In my 38 years as an ethics specialist, I’ve never noticed so many moral questions continually asked through so many people: who stays with the fan? Who gets the bed? Who gets the most productive non-public protection apparatus and who can be tested first? When and where do you wear a mask and who has the power, if any, to force you to use it?
And what about more institutional issues: schools will reopen and when? What about bars, restaurants, gyms and cinemas? Does anyone have the strength to put others at risk?
And then there’s the police problems. We, as parents, already know the demanding moral situations of tracking our children in search of screen time, curfews and relationships. Is it now also obligatory to hide your time and social distance? And how do all these unmasked party-goers deserve to be watched? And speaking of surveillance, to what extent does society deserve to get carried away? Or deserve the police to be dismantled or absolutely transformed?
So it’s a cashday for ethics professionals and teachers. There will be no shortage of problems in discussing COVID-19 and racial pandemics. It’s a dream decade for an ethics specialist.
And yet one person’s dream is another person’s nightmare. More than at any other time I remember, the answers to moral questions are not hypothetical, but they involve excessive suffering, bankruptcy and death.
What can I do? How does the ethics move from a long list of questions to that issue?
In 2017, I participated in a United Nations mission hosted at the headquarters of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, where a foreign team of ethics specialists developed an ethics program for academics around the world. What I appreciated about this assignment is that ethics were taught in elementary and high schools, not just in college. In addition, the program may simply adapt to cultures and countries that engage far beyond those that historically teach educational ethics.
Teaching young academics to think about ethical decision-making in the world is imperative because they are tomorrow’s leaders and teachers. Ethical education is in fact a direction that wants to expand and be drawn on a global highway.
But there are others.
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About six years ago, I contacted more than two hundred ethics specialists and other colleagues and asked them, “What have been the most difficult moral decisions ever made?” From the many answers they gave me, I developed detailed studies on the number of “big” – Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai, Socrates, Marie Curie and others – made their greatest irritating and thorny decisions.
After reading his biographies, autobiographies, letters, and more, I began to understand patterns of ideas and attitudes they had in common. Each of them is committed to something higher, whether described in secular terms as justice, humanity or integrity, or anything more based on religion that honors Allah, God, Krishna or Jesus. His moral decisions were not motivated by self-prevention, but by service to humanity and in many cases to an invisible source.
I think there is something to learn not only from ethical education, but also from how those ethical examples and leaders have replaced history despite death threats, harsh adversaries, and their own worst fears.
But we want something else.
Whether you live in a dream, whether it’s the COVID-19 nightmare, or the “I didn’t get shocked” dream that the lucky and filthy rich still keep, there’s a prerequisite: wake up!
I sense that some other people would possibly already feel moral because they were trained in the classical Western ethics of Aristotle and Kant. Or they prefer the ancient Asian wisdom of Laotzu and Confucius.
OrArray like me, feel that there is a wonderful moral wisdom rooted in the minds of other cultures, such as the original aloha spirit of Hawaii or the Ubuntu spirit of Africa. Or they feel moral because of the teachings of their devoted faith.
Although I honor all these traditions and provide them to my students, I feel that nothing can be completed in the dream state.
If leaders only dream of re-election, and if the hedonists only dream of the next unmasked pool party, it’s time to wake them up and say, “If you’re a lay, follow the clinical rules, and if you’re religious, go up to those rules, you go up to those rules, your own religion directives such as “love your neighbor” and “do harm.”
Ethics can be very confusing because there are many wonderful cultural traditions and approaches. However, the ethics of the pandemic cross this Gordian knot of infinite principles and theories.
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The long codes of ethics we used to expand for establishments will now be simplified into three words: “Protect Your Neighbor.”
Since the American dream has become the American nightmare, answers to the long list of moral issues can only be known when we, and in particular our leaders, leave amnesia, denial, racism, the guilt movement, and sleepwalking.
It’s time not only to school ethics and be informed of the most productive practices of the greats. It’s time to wake up our leaders and ourselves.
Our complex ethical codes can be temporarily simplified on those days: “Wash your hands”. “Put on your mask.” “Separate six feet.” Behold, the Ten Commandments are reduced to three.
Tom Cooper is a professor at Emerson College and author, most recently, of “Doing the Right Thing: Twelve Portraits with Moral Courage.”