Dr. Robert Kane is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin.

Values and Ethics How do you teach values and ethics to university undergraduates? That question has haunted me for years. I don't mean merely teaching what individuals or cultures or societies or religions said or believed about good or evil, right or wrong. We professors do that all the time. We tell students what the great philosophers and literary figures wrote about values, what the major religions believe, how values differ from culture to culture and society to society, how ideas about right and wrong have changed through history (usury, or lending money for profit, was thought to be a sin in medieval times but is considered a great good in our own time), and how people's values influence and are influenced by their religion, politics, biology, culture, and environment. But can we teach what really is good or evil, right or wrong objectively speaking-not merely what has been believed, but what is worth believing-without seeming to merely add our own subjective bias or point of view to the mix? It is a daunting problem and an important one. Undergraduates hunger for direction in matters of values, as everyone does-especially in these times when we live in a Tower of Babel of conflicting points of view about fundamental values. For me, this was not just a problem of teaching or research, but a personal problem. I could scarcely convince students something is objectively worth believing in the welter of conflicting messages we receive if I could not convince myself. Nor were teaching and research separable in this case. Knowing what to say in the classroom depended on finding my own way through the Tower of Babel and finding that way depended on answering tough questions from students who would not accept simple or facile answers. My attempts to answer those questions for more than a quarter of a century led to my writing a book, Through the Moral Maze, on ideas developed in the course of teaching at The University of Texas. It is ironic that the qualities of open-mindedness and objectivity so valued in universities make it difficult to pronounce what is "objectively" or universally right or wrong. Anthropologists and sociologists describe the values of different societies or cultures, but it is bad academic form to add in the classroom that one of these societies or cultures has the right set of values and all others are inferior. This is viewed as interjecting a preference or point of view into one's research, an offense against the scientific ideal of objectivity. (Anthropologists are especially wary of doing this since they were charged early on with imposing Western values on the "primitive" cultures they studied.) Thus, paradoxically, when the ideal of "objectivity" (which works so well in the natural sciences) is transmuted into the social sciences and humanities, it actually inhibits pronouncements about objective and universal rights and wrongs that hold for all peoples and all cultures; and, as a result, when it comes to values, the university, with its credo of "openness" and "objectivity," can end up standing for nothing in particular. As a philosopher, I thought this paradox worth pondering because it reflects a problem that pervades not only universities, but the whole of modern culture. We live in a world of conflicting points of view about fundamental values-the Tower of Babel. In such a world, there is a deep philosophical problem involved in trying to defend the claim that one point of view is right and all others wrong. To argue that one view-your own, for example-is objectively right and others wrong, you must present evidence. Yet the evidence is gathered and interpreted from one's own point of view. If the dispute is about values, some of the evidence about good and evil is not going to be accepted by those who fundamentally disagree with your values. Your values also need to be defended by other fundamental values and beliefs (perhaps you will refer to the Bible or Koran or some other sacred text) that are not going to be accepted by those who have basic disagreements with your point of view. (Even those who share your sacred text may not interpret it as you do). A troubling circularity is a natural consequence of such debates-the circularity of defending your own point of view from your own point of view, of defending your values in terms of other values you also hold, but others may not. The problem arises because we inevitably see the world from some particular point of view limited by culture and history. How can we climb out of our historically and culturally conditioned perspectives to find an objective standpoint on values above all the competing points of view? Natural science seems to have the requisite objectivity, but this is because, and to the degree that, it remains neutral about values. This problem haunts the modern intellectual landscape. One sees variations of it in many fields of study and everywhere it produces doubts among reflective people about the possibility of justifying belief in objective intellectual, cultural, and moral standards. A natural but controversial reaction to this problem is common in free and democratic societies like our own. People think to themselves that since it seems impossible to demonstrate that their point of view is the right one (and since everyone else is in the same condition), the only proper stance to take is an attitude of "openness" or tolerance toward other points of view. Judgments about good and evil, right or wrong, they reason, are personal matters and should not be imposed on others against their will. Hasn't much of the evil of human history come from those who thought they had "the correct view" and had the right to impose it on others? But such an attitude of openness or tolerance, though it comes natural to persons reared in democratic societies, is often disparaged by theorists and social critics. Allan Bloom, in his The Closing of the American Mind, argues that such openness (an "openness of indifference") is the scourge of our times, infecting society, education, and young people in perverse ways because it leads to relativism-the belief that no point of view is any better than any other-and hence to an indifference to objective truth and absolute right. I think Bloom is wrong about the consequences of such openness. What I came to realize in my research and teaching is that openness, properly conceived, does not lead to relativism or indifference, but (quite the contrary) to a belief in some universal values. This may seem surprising to say in the current intellectual climate, but I think it is true. To see why, the first step is to view openness to other points of view on matters of value not as an invitation to indifference, but as a way of expanding our minds beyond our own limited perspectives to find out what is true from every perspective (objectively true), not just from our own perspective. Openness is thereby viewed as a way of searching for the objective truth about values, not a denial of that objective truth. This is the proper role of openness in universities. It is how "openness" and "objectivity" are supposed to function in the natural sciences, for example, where they function well, requiring consideration of theories opposed to one's own and restricting undue bias in favor of one's own-all in the interests of finding the objective truth about nature. Why not think of openness in the search for objective values in the same way? Systems of values (as great sages, like Confucius and the author of the Bhagavad-Gita, remind us) are not just abstract theories able to be tested in a laboratory; they are ways of life ultimately only tested by being lived. So openness to systems of values other than one's own (to discover what is true about values from every point of view) would mean respecting other ways of life, letting them be lived or experimented with or tested in a way that is appropriate for values, that is, in action or practice. We can now see why people have shied away from this line of thought. Does it mean respecting or tolerating every point of view and allowing it to be lived, which would include the ways of life of the Hitlers, Stalins, ruthless dictators, killers and other evildoers of this world. Then openness really would amount to a relativism of indifference. But the fact is that such openness does not imply respect for every point of view. To the contrary, it turns out that you cannot open your mind to every point of view in the sense of respecting every way of life. There are situations in life (many in fact) in which it is impossible to respect every point of view. The idea is to "open your mind to all other points of view in order to find the (objective) truth about values." But the truth you find is not that "you should open your mind to all points of view." Openness of mind is an initial attitude in the search for truth, but openness of indifference or relativism is not the final one. Why is this so? Consider a situation where you are walking down the street and see a woman being assaulted and robbed in an alley. If you try to prevent the assault or call for help, you will not be respecting the point of view of the assailant by interfering with his desires and purposes. If you just "walk on by" when you could have helped, you will not be respecting the point of view of the woman being assaulted. The fact is that you cannot have it both ways in such situations; you cannot respect both points of view. When William Kidd and his pirates attacked Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, pillaging and raping, some of the resident men with pacifist beliefs would not protect their women. In effect, they were not choosing a non-violent world in which everyone's desires and purposes were respected. They were choosing that the desires of the pirates be respected and not the desires of their own women. So there are situations in life in which, when you are thrust into them, you cannot treat every point of view or way of life with respect, no matter what you do. You cannot be "open" to every point of view. When such situations occur, I say that the "moral sphere" has "broken down"-the moral sphere being the sphere in which every way of life can be respected. When the moral sphere breaks down, we must treat some ways of life as less worthy of respect than others. But which ones? For guidance at this point, we must return to the original ideal of respect for all, or openness. Recall that this ideal was not assumed to be the final truth, but a guide in a search for that truth. (Montaigne said that ideals are like the stars to the ancient mariners. We never reach them but we guide our path by them.) Thus when the moral sphere breaks down, we cannot follow the ideal of respect for all to the letter, but we can follow it in spirit by trying to restore and preserve conditions in which the ideal of respect for all can be followed once again. We must try to restore and preserve it by stopping those who have broken it and made it impossible for others to follow the ideal. In our examples, that means stopping the assailant and the pirates, by force if we must, since their actions broke the sphere-which answers the question of who is to be treated as less worthy of respect when the moral sphere breaks down and it is no longer possible to treat everyone with respect. Now stand back for a moment and consider what all this means. It means that the attitude of openness to all ways of life, when put to the test in practice, does not lead to relativism and indifference, as critics like Bloom suggest, but actually leads to the conclusion that some ways of life are less worthy of respect than others. In other words, relativism-or the belief that every view is as good as any other-like openness, turns out to be an impossible ideal when put in practice. What was said of the assailant in the alley and of the pirates, can be said of the Hitlers, Stalins, murderers, rapists, oppressors, exploiters, and other evildoers of the world. By their actions, they place themselves outside the moral sphere and make their ways of life less worthy of respect by making it impossible for others to respect them and everyone else too. We can look at the above line of reasoning in another way. I argue in my book that there are two ways of searching for absolute values (those that hold for all persons and all points of view) in a pluralist world of conflicting points of view. The "old way" was to position yourself in one of those points of view-your own-and argue that it was the right view and every other view wrong. But this way founders on the circularity problem discussed above. The other way is to open your mind initially to all points of view in order to find out what is true from every point of view. This way you lift from yourself the burden of proving your point of view is absolutely right and every other view wrong, and place the burden of proof on everyone equally to prove themselves right or wrong by their actions. Some ways of life will then make themselves less worthy of respect by breaking the moral sphere and thus make it impossible for others to treat them and everyone else with respect. What then can be said about the rightness of your own point of view? It is to be treated no differently than the others. If you break the moral sphere then you make your view less worthy of respect by others. This is burden of proof enough for anyone. For the "proof" (whether for your way of life or for others) is not carried out by "arguing" in the abstract that one view is better than others, but by how you live and act, just as we should expect for a theory of ethics or values. Do we have to wait till someone actually breaks the moral sphere and shows themselves less worthy before intervening? No, because respect for the ideal requires not only restoring the moral sphere when it has broken down, but also preserving it from breakdown in the future. We would not be respecting the ideal to the degree possible if we failed to take reasonable steps to forestall future breakdowns. Thus we punish criminals not only to stop them here and now (restore the sphere), but to deter them and others from committing similar acts in the future (to preserve the sphere). Likewise, we can act preemptively if we see that the moral sphere is about to be broken. Those who read Hitler's Mein Kampf could see that his life-plan was a moral sphere breaker, and they had every right to intervene by force if they saw he would carry it out. Unfortunately, we know that many of Hitler's contemporaries could not believe he meant what he said. Along with relativism, the existence of exceptions to traditional moral commandments (thou shall not kill, lie, steal, cheat) is another source of confusion about values in the modern world. For example, self-defense and just wars are commonly recognized exceptions to the one rule against killing. But questions arise about exceptions. Where do you draw the line on them? And if moral commandments have exceptions, can they be universal or absolute? What our reasoning shows is that exceptions to moral rules can be dealt with in the same way as relativism. For exceptions to rules arise at just that point where relativism fails-where the moral sphere breaks down. Violence and force are not usually allowed (inside the moral sphere), but when the moral sphere breaks down (as in assaults or warfare), violence and force may be needed to restore it. Take another traditional commandment-thou shall not lie. Lying usually means not treating others with respect, using them as means to one's own ends. But exceptions are possible. In a test case often used by teachers of ethics, the following occurs. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo arrive at your door and ask if a Jewish family is hiding on your farm. You are in fact hiding a family, but should you tell a lie? In this case most people feel an exception to the rule against lying may be in order. But why? Notice that this case is structurally similar to the assault in the alley. The moral sphere has broken down because you (the farm owner) cannot treat everyone with respect for their purposes and desires in this situation. If you tell the truth to the Gestapo, you choose to favor their purposes over the Jewish family's. If you lie, you respect the Jewish family's purposes, but not the Gestapo's. Again, you cannot have it both ways. The only question is who will be treated as less worthy of respect, not whether someone must be; and that should be the ones who broke the sphere, the Gestapo. You should lie. It is not that lying is merely permissible in this case. It is the right thing to do. The very same ideal which tells you that lying is usually wrong (inside the moral sphere) tells you that it can be the right thing to do when the moral sphere breaks down. And so it would be also if someone forced you to play a game of cards threatening to kill your children if you lost. Cheating is usually wrong (inside the moral sphere) but in this case (where the moral sphere has badly broken down) it would be right to cheat in any way you could. In such ways, the above reasoning supports many of the traditional ethical commandments endorsed by the major world religions (against killing, lying, cheating) and many of the commonly recognized exceptions to these commandments as well. The exceptions are not ad hoc; they follow naturally from the principles themselves. We see why pacifism is right inside the moral sphere, but cannot be the generally right when the moral sphere breaks down. I also argue to my students that this reasoning leads to the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") in one of its most plausible traditional readings-respect the ways of others as you want your own way of life to be respected-up to the point where the moral sphere breaks down. One can also derive in the same way the Jeffersonian rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness upon which our Constitution and those of other modern democracies rest-to respect others' ways of life is to respect their right to live and pursue happiness as they wish-up to the point again of moral sphere breakdown. These are remarkable results. Starting with "openness" and "objectivity" toward all points of view and ways of life-the ideals that are suppose to motivate the search for truth in universities and which work so well in the natural sciences-we do not arrive at relativism or indifference but rather at ethical principles like the Golden Rule and the Mosaic commandments that are deeply embedded in virtually all the major religious and wisdom traditions of human history. We also arrive at ideas of universal human rights (to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) that underlie modern free and democratic societies from the same principles. In his classic treatise, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill expressed the belief that by maintaining a condition of openness and allowing all points of view to be heard, the truth would emerge. My argument is a version of this claim: by being initially open to all points of view, the "ethical" truth emerges that some ways of life are more worthy of respect than others, and some less worthy. So, even while we allow all views to be heard in universities, we need not stand by mutely testifying to the doctrine that no view is any better than any other. Indeed, we cannot do that if our goal is to remain as open as possible to all in the search for truth. The cherished commitment to openness and academic freedom in universities is not a prelude to indifference or a way of standing for nothing in particular. It is ultimately an ethical commitment: "Be open if you wish to understand other points of view. That may be the correct attitude to start with if you want to find the truth, but remember that this attitude does not mean anything goes. You cannot take such an attitude of openness and not be willing at times to stand up and affirm that some ways of acting really are right and others wrong, and that some ways of life really are better than others, more worthy of respect, and some less worthy. You cannot cherish openness and tolerance and say anything less."