Andrew Mitton

This is the ques­tion that Clif­ford Owen asks in his recent arti­cle in the Globe and Mail.  His answer: No.  Not in a uni­ver­sity set­ting.  He says:

Stu­dents indif­fer­ent to jus­tice just aren’t going to be won over to it by any­thing that I could say. Or that any­one else could say. A uni­ver­sity course is not a revival meet­ing. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with stu­dents to come for­ward to declare them­selves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk con­sist­ing of high-minded oaths and dec­la­ra­tions of one’s moral seri­ous­ness is even cheaper.

If I’m under­stand­ing him cor­rectly, he’s say­ing that one’s char­ac­ter is shaped long before they arrive in col­lege.  There’s noth­ing a pro­fes­sor could teach a Bernie Mad­off that could have stopped him from his shenanigans.

There might some truth to this.  I’ve worked with youth in youth groups and they seem mal­leable and teach­able.  I’ve worked with adults and they seem set in their ways.  But we don’t give up.  Mr. Owen’s the­sis is hope­less.  He seems to look at adults and con­clude that they are who they are.

I don’t buy his argu­ment.  All it leads to is a con­clu­sion that peo­ple are gen­er­ally bad and need to be gov­erned by heavy reg­u­la­tions and over­sight.  It’s an argu­ment for more government.

I reject Mr. Owen’s argu­ment and think peo­ple can be taught and inspired to be good.  I’m con­vinced that we all have a moral sense as James Q. Wil­son elo­quently and thor­oughly argues in his book The Moral Sense.  We are born with it, but it can be demeaned, ratio­nal­ized away, and weak­ened. This is what’s hap­pened over many decades.   As a result we have lost con­fi­dence in the val­ues that are derived from our moral sense.  And we find our­selves in our cur­rent situation.

Mr. Wil­son says, “Main­tain­ing lim­its is a way of assert­ing com­mu­nity.  If the lim­its are asserted weakly, uncer­tainly, or apolo­get­i­cally, their effects must surely be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, con­fi­dently, and per­sua­sively.”  So we don’t throw up our hands and say we are who we are.  Instead, we assert ethics boldly, con­fi­dently, and per­sua­sively at home, at church, in schools, in col­lege, and in busi­ness until we are at a higher level of self gov­er­nance.  Oth­er­wise we dimin­ish our­selves to the low­est com­mon denominator.