedonism. "The gospel preached during every television show," says Silber, is " 'You only go around once in life, so get all the gusto you can.' It is a statement about theology; it is a statement about beer." He concludes, "It's lousy beer and even worse theology."

In the search for renewal, one of the greatest handicaps, say ethicists, is lack of leadership. This has been the case with the President, who, having declared that he ordered no cherry trees felled, has held to that protestation despite congressional testimony implying his knowledge and approval of the ^ Iran-contra arms dealings. This has caused the country some agonizing over how and why such doings, with all their ramifications at home and abroad, have become standard in a Government founded upon due process and accountability to the people.

The dominant reflex has been to blame those in office. Historians like Columbia's Henry Graff, however, point out that since all U.S. politicians are creatures of the people, the Administration merely embodies the people's most visible warts. Moreover, during the rummaging for new leaders, neither major party has come up with compelling exemplars of rectitude.

Lacking focused guidance, various segments of society are scrambling around to shore up their corners of the ethical roof. Congress is trying to fashion a bipartisan bill to reform election campaigns, though there is understandable doubt that any real change is in the cards, given the carloads of cash that political action committees confer on Capitol Hill. In addition, Congress is hammering out a toughened Government ethics code that includes a provision barring departing senior officials from working for a foreign nation until ten years after their Government service. A new law put into effect last month forbids specified departing Pentagon personnel to take jobs for two years in any industry whose military contracts they have been connected with. The hope is to eliminate revolving-door palships that have helped to kite prices of Defense Department procurements.

"We learn slowly and painfully," says Congressman Morris Udall, Democrat of Arizona, who points out that existing standards of congressional ethics result from past disclosures of Congressmen on the take. "You come out of the scandals with something better," Udall concludes. At least two state legislatures have moved to tighten ethical standards. Georgia this spring created a state ethics commission and established extensive disclosure and conflict-of-interest guidelines for all public officials.

In medicine the concern for ethics has become central to the relationship between doctors and their patients. According to the American Hospital Association, ethical consultants or committees now work day to day with 60% of acute-care institutions and 90% of major medical centers. Recently at Dartmouth College's Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, ethicists joined a gynecologist to dissuade an infertile couple from requesting that the wife be artificially inseminated with her husband's brother's sperm. "Imagine how that kid is going to be thrown for a loop," argued Hitchcock Ethics Counselor Charles Culver, "when he finds out his uncle is really his father."

At Boston's Beth Israel Hospital an ethical advisory group meets regularly to deal with questions ranging from which patients should receive specific types of surgery to treatment choices for newborns with potentially lethal flaws. Says Rabbi Terry Bard, who set up the Beth Israel committee: "The thing people fear most is non-being, so when medicine is at the brink of posing being or non-being for us, it has tremendous power. This is one reason why ethical dilemmas have become such an important part of medicine."

The same is true for the power of other technologies that have made moral decisions more daunting and complicated. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology some 120 faculty members have signed a nationally circulated pledge to refuse research funds for the Strategic Defense Initiative. "The problem," explains M.I.T. Physicist Vera Kistiakowsky, one of the signers, "is that the money is not just money for research. There are consequences attached to it." The most troublesome consequence she sees is implied support for a program that is highly politicized and dubious as science. Declares University of Illinois Physicist John Kogut, a key figure in circulating the pledge: "We are not going to cooperate with the government to militarize space."

Also at issue is whether any university should participate in weapons research -- or classified research of any kind -- when the institution's purpose is to disseminate knowledge for the betterment of mankind. Many universities already forbid faculty to accept grants carrying restrictions on full publication of research results.

Other universities are grappling with moral concerns in business and industry, mainly by trying to influence students through ethics courses. At Georgia Tech, Professor Stothe Kezios offers a popular elective in engineering ethics. The course confronts would-be engineers with situations like the tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger -- a case wherein several engineers at Morton Thiokol, the rocketmaker, spent the night before the launch pleading futilely with NASA and their own management for a precautionary delay.

Since the disaster one engineer, Roger Boisjoly, has quit Morton Thiokol and brought lawsuits for more than $3 billion against the company in connection with the deaths of the seven shuttle crew members. However, Arnold Thompson, another who had argued for a delay, has stayed on "to get things flying again." Thompson's decision to hang in, hoping and working for better decisions in the future, reflects the tendency of most of corporate America. "Managers are paid to manage, and it's up to them to make the final decisions," says Thompson, implicitly accepting the dominance of the organization over personal conscience.

Professor Kezios offers his students a stout principle for ethical dilemmas like the one at Morton Thiokol: "Raise hell, stand firm." But he acknowledges that such doctrine is easier said to students in school than done by them in the working world: "They don't have any clues as to how they are going to behave out there." In Los Angeles, Michael Josephson, a Loyola Marymount University law professor who has founded a new institute for ethical studies, is grappling with the same reality gap. "It's easy to say you want to make a lot of money and also be ethical when you are a student," he notes, but "it is much different in the real world." Kirk Hanson, who teaches ethics at Stanford's business school, finds many students apprehensive about the quandaries they will face. "There are a lot of pressures in fast-track environments," Hanson emphasizes. "I think they're afraid of the pressures and culture of Wall Street." But he adds, hopefully, "They're starting to think in advance about what kind of price they want to pay," with the implication that some may feel they do not want to pay at all.

Harvard's Coles senses a turning from the success cult among many college students. "Right now there are almost 1,000 ((Harvard)) students doing volunteer work with the elderly or with prisoners, or as tutors for children," Coles points out. He regards this as a hopeful sign of "decency, compassion and sensitivity to others, as well as to one's own needs." Some graduate students in professional schools, on the other hand, still seem preoccupied with their personal ambitions. In an effort to encourage moral inquiry, Coles taught a special ethics class at the business school this spring, using characters and incidents from novels and short stories to dramatize the need for broader values. During one class focused on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Coles called out a cadence of four words from the book: "Tolerance, kindness, forbearance, affection." Then he asked, "Can these lessons be taught? Should we teach them here? Will these + qualities increase our nation's GNP?" One student thought not, arguing, "It is difficult to say that human behavior is driven by anything other than self- interest."

Moral Philosopher Kenneth Goodpaster recalls being struck by the same attitude when he came to the Harvard Business School from Notre Dame in 1980: "There was a certain cynicism that said, 'What good will philosophy do when everyone knows the bottom line is profit? Why bother putting a veneer over that when in fact the driving impulse is going to be amoral if not immoral?' " Harvard's Barbara L. Toffler, who recently published a book entitled Tough Choices: Managers Talk Ethics, says the administration of the Business School itself "is not very supportive in trying to bring those of us with concern for ethics together."

Efforts to instill ethical concerns in students are reaching down even to the elementary-school level. Georgia Attorney Michael Ratelle deplored the dearth of basic civics and morality lessons given to his three schoolchildren in exurban Atlanta. "Words like honesty and integrity aren't in the forefront of kids' minds today," says Ratelle. Last year Ratelle convinced his county's school board to adopt a curriculum developed by a nonprofit Texas group called the American Institute for Character Education. The heart of it is a 106-word statement of principles called "freedom's code," in which some of the key words are citizenship, obligations and two of the same ones that Coles offered to his class, tolerance and kindness. Introduced in 1969, the curriculum is being used in more than 33,000 elementary classrooms in 45 states.

To many observers, however, these efforts amount to patchwork, with no unified direction yet defined. Says Emory President Laney: "There's no question that we are talking more about ethical questions and we seem to be taking a greater interest in them. But whether that translates into moral probity, I wouldn't want to say."

Interestingly, and perhaps reassuringly, some of the most thoughtful ethicists feel that the elements for an enduring moral consensus are right at hand -- in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, with their combination of Locke's natural rights and Calvin's ultimate right. "It's all there, it's all written down," says Colgate Philosopher Huntington Terrell. "We don't have to be converted. It's what we have in common." Terrell calls for a move "forward to the fundamentals," in which people put their lives where their mouths have been: in line with the country's founding principles.

Loyola Marymount Ethicist Josephson argues that such principles are neither idealistic nor theoretical but, rather, the apex of pragmatism. "It is not a matter of being a Goody Two-Shoes," he says. "It is a matter of being practical. The notion that nice guys finish last is not only poisonous but wrong. In fact, the contrary is true. Unethical conduct is always self- destructive and generates more unethical conduct until you hit the pits." He concludes, "The challenge is not always being ethical or paying a big price. The challenge is to be ethical and get what you want. I think you can do it almost every time."

But this optimistic solution does no more than lay bare the marrow of the problem, namely, the nature of people's wants. If Americans wish to strike a truer ethical balance, they may need to re-examine the values that society so seductively parades before them: a top job, political power, sexual allure, a penthouse or lakefront spread, a killing on the market. The real challenge would then become a redefinition of wants so that they serve society as well as self, defining a single ethic that guides means while it also achieves rightful ends.

FOOTNOTE: *The findings are based on a telephone survey of 1,014 adult Americans conducted January 19-21. The potential sampling error is plus or minus 3%.

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York, Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Don Winbush/Atlanta