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.