Values without virtues leaves us hooked on gratification
By Chris McGillion
December 22, 2004
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Research into the sexual practices of American college students has identified a new phenomenon known as "hooking up". This involves the usual gamut of sexual activity (from kissing to oral sex and intercourse), but among participants who typically know little about each other and want to know even less.
Moreover, it is not something they do "on the side" or between stable relationships (like an older generation's one-night stands). Hooking up is the norm for some young people and is replacing traditional dating and the old boyfriend/girlfriend coupling.
Some researchers warn that hooking up provides no relationship training and could detrimentally affect the ability of those involved to form committed partnerships over time.
The result could be more failed marriages, unstable families and unhappy lives.
Hooking up is not the only sign of moral slippage among young Americans. Consider the findings of the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, which has been tracking the moral disposition of American high school students for more than 10 years.
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AdvertisementIts latest survey shows that the number of students admitting to cheating in exams jumped from 61 per cent in 1992 to 74 per cent in 2002; the number who had stolen something from a shop within the previous 12 months rose from 31 per cent to 38 per cent, and the number who admitted lying to their parents and teachers had climbed from 83 per cent to 93 per cent.
These and similar trends have not gone unnoticed by Australian parents and educationalists.
In 2002 the federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, commissioned the Values Education Study to provide an informed basis for the promotion of values education in schools.
The final report of the study was published in November last year. It identified 10 values which schools should promote - including tolerance, honesty and ethical behaviour - and outlined educational strategies to that end.
Support for values education is growing. Eighty-three per cent of parents surveyed in the study strongly agreed with the proposition that values should be taught in schools.
But there are criticisms of this approach. First, many question whether values can be taught. How, for instance, do you teach courage or the ability to forgive?
Second, as the study notes, the development of students' capacity to reason about morality does not necessarily translate into moral conduct on their part. At the very least, what's taught in the classroom must be encouraged in the playground and reinforced by the ethic of the entire school.
Third is the protest that all values are relative and thus to champion any particular set is not only arbitrary but oppressive.
There is a more fundamental criticism of values education, however.
Possessing values is considered necessary for us to become responsible human beings. They tend to be defined by moral rules (such as telling the truth) and can be learnt, measured and compared because they are concrete outcomes.
For that reason, however, these rules can seem remote from a person's sense of self. And so when other things by which the self is defined or judged (such as success, wealth or sexual gratification) come into conflict with moral rules, the latter are easily broken.
The same cannot be said of virtues. Virtues are not moral outcomes but the capacities (from the Latin root virtus, meaning "power") that enable us to accomplish them.
Virtues are the good habits out of which character is formed. Because character is closely linked with personality, a virtuous person will seek to do good even against temptations to do otherwise - and often at a cost. Virtues tie us to the goals of a practice (be it education, the law, love or friendship) so that we embrace them as our own.
Twenty years ago, in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, one of the world's leading contemporary philosophers, the Scottish-born Alasdair MacIntyre, argued that when people are motivated not by a culture that encourages an internal concern to do good, but instead by one that operates on a system of external rewards, all the rules in the world are not going to prevent moral decay.
The reason is that people within that culture are disengaged from what they are doing: they're simply in it for the money, or the status, or the sex.
Is it really surprising, then, if young people behave in sexually irresponsible ways when their culture bombards them with messages about how their maturity and sophistication are expressed in sexual conquest?
Is it any wonder that students cheat in exams when education is marketed to them as a stepping stone to the material rewards of a career?
One thing young people are very good at is identifying hypocrisy. Thousands of websites are dedicated to the subject in the lyrics of popular songs.
But perhaps a former youth, Bob Dylan, put it as well as any when, in his 1965 lament It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), he wrote: Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their mark Made everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much Is really sacred.
When nothing much is really sacred, we do what's most likely to achieve our goal, what's most convenient, or what we can get away with. We are simply not geared up as a society for virtue. Education in virtue is much harder than education in values. Perhaps that's why the word virtue hardly rates a mention in the 253 pages of the Values Education Study.
What it would require is not that morality be better taught but that the teaching of everything else undergoes a counter-cultural revolution.
Is that a price we are willing to pay?
-----
Discuss.
By Chris McGillion
December 22, 2004
Page Tools
Email to a friend Printer format
Research into the sexual practices of American college students has identified a new phenomenon known as "hooking up". This involves the usual gamut of sexual activity (from kissing to oral sex and intercourse), but among participants who typically know little about each other and want to know even less.
Moreover, it is not something they do "on the side" or between stable relationships (like an older generation's one-night stands). Hooking up is the norm for some young people and is replacing traditional dating and the old boyfriend/girlfriend coupling.
Some researchers warn that hooking up provides no relationship training and could detrimentally affect the ability of those involved to form committed partnerships over time.
The result could be more failed marriages, unstable families and unhappy lives.
Hooking up is not the only sign of moral slippage among young Americans. Consider the findings of the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, which has been tracking the moral disposition of American high school students for more than 10 years.
Advertisement
AdvertisementIts latest survey shows that the number of students admitting to cheating in exams jumped from 61 per cent in 1992 to 74 per cent in 2002; the number who had stolen something from a shop within the previous 12 months rose from 31 per cent to 38 per cent, and the number who admitted lying to their parents and teachers had climbed from 83 per cent to 93 per cent.
These and similar trends have not gone unnoticed by Australian parents and educationalists.
In 2002 the federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, commissioned the Values Education Study to provide an informed basis for the promotion of values education in schools.
The final report of the study was published in November last year. It identified 10 values which schools should promote - including tolerance, honesty and ethical behaviour - and outlined educational strategies to that end.
Support for values education is growing. Eighty-three per cent of parents surveyed in the study strongly agreed with the proposition that values should be taught in schools.
But there are criticisms of this approach. First, many question whether values can be taught. How, for instance, do you teach courage or the ability to forgive?
Second, as the study notes, the development of students' capacity to reason about morality does not necessarily translate into moral conduct on their part. At the very least, what's taught in the classroom must be encouraged in the playground and reinforced by the ethic of the entire school.
Third is the protest that all values are relative and thus to champion any particular set is not only arbitrary but oppressive.
There is a more fundamental criticism of values education, however.
Possessing values is considered necessary for us to become responsible human beings. They tend to be defined by moral rules (such as telling the truth) and can be learnt, measured and compared because they are concrete outcomes.
For that reason, however, these rules can seem remote from a person's sense of self. And so when other things by which the self is defined or judged (such as success, wealth or sexual gratification) come into conflict with moral rules, the latter are easily broken.
The same cannot be said of virtues. Virtues are not moral outcomes but the capacities (from the Latin root virtus, meaning "power") that enable us to accomplish them.
Virtues are the good habits out of which character is formed. Because character is closely linked with personality, a virtuous person will seek to do good even against temptations to do otherwise - and often at a cost. Virtues tie us to the goals of a practice (be it education, the law, love or friendship) so that we embrace them as our own.
Twenty years ago, in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, one of the world's leading contemporary philosophers, the Scottish-born Alasdair MacIntyre, argued that when people are motivated not by a culture that encourages an internal concern to do good, but instead by one that operates on a system of external rewards, all the rules in the world are not going to prevent moral decay.
The reason is that people within that culture are disengaged from what they are doing: they're simply in it for the money, or the status, or the sex.
Is it really surprising, then, if young people behave in sexually irresponsible ways when their culture bombards them with messages about how their maturity and sophistication are expressed in sexual conquest?
Is it any wonder that students cheat in exams when education is marketed to them as a stepping stone to the material rewards of a career?
One thing young people are very good at is identifying hypocrisy. Thousands of websites are dedicated to the subject in the lyrics of popular songs.
But perhaps a former youth, Bob Dylan, put it as well as any when, in his 1965 lament It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), he wrote: Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their mark Made everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much Is really sacred.
When nothing much is really sacred, we do what's most likely to achieve our goal, what's most convenient, or what we can get away with. We are simply not geared up as a society for virtue. Education in virtue is much harder than education in values. Perhaps that's why the word virtue hardly rates a mention in the 253 pages of the Values Education Study.
What it would require is not that morality be better taught but that the teaching of everything else undergoes a counter-cultural revolution.
Is that a price we are willing to pay?
-----
Discuss.
Otherwise, if you did read the whole article... I think you should read it again.
