by Shelly London
It seems that every major disaster is followed by almost pro forma revelations of danger signs that should have alerted us to the danger but were ignored. We heard those revelations in the aftermath of 9/11 and we’re hearing them now as the BP oil spill takes its place as the worst environmental disaster in American history.
My research into ethics education gives me the uncomfortable feeling that we might be in danger of a collapse in ethical values, not as dramatic perhaps but in its own way as detrimental to America as a terrorist attack or environmental disaster.
Ethical danger signs usually come from adult business and poltical leaders, whose egregious ethical shortcuts often warrant headlines. But I’m more concerned about ethical danger signs among young people, like the one raised for me by an experience shared by a college ethics professor.
This professor told a class of college freshmen about a long-running scandal on the Long Island Railroad, a commuter line connecting New York City with the Long Island suburbs.
Extensive investigative journalism by the New York Times in 2008 revealed that for years almost every employee retiring from the railroad applied for and received occupational disability payments as well as his or her regular pension and retirement benefits. Those results could only indicate that wholesale fraud was taking place, especially since the railroad had won national awards for improving worker safety.
With the full knowledge of management, retiring employees were essentially gaming a complicated system that made unjustified occupational disability benefits a virtual part of their retirement package. Not only were perfectly healthy retirees drawing disability payments from their former employer, they were also using their disabled classification to claim taxpayer-paid benefits. They qualified for free passes at state parks and free access to publicly owned golf courses, which they used with great frequency despite their “disabled” status.
The professor expected outrage from the class at this epidemic of fraud and ethical failure. But the class reacted quite differently. They concluded that if any problem existed, it lay with “the system” that allowed such institutionalized theft of undeserved benefits. As they saw it, the individual retirees had no ethical responsibility at all. They were just dipping into the trough with everybody else.
These college freshmen found no problem with that and saw no failure in ethical values. In fact, more than one student expressed the hope that he or she could take advantage of a LIRR style “perk” someday.
Talk about a warning sign! The attitude of these young adults indicated they had reached college age without absorbing the concept of individual ethics and collective responsibility to society. Unfortunately, that attitude is not an aberration. I’ll spare you statistics, and I’ll stipulate that not all kids would react the same way.
Still, those students reflect the danger that the most hovered-over generation in history has been raised in an ethical wilderness — in an environment that emphasizes individual entitlement over individual responsibility.
We owe it to our children and to the future of our society to at least give young people the intellectual ammunition to evaluate life’s choices in terms of ethical values. The warning signs are there. We ignore them at our peril.