- 30% admitted to stealing from a store in the past year;
- 42% lie to save money;
- and a whopping 60% cheated on an exam.
While 26% admitted to lying on the survey itself, 93% of respondents were "satisfied with their personal ethics and character."
I think these results are a sign of something, but I'm not totally sure of what. Most of all, I think it is failure of society that we facilely consider "ethics" to be whether or not we follow the rules. If these teens break the rules of "Do not steal/lie/cheat" yet still are basically satisfied with their behavior, then this means that those rules as constituted in the survey are not part of the teens' moral narrative. It is our responsibility to buttress that narrative with the virtues we profess.
2 comments:
I'm taking a class next semester titled "Christian Moral Ethics." It is part of the Theology requirement for my MA. Perhaps then I'll be able to speak more intelligently on ethics. For now, I am unsure of the distinction between morality and ethics. For the teens in the survey, I'm not terribly surprised by the lying and stealing numbers. In high school most of my friends, including the ones from church did both. What puzzles me is the cheating on exams. Aren't the teachers watching? Aren't they students afraid of repercussions? I'm also interested in the demographics of the study. They surveyed 30,000 students which seems to be a good number. I am interested in what the numbers showed about differences in Urban vs. non urban students. I also wonder what this means for youth pastors and the church.
I'm teaching Christian Ethics this semeseter at Eden Seminary. From my point of view, there's no significant difference between "morality" and "ethics." The former refers to one's moral code while the latter can sometimes refer only to the philosophical study of morality.
Neither repercussions nor rules seem to be preventing this kind of behavior in the teens. I suspect that neither stronger rules or more severe repercussions would make a difference. We require a more compelling narrative of caring for one another.
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