Moral Literacy

Social critics, ranging from William Bennett to Derek Bok, have lamented the demise of formal moral education in American schools and universities. Ethics had once been such a major focus of higher education, they point out, that college seniors were required to take a year-long capstone course in moral philosophy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, ethics training of any sort became conspicuously absent, except for the occasional college ethics course.1 Although various efforts to revive ethics education have been attempted in recent years, it does seem that basic moral literacy, referring to a minimal ability to make considered decisions of right and wrong, is a skill that most people today lack, to varying degrees. Not that they are immoral, but moral decisions are usually reached through rough appeals to custom, largely blind adherence to religious dicta, or even “gut” feelings of what is right and wrong. By way of illustration, consider former President George W. Bush’s assessment of the moral character of Vladimir Putin, “He’s a good man. I feel it in my heart.” In fact, arguably few adults, even otherwise educated ones, are able to fully articulate the reasons for their decisions, much less to critically evaluate those decisions or defend them rationally against counter views. My purpose in this paper is not to try to diagnose the causes of the current dilemma regarding moral education, but rather, simply, to lay down the basic requirements of moral literacy, as well as offer some suggestions for how such literacy might be inculcated. For nearly two decades of teaching courses in practical ethics, I have witnessed the lack of moral literacy manifest itself in a number of ways. To use an analogy that I think not too hyperbolic, trying to teach a college course in, say, business ethics to students who lack basic moral literacy is not unlike trying to teach an English literature course to students who cannot read or write. Most (by far) of the students I teach have difficulty articulating or even conceiving of the need for reasons why they feel the way they do about something (for example, gay