The main question I began to consider yesterday concerns the grounds people are relying upon in order to make the judgment that these parents and the others involved were doing something morally wrong.
The post was based on an article written by Jennifer Graham at Deseret News. In her column Graham says this:
Steve Mintz, an ethicist and professor emeritus at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, believes a cultural problem seethes beneath what prosecutors call "Operation Varsity Blues," and that until Americans can admit their moral compass is askew and take steps to fix it, the nation will continue to suffer scandals like this.Well, I agree with everything Mintz said, but it's what he didn't say that's most important. What he didn't tell us is why what these parents and their abettors did is wrong. Is it wrong because, as he put it, it violates "conventional standards of morality"? That can't be right.
“There is no way to justify this type of activity. It reflects a society where people no longer live by conventional standards of morality," Mintz said. “I can’t imagine any of these parents stopped and thought, ‘Is what I’m doing harming others? Am I taking away a position from other kids who might be more worthy?’
This is what ethics is all about — considering how your actions might affect others before you do something, not after the fact, after you’re caught. To look at this one incident in isolation is wrong, in my point of view," he said.
What makes those standards obligatory? Just because the consensus opinion has always endorsed them why does that make them right? What if a society's conventional standards affirmed slavery, infant sacrifice or honor killing? Would those practices then be right and would opposing them be wrong?
It would be very helpful if Mintz would answer these fundamental metaethical questions, for if they're left unanswered then all of our theorizing about ethical standards amounts to little more than hand-waving.
Graham continues:
Mintz believes that a creeping moral nihilism, coupled with a widespread belief that few people face serious consequences for ethical wrongdoing, have erased a bright line of right and wrong, leaving in its place a “gray streak.” He said that a deterioration of public discourse is further evidence of the problem, saying “civility and ethics go hand in hand.”What Mintz apparently is reluctant to come right out and say is that a secular society in fact has no solid basis for making moral judgments. Only if there is a transcendent, personal moral authority who has somehow revealed moral truth to us can any moral judgment be anything more than an expression of one's own personal tastes and feelings.
“For many years, we’ve had the Golden Rule, but it’s hard to say that this is still the basic ethical or moral rule in society anymore,” Mintz said.
In order to be binding people must believe that moral obligations are imposed upon them by something beyond themselves and beyond society. They must believe that morality is objectively real. That harming others is objectively, not merely subjectively, wrong and that those who harm others will ultimately be held accountable for their actions even if they get away with it in this life.
The reason the Golden Rule lacks the authority in people's lives that perhaps it once had is that fewer people today believe that the Golden Rule expresses the will of God. For too many folks the rule that we should treat others as we want to be treated is no more, and probably a lot less, authoritative than the rule that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others.
Morality must be divinely sanctioned if it's to have any power to motivate people to override their desires and appetites, but in a society which has abandoned the concept of the divine it's very hard to say why it's wrong to yield to those desires and appetites, whether or not doing so results in harm to others.
Maybe this is why no one in Graham's article offers an explanation for why cheating to get into college is really wrong. Unless they're willing to invoke God's law there's simply no way to support the claim that cheating is objectively wrong, but, of course, invoking God is no longer fashionable.