When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,\u201d\u009d 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\u2019t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. \u201cI don\u2019t really deal with right and wrong that often,\u201d\u009d is how one interviewee put it.<\/p>\n
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. \u201cIt\u2019s personal,\u201d\u009d the respondents typically said. \u201cIt\u2019s up to the individual. Who am I to say?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n