If It Feels Right ...

[rug]

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html

I bet there's an app for that.

[mdmc]

1. I fit right in with this crowd

clueless..

[rug]

2. Lol.

[sudopod]

3. I blame Iphones too.

also, hipsters.

[EC]

4. Wait a minute here.

David Brooks, a conservative, writing about individualism as though it's bad? This is what the right has been working for and he's upset to see it reflected in the young people of today?

[trotsky]

5. If only these kids had an authority structure to tell them what is moral.

Like one that shelters and enables child rapists. That one is always willing to tell everyone else how immoral they all are.

[rug]

6. No, that's your job.

Text them.

[Silent3]

7. My guess would be that in many cases, even when people have...

...a well-developed moral framework, they end up doing "what feels right" anyway. The framework simply becomes a tookit for constructing impressive rationalizations for their feel-good actions.

[NMMNG]

9. Bingo

That's why those who preach endlessly about "moral values" and the "sanctity of marriage" are often on their third marriage, which is to the person they committed adultery with while married to their second spouse.

[dmallind]

14. Everybody free to make the choice, ultimately, does what they want

Hitler and Albert Schweitzer made exactly analogous moral decisions. I do too. So do you. Now of course the teleology differs, but even as a utilitarian, I'm basing my moral decisions on what I want. So was Father Damien. Let's look at an example:

A sybaritic heartless bastard gets a Powerball jackpot. He buys super-fancy houses, cars, yachts, vacations, trophy girlfriends, drugs and the best of everything all for himself - because luxurious hedonism is what he wants.

A normal level-headed "nice guy" gets a Powerball jackpot. He makes all his siblings debt-free millionaires, sets his kids up with trust funds, gives a goodly chunk to his favorite charities and causes, buys a nice house and car, and lives off the interest/dividends of the remainder in contented comfort - because a happy secure family, financial peace of mind and nicely funded, say, dog shelters are what he wants.

An ascetic deeply-committed advocate for the homeless gets a Powerball jackpot. He doesn't even consider moving out of his crappy studio or replacing his 1996 Corolla, but uses it all to set up fully funded and endowed homeless shelters in the 3 cities close to him, complete with soup kitchens, on-site nurses and counselors - because the most he can do to help the homeless is what he wants.

#3 may seem to be doing things based only on the needs of others, and certainly based on first-order teleological calculus he has done most good (although we cannot see all possible results - maybe his shelters keep the next Mc Veigh from dying of hypothermia while one of #1's hookers uses the money to get her kid into a good school. The kid who goes on to cure AIDS) but what he is actually doing is what he wants - what makes him more happy, or at least content, than any alternative. #1 and #2 are doing no different.

[Silent3]

15. 1.7

I think that's about where I'd fall on that scale. :)

[darkstar3]

8. I stopped reading right about here:

"It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery"

Yep, not credible.

[rug]

10. Oh, you should have read at least one more paragraph.

"When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot."

Lol.

[darkstar3]

11. I don't buy anything in the story.

When the person writing the article about morality writes a sentence like I quoted above, they have no leg to stand on and the whole article is a waste of time.

[struggle4progress]

12. It's David Brooks. His summaries always have agendas

[Jim__]

13. I hate open-ended questions in interviews.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about the meaning of life? Really? And they are surprised that they get rambling answers?

I long ago learned that the trick to giving a good interview is to anticipate all the questions. Like when you're looking for a job, by about the 5th or 6th job interview you can pretty much aniticipate most questions; and, of course, you do quite well answering those questions.

I'd need more information on how those interviews were conducted before I could try to judge the answers.

[backscatter712]

16. An education issue, perhaps?

With the cutbacks and dumbing down of schools, kids aren't being taught ethics or philosophy anymore.