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.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Now I understand more about why its difficult for me to understand the behavior of much of the under-40-years-of-age-crowd.
This also reveals the nature and magnitude of the challenge facing us when we try to reach out to preach/teach “…the Faith once given…” to the younger generations.
Detaching our young people from their spiritual and moral roots has been a long-term goal of those who see a spiritual and moral USA as an impediment to achieving their radical agendas.
If everyone is their own moral center, then the only moral force is power.
You poke it, and it feels like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
We can fault the young people for lack of awareness for moral
issues. However, in nearly 40 years of being in the working force,
I’ve often seen behavior motivated by an attitude which can be
summed up as : “It’s whatever I can get away with.” The rot set
in long before the present generation ever existed. Also, the
pathological emphasis on individualism often acts to atomize our links
to family, friends, and the wider community.