From Vietnam to Garygate: American Soul-Searching

Within the past year, Wall Street insider trading scandals, the Iran-contra arms deals and the press's handling of Gary Hart have prompted a reexamination of ethical conduct in fields as diverse as government, the press, business and religion throughout the nation.

President Bok and educators throughout the country have also taken up the issue and are striving to define what role the University should play in the teaching of ethics. But the ethical education debate underscores a problem facing the entire country--a conflict over basic values and changing norms which transcends individual fields.

Not since Watergate and the Vietnam War has the nation undergone such comprehensive soul-searching. Gone are the relatively halcyon days of the 1950's when America was apple pie, the Star Spangled banner and wholesome values. The unsettling period of the late 1960's and early 1970's changed all that, as the Sexual Revolution and the hippie generation forced a rejection of traditional values.

In the 1980's, the country is struggling with the legacy of those unsettling years. Experts in a broad spectrum of professions say America is currently in an ethical vacuum, searching for a new code to replace the tattered shreds of post-World War II moralism. Technological improvements have created a national culture, bound together by a communications network. But America has yet to find a new national ethic to keep pace with the development of this media culture.

"The sum of dramas and scandals over the past 20 years--Vietnam, Watergate, Wall Street--suddenly has had an impact," says Dillon Professor of French Civilization Stanley Hoffmann, who teaches a course on "Ethics and International Relations" at Harvard. Hoffmann adds that the country must now try to regain and transmit its values.

"There has always been some kind of ethical preoccupation in our country, but we've changed as a society over the past 20 years. In this periodic reassessment, we have the tremendous power of communication, which is much more expansive than in the past--a source of confusion and bemusement," says Kenneth J. Ryan, Ladd professor of obstetrics and gynecology and a senior ethics fellow at Harvard.

The United States today is a fluid and dynamic society--buffeted by the forces of technological change on one side, and traditional institutions on the other, observers say. "I think the most fundamental point is that the accepted and recognized, if not always approved standards, of conditions is becoming more fluid and ambiguous," says Geoffrey Hazard, a Yale law professor who specializes in legal ethics.

"Today it is not quite clear what the standards are, there is not such a firm conviction of how they ought to be presented," he says.

"Everyone in the Western world is interested in questions of right and wrong, and dealing with options we didn't have half a century ago," says Lynn M. Peterson, an assistant professor of medical ethics at Harvard who is also on the interfaculty committee coordinating a new University wide ethics teaching program.

This crisis of faith in old ethical codes has been brewing for a long time; the current scandals serve to illustrate the weakness of the old system, experts on ethics say. "Ethics are so prominent right now because of the wild coincidence of people in pulpit, people in politics and people in government transgressing," says Edward M. Fleischman '54, who is a member of the Securities and Exchange (SEC) Commission. "But we won't know for 30 years whether this period is really a crisis," he adds.

The level of public concern about ethical issues waxes and wanes; Watergate prompted a reassessment of ethics in government and the Vietnam War provoked a rejection of American militarism. Today, the Wall Street insider trading cases and the rash of corporate takeovers have sparked a scrutiny of business ethics.

This emphasis on transmitting values is a recurrent theme in the debates about ethics--in education, in foreign policy. "The problem is developing a foreign policy which reflects basic American values, and that is something we do not have right now," says Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, one of the Democratic candidates for president.

Gary Edwards, director of the Washington-based Ethics Resource Center say that part of the problem lies in the culture itself, which they say bolsters certain types of unethical behavior. "There is a paradigm of unethical conduct in large organizations," he says. "You can read it off the culture of the organization."

Fleischman agrees with Edwards' assessment of the problems that institutions are currently battling with. "Corporate culture is the buzzword these days," he says, explaining that the general impression conveyed by a company's management influences the organization's ethical standards.

But culture alone cannot be blamed for today's society's lack of a concrete ethical code, experts say, adding that they are not sure what will make an effective panacea.

If corporate culture and President Reagan's management style were responsible for the miscalculations, then the society which fostered such developments should be changed, say ethics experts at Harvard and in Washington. And if education has left students ethically illiterate, then that too should be changed, they say.

Proponents of integrating ethics into the educational system say that an entire generation--the product of post-Vietnam disillusionment--has been educated in an ethical void. They argue that it is through education that new standards will be transmitted. But they add that there is a fine line between concern for ethics in the educational system and a bias toward outmoded ethical systems, which represents a return to the days of religion and the pledge of allegiance.

But others say the blame cannot be placed on only one sector of society. "I don't subscribe to the notion that youth of America has been brought up to worship the almighty dollar," Fleischman says. "I don't think you can indict an entire generation, or a society."