Two-thirds of young adults couldn’t name a moral dilemma, says David Brooks, citing a study done on that age group by University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.
‘I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,’ is how one interviewee put it.
So often the respondents would say “It’s up to them” – meaning it’s up to each individual to decide for himself or herself what is best to do. In this framework, there is no “right” and “wrong” so much as there is individual preference.
As a moral theologian, I found the study both disheartening and true – this matches what I see in my classroom every day, not just with the present generation of students, but for quite a few years (back to my own college days and beyond?). It reminds me, again and again, that Pope Benedict XVI is exactly right to want to focus on relativism as a key problem.
But Brooks takes this analysis further. This isn’t just a case of relativism; it’s a case of even being unable to speak about moral problems, even to name something. These students simply have no language for saying what is “right” and “wrong.” Where there is no language, there is no way to see where problems are.
Take, for example, my bioethics course last fall. I invited a friend of mine, a pediatrician, to come and speak to the students. “Name the top issues facing medicine,” he asked them.
They could name what I call “the Big Four,” the things that always make the news: abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, and cloning.
“Now,” continued my friend, “How many times did I deal with those in my practice last year?” No one moved to speak. “Exactly, NONE,” he said.
No wonder those students couldn’t name a moral dilemma. No wonder ethics feels abstract. This is not to say that there aren’t serious moral dilemmas that people face about abortion or euthanasia or the others. But those are issues far less encountered than the daily issues people face every day, but can’t name as moral questions. “How will I treat my roommate? How will I spend my money? How will I take care of the apartment in which I live, and alongside that, demonstrate care for my roommates?”
These are the real life questions students face – and the ones they can’t see as moral questions because, if the Big Four seem relative, well everything must be relative. When I finally get to the point of getting students to think about the ways in which they are living moral lives every single day, for good or ill, they then want to say, “Well, that’s just all about love.”
Except the point is – we can no longer name even what it means to love if we can’t identify the problems we and the people around us face. How can we love each other if we don’t realize that, for example, my individual decision to use air freshener in my own individual room is seriously detrimental to my allergic apartment-mate, even though she doesn’t live in my room? It is exactly the reverse of what Paul advocates in his First Letter to the Corinthians, that if eating meat causes my brother or sister to fall, I will not eat meat (8:13). That isn’t first about my preferences, but someone else’s.
So – to return to my pediatrician friend and others like him- what are “the issues”? They are mostly everyday things, not Big Things. Poverty, for one – the fact that he has severely asthmatic patients who can’t afford medicine so end up in the ER often – a plight that could be avoided if they had the medicine! The fact that his patients can’t afford fresh fruits and vegetables but can afford, calorie for calorie, the hamburgers and packages of orange crackers with peanut butter, that tend to increase their diabetes and heart disease risks, even at young ages. The question of measles outbreaks, because there are parents that won’t vaccinate at all (not just on a delayed schedule – at all) their otherwise healthy kids for fear of autism, but which then puts seriously ill kids at risk. And so on.
Daily actions, ordinary actions – these are our moral lives in large part.
Thomas Aquinas says that “Human acts are moral acts.” What would it mean to live our lives knowing this? What would it mean to realize that almost every moment of my life is a “moral dilemma” because every moment of my life there is the possibility of witnessing to Christ – or not?
Jana, I’m so glad you posted on the Brooks article — I thought about doing a post, too, because it also resonates with my experience in the classroom. This is exactly why I designed my “Contemporary Moral Problems” class around lies, sex, work, and war. These topics allow them to consider the possibility of moral absolutes, the interconnections between personal and social issues, the importance of virtue, the role of scripture, and countless other key aspects of morality. But most of all, they have to deal with the fact that morality pervades every aspect of their lives.
Great article. This tendency to see the Big Problems as relative, and not to see most other personal interactions as even being moral interactions seems like one of the major issues in contemporary everyday moral thought.
I feel like a total pricing geek for bringing this up, but since I just spent most of my week doing food pricing analysis I could help weighing in on this toss-off example you give:
The fact that his patients can’t afford fresh fruits and vegetables but can afford, calorie for calorie, the hamburgers and packages of orange crackers with peanut butter, that tend to increase their diabetes and heart disease risks, even at young ages.
The fast food as cheep food myth is one that dies hard, but in these days the national average price for a Big Mac is $3.50 and even “value menu” shoppers typically end up picking up a McDouble, Small Fries and Small Drink for a dollar a piece: $3 total.
Given that people can typically get a 5lb bag of apples for $2-3 or a loaf of whole grain bread for $2-$2.50, it’s not a price advantage to get pre-packaged snacks or fast food. The big issue is a psychological one — people are much less inclined to run into a grocery and pick up fruit on the run (or bring it from home) than they are to drive through a fast food place. Plus, there are millions of years of evolution telling our brains that we need lots of fats and sugars so we’ll make it through the next famine — which in our modern world usually doesn’t come.
Sorry for the digression…
DarwinCatholic – I get your point, and I agree wholeheartedly with you that more people could do far more toward eating healthier with the same dollars they spend on fast food.
My point is more about calories in relation to cost – because isn’t that more the point that gets made in studies? The McDouble at $3 has more calories than the, say, 8 apples, or even 10, in a bag – 55 calories per apple, for a total of 550 calories, versus 390 cals for the McDouble, 230 for the small fries, and 150 cals for the small Coke., for a total of 770 calories.
This is surely still, as you point out, psychological – especially since one is buying only one meal at McD’s, but several meals at the grocery store and it’s perhaps a bit harder to think in terms of, it’s not only the apples but the bread, the cheese, etc. that will make up the eventual meals.
Still, what I’ve seen (and admittedly don’t have a website to hand – maybe someone else can help me out here) is that when it comes to money people can spend, the question is whether people have enough outlay of cash at one time to buy all the ingredients of what could make whole meals for a week or a few days – versus being able to come up with quick cash for one meal that could fill up a person for longer during the day than an apple. I mean – if you have only $3 to spend and you don’t know when you might get more – $3 is not going for a bag of apples. So one of the major problems is really having cash to hand to spend on food – and that’s something people in the middle class can do, but less so at lower incomes, depending.
Thanks for blogging about this article, Jana. My moral theology students actually spent an entire class period discussing the article. Some of their conclusions were interesting, and perhaps encouraging:
First, my students insisted that they and their peers knew how to talk about moral issues, but avoided doing so in public out of fear of being intolerant. One student explained that the issue was not so much one of moral language, but a confusion about how to bring moral language to the public square. Another student emphasized that for his generation, tolerance was the most important virtue. “It’s hard to talk morality if you are concerned about tolerance.” Another student said she talks about morality all the time with her friends but would feel very awkward talking about such issues with a stranger in an interview.
Second, and related to the first, my students had a strong sense that the separation between church and state in this country does not allow them to speak about public issues from a religious perspective. Many of my students admitted that they thought about right and wrong in ways largely formed by their religious communities, but that these values were irrelevant in an increasingly-secular society where other people did not share those values.
Third, and this is perhaps more of my concern than my students’, David Brooks has a much narrower conception of morality than I think many in the Catholic moral tradition. For example, he says that an individual debating whether or not to rent an apartment they couldn’t afford was not a moral issue. To heck it isn’t! People buying things they couldn’t afford, and convincing others to buy things they couldn’t afford is how we got the housing crisis and is a big reason our economy is tanking right now. If you’re right that morality is about the everyday, and I think you are, then maybe young people don’t know how to speak about moral issues because they have been told that the issues that matter to them aren’t really moral issues at all. I addressed the topic of body image in my class, and at the end of class, I asked them whether this topic belonged in a moral theology classroom. They were almost unanimous that it did, but couldn’t quite identify why.
So maybe the issue is not that young people lack moral language, but that they don’t have the rich and sophisticated moral language that will allow them to talk about the everyday issues they are concerned about in the public square.
I hate to say that I’m not encouraged by your students’ discussion. Being afraid of coming across as intolerant or knowing how to bring these issues to the public square is, I think, evidence of being unable to name moral issues. The church/state and tolerance points they bring up point to the problem of individual preferences that Brooks mentions, because those splits lead precisely to seeing ethics as a matter of personal preference. Yet if we (and they) had the language to speak about moral life beyond individual preferences, the question of tolerance would not come up. Indeed, I worry that tolerance is a very troublesome kind of virtue in our age – it has replaced virtues like kindness, generosity, hospitality, which go farther toward good human relationships than tolerance does. Tolerance encourages almost ignoring each other (i.e. fear of speaking out because we might offend so therefore not engaging). So I must say I am unconvinced by your students….
Agree with you that Brooks has a narrower view of what counts as a moral issue – renting an apartment is a moral question, indeed. And you may be right that youth and young adults would be more likely to learn how to use moral language if the issues that matter to them are the ones discussed as moral issues.
Right, Jana. I’m not saying things are good, by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just saying they aren’t as dire as Brooks seems to think (or maybe not dire in the same way he seems to think they are). I think that you’re right that tolerance has become a vicious sort of virtue, but maybe tolerance reigns supreme in the moral language of young people today for a good reason. I teach Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, and students are usually horrified both by the reality of racial segregation and the reality of going to jail. I think they look at white religious leaders from the 60s and think “I don’t want to be them regarding the issues of my day (gay marriage, abortion, animal rights, etc.) and I sure as heck don’t want to go to jail fighting for anything like MLK did, so I will just be as tolerant as possible to make sure I am on the side of justice.” I agree that this isn’t an ideal stance, which is why I like to dig into the nitty gritty of what a just law actually is, but I can’t say this sentiment is necessarily a bad one.
Interesting thought experiment: would you rather have a young person stay mum on the question of the morality of gay marriage and take the most tolerant position possible or would you rather this young person take an extremely intolerant, possibly hateful position, but use rich moral and theological language to do so? Maybe the desire to be tolerant is something effective teachers and preachers can slowly transform into the more complicated and rich language of love and justice . . .
Beth – if those are the two options that we are left with if tolerance is the reigning virtue, then I really, really think that tolerance needs to become an obsolete virtue….
Thank you for the thoughtful post, Jana. I have been following the exchange between you and Beth and want to speak directly to the issue of tolerance. Perhaps it would be more helpful and more in keeping with the Catholic moral tradition to not lose sight of what tolerance (or forbearance) meant to Christians past rather than succumbing to the moral inarticulacy and incoherency of the term as it is employed today. When reading someone like Lactantius in the fourth century or Las Casas in the sixteenth, their attitude (or virtue one might say) of tolerance was rooted in humility and charity in the face of evil practices among pagan neighbors. Tolerance was a means of patiently dealing with those steeped in practices and customs that one finds debased and destructive for authentic Christian living (e.g. persecuting Christians or human sacrifices). Nevertheless, Christians were not supposed to abandon them (that is, the unchurched) but learn to live amongst them while loving them and preaching the Gospel.
Liberal political thinkers of the post-metaphysical sort today avoid using the word tolerance or toleration (a juridical or political concept) because it implies that one is making a judgment concerning the truth or falseness, or goodness or wrongness, of certain beliefs and actions. I think a more appropriate way to describe what you two are highlighting is what the Church has sometimes called “indifferentism.” In other words, “liberal whateverism,” which any educator has had the misfortune of knowing all too well, is the problem. Disconnected from any belief in the unity of goodness or truth, it falls prey to what Jana has rightly detected as a subjectivity of values based on personal preferences. I would also add, following Charles Taylor, that it finds termination in an instrumentalist logic that crowns efficiency as its prize.
Returning to tolerance, I think it might be fruitful to see it as a virtue worth preserving in its Christian mode. It should not be confused with either indifferentism or judgmentalism (the two opposed vices), both of which in our culture have very little if nothing to do with a commitment to truth and more to do with a callousness sprinkled with moments of emotional hyper-sensitivity. The development of virtue has always required real struggle and hardship. Tolerance was a traditional and important way of preserving this truth.
David – Thanks for this! I really appreciated your brief discussion of tolerance in Christian context – that is a much more helpful framing of it than how I have been thinking of it (which is also how I think the word tends to be used in contemporary culture). Do you know anything written about this? It would be interesting to see how this might play out in the classroom, and especially I’d be curious what people would make about the opposed vices, since I think that many students (and adults) think of tolerance as more akin to “liberal whateverism”…
Jana – One article dealing with Lactantius and other early apologists comes to mind and it was written by John Bowlin. It is titled, “Tolerance among the Fathers,’ and it was published by the JSCE in 2006. As for Las Casas, I hope my dissertation will contribute to that area of inquiry 🙂 Bowlin apparently is at work on what I presume is a larger normative treatment of tolerance as a virtue, which is now under review according to his faculty profile.
One possible strategy for thinking about this in the context of the classroom might be to compare tolerance with the virtue of courage. I don’t think anyone wants to be branded as a coward or reckless. Similarly, I don’t think students want to be seen either as total social conformists (it seems to be against their nature) who promote everybody’s beliefs and practices or as Pharisaic judges on the seat of righteousness. I wonder, however, what would be the vice that appears to be most like the virtue (assuming we are even using indifferentism and judgmentalism, it was merely a suggestion) of tolerance? Would one’s social location inside or outside the Church change the appearance of the vices? I am inclined to say yes. Just some thoughts, I wonder what you think…