Penny Thoughts: Life is a Constant Laboratory for Morality

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of The West Alabama Watchman.

Both by disposition and by academic study, I suffer the wiles of being a philosopher, and in a practical sense that is what I am and that is what I do for mental relaxation – although my brothers are more inclined to see me as an incessant and prolific distributor of prime manure, which is also how they saw my course of academic study.

Their misgivings notwithstanding, I have pressed on for the past four-plus decades in the classroom either challenging or boring my students in any one of my three favorite areas of philosophy – logic, ethics, or epistemology (the study of the forms of knowledge and how we gain it). However, the course I enjoy teaching the most is ethics, moral philosophy, because it offers the most opportunity for students to make practical applications of their belief systems and articulate them in light of classical philosophers like Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche.

And as Nietzsche points out all, educators are philosophers by disposition in the first place.  Everything else follows from their inquiries and from that, their preparations of young minds. Also, in that sense, and being an apologist for Nietzsche anyway, I ended up in the most appropriate of professions for me – education, from public education to higher education.

Still, when it comes to general education and moral philosophy, I am encouraged and enthusiastic about the fact that education really does offer young minds a laboratory in which to apply their belief systems to the many practical moral dilemmas they face.

One very impressive moral event happened to one of my sons when he was in high school and on the math scholars team.  During late Spring, his senior year, his team had to travel to the State Math Scholars Competition. 

He was with three of his closest chums on this team. They had experienced great success with Math Scholars during the time these four young men had been together. They had come to know and truly respect each other since they all began together in the eighth grade. They were in sports, student government, National Honor Society, yearbook, and a host of other extracurricular activities together. Their bonds had grown immensely strong.

At State, their team placed second, but there was a rather dark pall, which overshadowed their success and which followed them home. I could tell that something was wrong because my usually exuberant son was unusually quiet when they returned.  He did not say anything.  He did not have to – Papa sensed his discomfort and left it alone.

When my son came home from school on Monday his discomfort had turned to abject depression, and his silence seethed into a time of confession – along with a plea for solution to a moral dilemma he was suffering.

Then, during the normal room check of the motel at which they were staying for the Math Competition, the coach, a math teacher, had discovered an empty pint bottle of whiskey in the room. After a brief, but unproductive interrogation, the math coach ordered the “four horsemen” of the math team to report to the Assistant Principal for Discipline’s Office the first thing Monday. 

The Assistant Principal had interrogated each of the young men individually after he had announced to them as a group that he would get to the bottom of this “scandal” if it were the last thing he ever did! It was obvious that this man was on a mission, and my son clearly understood its impact. You see, the question was: who was the party guilty of bringing the liquor to the room, or indeed, even on the trip. Not one of the four young men named him. And that young man was going to pay “dearly” as the Assistant Principal told me on the phone that evening. His mission also included calling each of the parents of these rapscallions.

My son’s dilemma was no different than any other adolescent – or the mafia. He wanted to remain loyal to the young man who was guilty, so the code of silence and not being a “narc” took precedence in his world. 

Ah, but there was something else which compounded things.  The Assistant Principal had declared that if no one had confessed or no one had “ratted” out the guilty boy, all of them would be suspended for the remainder of the year – two weeks at that point – and none of them would be able to participate in graduation exercises. Pretty stiff sentencing, but there was more. The Assistant Principal said he would write a letter to the Deans of each of the respective colleges they were to attend the following year and expose the entire sordid ordeal.

My son wanted to know what to do. He just could not give up his guilty friend because if he did, that young man stood a good chance of losing the scholarship Stanford had awarded him. Furthermore, the guilty young man had pleaded with the group not to tell.

When I suggested that telling the Assistant Principal what he wanted to know, my son’s face tightened and he just shook his head, “No.” I figured as much and proceeded to tell him just how much this “friend” was taking advantage of the bond these four young men had made over the years. In a calm fashion, I briefly reviewed Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche with him. Each of them would have let his “friend” know that it was his own responsibility to confess. Then I suggested that he get his group together one last time and try to prevail on their guilty friend to go to the Assistant Principal himself and let the others off the hook.

What was revealing for my son was gaining a different perspective on the issue of loyalty and the morality of secrecy.

Tuesday around noon, my son called me much relieved. The guilty young man had actually gone to the Assistant Principal’s Office with his father and all was resolved. The loyalty of the group had been preserved and the Assistant Principal had gotten what he wanted.

The lesson had been learned, but the group was never the same, and in my most recent conversation with my son he allowed that they never really stayed in contact after they left for college. Perhaps there was something in the tender innocence of remaining loyal to an unworthy cause, which brought on a sudden focus of moral introspection.

And until this column is printed, my son will never know that I had called the guilty young man’s father late that Monday evening. Fortunately, he held my position. But there, in an educational setting, four young men came to grips with perhaps their first significant moral dilemma and were exposed to lessons that many do not learn until years later.