Thursday, March 3, 2011

One Honest Ninja

After parking my Jeep my 6-year old son decided that he was going to exit the vehicle via his open back seat window instead of through the door.  Being a Jeep its a long way down to the pavement so I told my ninja to open the door like a little man.  I few moments later I saw him standing on the ground but I had never heard his door open or close, so I asked him if he had crawled out of the window after I had told him not to. I could see him thinking about it and he finally confessed that he had.  I couldn't have been more proud of my son.  He chose to tell the hard truth instead of the easy lie, his moral compass was aligned correctly.

I've come to believe that morality and ethics have no relation to age nor intelligence.  As a matter of fact, if there is a relationship at all its probably inversely related. As an example, with increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.

How is it that intelligent people loose their moral compass that they once had when they were young?  Do some believe that ethics and morality are inherent within intelligence and therefore any decision that they make must be automatically ethical?  Maybe intelligence trumps morality and a few are somehow smarter than those that have spent lifetimes defining and framing ethical and moral issues.  I'm unsure.  All I know is that there is far too much dishonesty in our world, however we all thankfully have the power to change that, one truth at a time.

Addendum:  I posted to the blog and then went out on a long trail run.  During my jaunt through the woods I began to wonder where on the Spiritual-Intellectual-Physical triangle does morality and ethics lie?  It seems clear to me that they are more aligned with the spiritual rather than the intellectual, which explains why learning ethics in the classroom was so much noise for me.  You can't learn moral behavior and ethics without something touching your soul.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

1. Know little of spiritual.
2. From my viewpoint, morality is circumstantial.
3. Agrarian societies tend to be moral for a lot of practical reasons. The fellahin, were as honest as their counterparts among campensinos or US farmers.
4. Their urban cousins would lie about what they had for breakfast.
5. As our society distances itself from its rural roots, expediency is increasingly prized -or at, at least, tolerated. A characteristic of urban societies going back to ancient times.
6. Honesty and what we consider good general moral character is a desirable trait in a soldier, again for very practical reasons.
7. See cracks appearing in the fabric of our great society as we depart from the moral uprightness of our forbearers.
8. The ethical basis of my adherence to biblical moral imperatives is different than yours.
9. Hope my children do not find the moral instruction they are receiving to be disabling.
10. Congratulations on your son. He is mirroring a person I much admire.
V/R JWest