Can We Teach Virtue?

There’s an old saying: “You can’t legislate morality.”

To which I’m tempted to reply: “No, but you can always find a judge willing to make an end-run around the legislature.”

However, let that pass. My topic for today is not legislating virtue, but teaching it. I take as my text a recent essay entitled “The Death of Honesty” by William Damon of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.(1)

After some initial discussion of circumstances in which departure from strict adherence to truth-telling is morally permissible—the white lies that grease our social interactions, the perennial Nazi-at-the-door thought experiment—Damon observes that:

A basic intent to be truthful, along with an assumption that people can be generally taken at their word, is required for all sustained civilized dealings.

Why does he think this is so?

No civilization can tolerate a fixed expectation of dishonest communications without falling apart from a breakdown in mutual trust. All human relations rely upon confidence that those in the relations will, as a rule, tell the truth. Honesty builds and solidifies a relationship with trust; and too many breaches in honesty can corrode relations beyond repair. Friendships, family, work, and civic relations all suffer whenever dishonesty comes to light. The main reason that no one wants to be known as a liar is that people shun liars because they can’t be trusted.

In other words, truth-telling is the lime in the mortar of mutual trust, and mutual trust is the cement of society.

So far, Damon is trodding ground well-worn by Aristotle, Roman moralists like Cicero (right), and Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant.

After this prolegomenon, he abords his real thesis: American society today is suffering a crisis of more-than-ordinary dishonesty, and we had better reinstitute the idea of honesty as a private and public virtue, if we know what is good for us.

. . . Although truthfulness is essential for good human relationships and personal integrity, it is often abandoned in pursuit of other life priorities.

Indeed, there may be a perception in many key areas of contemporary life—law, business, politics, among others—that expecting honesty on a regular basis is a naïve and foolish attitude, a “loser’s” way of operating. Such a perception is practically a mandate for personal dishonesty and a concession to interpersonal distrust. When we no longer assume that those who communicate with us are at least trying to tell the truth, we give up on them as trustworthy persons and deal with them only in a strictly instrumental manner. The bounds of mutual moral obligation dissolve, and the laws of the jungle reemerge.

Our serious problem today is not simply that many people routinely tell lies. As I have noted, people have departed from the truth for one reason or another all throughout human history. The problem now is that we seem to be reaching a dysfunctional tipping point in which an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed in our society. If this is indeed the case, the danger is that the bonds of trust important in any society, and essential for a free and democratic one, will dissolve so that the kinds of discourse required to self-govern will become impossible.

What evidence is there that this is true? Here is what Damon has to say:

What are the signs of this in contemporary society? In professional and business circles, a now-familiar complaint is, “It used to be your word was good, but those days are gone.” In print, broadcast, and online news coverage, journalism has lost credibility with much of the public for its perceived biases in representing the facts. In civic affairs, political discourse is no longer considered to be a source of genuine information. Rather, it is assumed that leaders make statements merely to posture for effect, and not to engage in discussion or debate. In such an environment, facts may be manipulated or made up in service of a predetermined interest, not presented accurately and then examined in good faith. This is troubling, because civic leaders set the tone for communications throughout the public sphere.

Damon then rightly notes that nowhere is the virtue of honesty more critical than in our educational institutions:

Most troubling of all is that honesty is no longer a priority in many of the settings where young people are educated. The future of every society depends upon the character development of its young. It is in the early years of life—the first two decades especially—when basic virtues that shape character are acquired. Although people can learn, grow, and reform themselves at any age, this kind of learning becomes increasingly difficult as habits solidify over time. Honesty is a prime example of a virtue that becomes habitual over the years if practiced consistently—and the same can be said about dishonesty.

Honesty is the character virtue most closely linked to every school’s academic mission. In matters of “academic integrity,” which generally revolve around cheating, schools have a primary responsibility to convey to students the importance of honesty as a practical and ethical virtue. Unfortunately, many of our schools today are failing this responsibility.

Damon rightly dwells on this point, feeling that he has put his finger on the pulse of what he considers the crisis of dishonesty in American society:

Of all the breeches that can tear deeply into the moral fabric of a school, cheating is among the most damaging, because it throws in doubt the school’s allegiance to truth and fairness. Cheating in school is unethical for at least four reasons: 1) it gives students who cheat an unfair advantage over those who do not cheat; 2) it is an act of dishonesty in a setting dedicated to a quest for truthful knowledge, 3) it is a violation of trust between student and teacher; and 4) it disrespects the code of conduct and the social order of the school.  As such, one would expect that cheating would provide educators with an ideal platform for imparting the key moral standards of honesty, integrity, trust, and fairness.

Damon goes on to describe some well-known instances of cheating on the part of teachers, as well as pupils. He concludes by reflecting on what ought to be done about the situation:

With such prominent and recent instances of cheating among students and teachers today, one would expect a concerted effort to articulate and promote the value of honesty in our schools. Yet school programs regarding academic integrity consist of little more than a patchwork of vaguely-stated prohibitions and half-hearted responses. Our schools vacillate between routine neglect and a circle-the wagons reaction if the problem boils over into a public media scandal. There is little consistency, coherence, or transparency in many school policies.

It is practically impossible to find a school that treats academic integrity as a moral issue by employing revealed incidents of cheating to communicate to its student body values such as honesty, respect for rules, and trust. In my own observations, I have noticed a palpable lack of interest among teachers and staff in discussing the moral significance of cheating with students. The problem here is the low priority of honesty in our agenda for schooling specifically and child-rearing in general.

In former days, there was not much hesitancy in our society about using a moral language to teach children essential virtues such as honesty. For us today, it can be a culture shock to leaf through old editions of the McGuffey Readers, used in most American schools until the mid-twentieth century, to see how readily educators once dispensed unambiguous moral lessons to students. Nowadays, when cheating is considered by some teachers to be an excusable response to a difficult assignment, or even a form of pro-social activity, our society risks a future of moral numbness brought on by a decline of honesty and all the virtues that rely on it. As the Founders of our republic warned, the failure to cultivate virtue in citizens can be a lethal threat to any democracy.

In other words, America’s teachers are failing in their duty to inculcate honesty in today’s students, not primarily because they approve of dishonesty—though apparently some of them do—but rather because honesty is a virtue, virtues must be discussed in moral terms, and moral language is considered “inappropriate” for school.

So, can we teach virtue? Of course, we can. As Damon points out, we used to do it. Therefore, there is no reason why we cannot do it again, if we put our minds to it.

What is standing in the way? Nothing but relativism, which has become the official creed of the educational establishment. Yet, relativism is a superficial, stultifying, self-refuting dogma that has no place in in anyone’s outlook on the world, much less an educator’s.

An educator—if he or she is anything at all—must be someone possessed of some knoweldge that is worth imparting to others.

But to know something just means knowing that some things are true and other things are false. Therefore, knowledge is essentially a kind of loyalty to the truth. Which in turn means that both teaching and learning presuppose the virtue of honesty.

So, if honesty cannot be taught, then nothing else can, either.

And if honesty can be taught—as it can, and must—then nothing stands in the way of teaching all the other virtues.

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(1) Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford. His essay is a chapter from an online book, Endangered Virtues, produced by the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society.