I have just finished teaching a course in ethics to about 20 adult college students who are trying to complete their undergraduate degrees. The experience has been both enjoyable and discouraging for me. I enjoy the classroom, with its stimulating interchange with students and the opportunity to explore their thinking. But this occasion has also been discouraging for several reasons; and this is what I want to discuss here.

First, it will perhaps be useful to explain my general purpose in the class. I find that much of what passes for education in the humanities these days is little more than shared ignorance. Everyone expresses their opinion, whether or not they have any worthwhile basis for their view; and it is considered bad form to make much of an effort to call into question those opinions. After all, doesn't everyone have a right to their own opinion? Since they are all only opinions, they are assumed to have equal validity. Whether an opinion is true hardly enters anyone's mind, since all truth is presumed to be relative to the individual.

Having said this, my goal was to try to drive my students to examining their ultimate foundation for moral judgments. My questions were "Why do you believe that?" and "How do you justify that judgment in view of what you believe to be the nature of ultimate Reality?" My first disappointment (although it was not unexpected) was that they found the question almost impossible to grasp, even though I spent several hours explaining it. I tried to make clear to them that ethical judgments are based on beliefs about what is of "Intrinsic Value"-that is, what has worth because of what it is rather than merely what we can do with it. Material objects derive their value strictly from their usefulness, but sooner or later that use must lead to something that has worth in itself-in what it is. I think I failed to get most of them to understand this.

A further, and frightening, disappointment came from the ease with which some were willing to dispense with human life. Matters of abortion, and euthanasia were decided by many on mere convenience or cost effectiveness. Rarely did they recognize the intrinsic worth of "personhood" which has been the basis for moral decision-making in Western Judo-Christian cultures. They often confused mere life (animal as well as human) with what it means to be a person, and so found it difficult to distinguish human life and the life of their pets.

Some actually argued that their personal emotional responses make actions either morally right or morally wrong. This, of course, robs the entire discussion of any real significance, first because our emotions about the same thing can change drastically, and also because it robs us of any objective standard for adjudicating conflicting emotions about the same thing held by different people. It implies that no action is, in itself, either right or wrong, but is only seen so (and that, mistakenly) by each individual on the basis of his or her personal emotional response to it. This is tantamount to denying that anything has any intrinsic worth. That, in turn, should ultimately lead any thinking person who holds such a position to despair, because any significance, meaning, or purpose in life is all dependent on the fact that persons have intrinsic value, which they do not have.

I say I am disappointed, but I am not surprised. The last 30-some years of teaching have made me amply aware that this is the direction our culture is taking. Many things have contributed to this, not the least of which is the decreasing value placed on serious critical thinking in our institutions of learning. Modern scientific materialism has convinced many that questions of ultimate meaning and worth (and therefore, of morality) are unanswerable and nonsense. Political correctness has made any effort to resist this trend difficult-and a culture made soft by hedonistic pursuits does not have the fortitude to resist. Will we find the strength and courage to resist the current attack on reason and values from the irrational religious fanaticism of militant Islam? I wonder.