Ethics

There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a few weeks ago that captured perfectly our current dither over ethics. A group of businesspeople were gathered around a conference table, and the chairman was saying something like this: "Flemmer won't be with us today. He called in ethical."

We don't teach formal courses in ethics at ConVal, but any time one teaches literature, ethical questions arise, and they often provide the richest, most surprising, and occasionally disheartening class discussions. One of my colleagues, Jackie Kelley, was recently teaching her Modern Literature class Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In it, one of the characters steals a fountain pen. It's an important moment because the character realizes, in a flash of desperate inspiration, that stealing the pen represents everything that's wrong with his life.One of Jackie's students took a more mundane view: "Unless it's a really expensive pen, it's no big deal."This comment inspired Jackie to conduct an informal survey of her students' attitudes about what's ethical behavior. Here's what they said:"I think it's ethical as long as it doesn't hurt anyone but you.""If it benefits you, do it.""A store wouldn't close because you took a Gummi Bear.""My code of ethics is not to break the actual law, other than traffic violations.""No one can be completely ethical.""Eating a few grapes in a store is OK; eating a can of beans is not.""Ethics are only about yourself.""Little lies are OK.""It's OK to tell your parents you are going one place, then go another. It keeps them from having to worry."

These revelations, however dismaying, are not cause to "call in ethical," to avoid contamination. The world is the way it is, and we should not be surprised that young people are just as ethical or unethical as the world they live in. How many of us can honestly say we have never acted on one of the principles these students set forth?

I console myself by remembering that these are teenagers, and therefore capable of change. I dedicate myself to teaching them great literature, in which people who live their lives according to such "ethics" are inevitably punished by the same dreary self-centeredness those beliefs celebrate. But I remind myself of something Oscar Wilde is reported to have said: "A novel is a story in which the good end well and the wicked end poorly. That is why we call it fiction."