What is ethical? And where should ethics be taught? There is quite a great deal of concern about ethics in the modern age. Is this concern warranted? Should ethics therefore be taught in college?

First, let me say that I believe that it is a right and a wrong, and that humans largely (with some disagreement) share a common sense of how to evaluate right and wrong. This does not mean that there is only one ethical code which we are all bound to robotically serve. It does mean that there is a limited range of behaviors that are tolerable within the realm of ethics. For example, there may be many marital arrangements which satisfy the demands of raising children -- man working, woman at home; man at home, woman working, man and woman both contributing to work. There is some scope to the acceptable approaches to marriage. However, neither of the parents working or making an effort to find work, and still trying to rear children, is certainly lacking morality and principle. This is only one example. There is a range of ethical behaviors that is not well-defined in today's society.

I use the example of marriage because it illustrates my second concern. Many people feel that ethics is learned primarily in the household -- from mother and father. But with divorce rates so high, broken marriages and child abuse so rampant, this may endanger the ethical rearing of youth. A single parent may not fail to instill ethical values in his or her child -- but a single, embittered and abusive parent certainly may. And there are a great number of such broken families in our society.

If the institution of marriage has difficulty in transmitting ethical values -- then maybe it is also in part due to a failure of schooling. After all, parents have only partial control over their children's upbringing. When the child comes of age and goes to school, a large part of the socialization process is ceded to the school, to teachers and peer groups.

Therefore in the crucial formative years of schooling should a child receive some exposure to ethical "training" beyond the simple discipline of going to school, behaving and doing one's work? And should this education end with high school or should it be continued into college? We are living in a complex age where we have a considerable degree of power over our environment. This power must be held responsible by future citizens; nuclear power and arsenals, economic might as a source of potential inequalities and environmental strain. In a complex age with powerful tools at our fingertips, we must not only understand these tools, we must understand morally our worlds and ourselves.

Some form of ethical education at the university level may be beneficial. The key difficulty here is how to establish such an education and to distinguish it from indoctrination; or advocacy of a shallow, state-sponsored belief. How, for instance, would religious moral issues be handled in a state-funded institution when we separate the powers of church and state? Some range or scope of ethical approaches must therefore be covered, yet ethics has already been defined as a limited range of moral behaviors. It may be that when we study our various ethical systems -- that we find more core points of agreement than disagreement. I leave you to think on this further. For now, I suggest that more formal attention to ethics is needed.