In this essay from 2001, Dennis Dutton (the man who puts together Arts & Letters Daily) responds to Toni Morrison, who suggested that colleges and universities should stop pretending to be dispassionate and disinterested and instead start inculcating their students with values and ethics (the link is to the Morrison lecture).  Now, this is a complicated issue where we can easily forget what side we’re supposed to be on.  The question at issue, I think, is: What kind of values and ethics do students learn in college, and at different colleges?  The answer is complicated, but Dutton offers some nice thoughts on how many colleges are already inculcating values and how those values are, well, dogmatic and forced (this link is the Dutton response to Morrison).

In fact, the most mandarin and exclusionary departments in the modern university are not the sciences or disciplines that traditionally claim some measure of objectivity. They are rather the very departments where denunciations of “objectivity” and disinterestedness are most frequently voiced: humanities departments that traffic in literary theory and Marxified cultural studies. Here obfuscation and jargon reign, normally used to give the dazzle of science to political agendas: theorists mimic rigor and profundity, often to enshroud in verbal fog the banality of what is actually being said.

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Doug Glanville played for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers from the mid 1990s to 2004.  He writes an op-ed for the Times, and it’s a refreshingly authentic and personal and fresh angle on the temptation to take steroids:

Human nature wants to put the brakes on that rate of change. While your clock is ticking, faster, stronger and younger players are setting up their lockers next to yours. They usually have better sound bites and lower salaries, too. In 1998, I was the new kid in Philadelphia, battling Lenny Dysktra for the center field job. Five years later, I was mentoring another new kid, Marlon Byrd, so he could replace me. Faced with that rate of career atrophy, players are capable of rash, self-serving and often irresponsible decisions. Enter steroids.

The best thing I’ve read on it so far.

People pricked up their ears last December when actor Will Smith said Hitler probably considered himself a good person. Smith raised an age-old question that the “science of the moral sense” tries to answer: What is morality, and how should it affect our actions?

In a meaty article for the New York Times, Harvard professor Steven Pinker says the science of morality uses psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology to explain our reactions to certain moral actions.

Pinker first explains the difference between a moralization and an opinion: 1) People see morality as universal; 2) People say immoral people deserve to be punished. Modern moralizations are always in flux. Smoking (once a lifestyle choice) has become a moral issue, and homosexuality (once a moral issue) has become a lifestyle choice.

How do we decide what’s moral and what’s not? Neuroscience says our brain plays a role. People with certain types of brain damage sometimes display moral callousness. When we make a non-utilitarian decision, it’s an emotional impulse triumphing over our rational side.

Do we have an innate moral sense? Pinker says we seem to know innately that we shouldn’t harm others and that we should practice fairness, preserve community, respect authority and guard purity. We prioritize these values differently, leading to our cultural and political divides.

How did we get this moral sense? Pinker says evolutionary biology explains it. Rhesus monkeys show the same reluctance to harm each other. We see respect for authority in the pecking order of the animal kingdom. Community protects our survival.

So is morality objective or a figment of our imagination? Pinker says evolutionary biology doesn’t debunk morality. He discounts God as a source for morality and says perhaps moral truths are like mathematical truths – objective, there for us to discover.

Does the science of morality kill morality dissecting it? Pinker says no; it actually advances morality “by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend.”

Kristina Robb Dover is a hospital chaplain, and she says that the Health and Wealth Heresy (ala Joel Osteen) is trickling into hospital chaplaincy.  This is evidenced, she argues, by two things:

The first is that the terminally ill patient is always right. Because he is on the threshold of death, he is presumed to enjoy greater access to virtue and judgment than is attainable by those who dwell in the land of the living. He attains a kind of sanctified status.

The second assumption is that death, embodying a “natural” transition to a carefree afterlife, is a good in itself.

Dover says that for a Christian chaplain, these two commonplaces of the death experience constitute “some disturbing theological implications.”

Disturbing Theological Implication #1: “[A]n orthodox Christian understanding of human sin and our need for divine pardon is outmoded and inadmissible. Guilt, regret, or a conviction of divine wrath only fosters unnecessary discomfort, and must therefore be eliminated.”

Disturbing Theological Implication #2: “The chaplain must leave his ‘theology’ at the door before entering a patient’s room. The chaplain’s primary purpose is to embrace the patient’s definitions of truth and salvation, whatever they might be, with the goal of helping him feel affirmed and, in turn, pain-free and comfortable.”

So, what’s a chaplain - or any minister who ministers to those who are dying - to do?

In a case reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo story, the father and mother of comatose 16-year-old Javona Peters are fighting over whether she lives or dies. Peters’ father wants his daughter to remain on life support, but her mother is seeking full custody so she can sue the hospital for malpractice … and potentially determine her daughter’s fate.

According to Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, the fate of the girl should be determined by the one “who speaks with the most loving and intimate knowledge of the daughter.” What do you think?

A 14-year-old Jehovah’s Witness died from leukemia Wednesday after a judge ruled that the state couldn’t force the boy to have a blood transfusion, even though it might have saved his life.

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Most college students will soon be getting their fall term grades. The Ethicist at the Times gets letters from readers, looking for advice on ethical matters.  One reader recently wrote:

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When Michael Hartmann was just a baby, he saved his 10-year-old sister’s life. At the time of his birth, Elisabeth was dying from Fanconi anemia, a disease that didn’t allow her body to make healthy blood. The blood from Michael’s umbilical cord was used to save her life. Coincidence?

Hardly. While still an embryo, Michael was selected from more than 40 other embryos his parents conceived outside the womb. He had the genetic material that could help Elisabeth.

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It’s not the first time the Rev. Earl Paulk has been engulfed in a sex scandal. But this time he’s in trouble for sex he had in 1973:

The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother’s wife and fathered a child by her. Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk’s family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test.

The secret is that Reverend Earl’s nephew, D.E. Paulk, is actually Reverend Earl’s son.

Then there’s the matter of Mona Brewer, a church employee who is suing Reverend Earl, his brother and their church. Brewer alleges that between 1989 and 2003, Reverend Earl manipulated her into an affair, saying it was her only path to salvation.

Disgusting.