This is the question that Clifford Owen asks in his recent article in the Globe and Mail.  His answer: No.  Not in a university setting.  He says:

Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.

If I’m understanding him correctly, he’s saying that one’s character is shaped long before they arrive in college.  There’s nothing a professor could teach a Bernie Madoff that could have stopped him from his shenanigans.

There might some truth to this.  I’ve worked with youth in youth groups and they seem malleable and teachable.  I’ve worked with adults and they seem set in their ways.  But we don’t give up.  Mr. Owen’s thesis is hopeless.  He seems to look at adults and conclude that they are who they are.

I don’t buy his argument.  All it leads to is a conclusion that people are generally bad and need to be governed by heavy regulations and oversight.  It’s an argument for more government.

I reject Mr. Owen’s argument and think people can be taught and inspired to be good.  I’m convinced that we all have a moral sense as James Q. Wilson eloquently and thoroughly argues in his book The Moral Sense.  We are born with it, but it can be demeaned, rationalized away, and weakened. This is what’s happened over many decades.   As a result we have lost confidence in the values that are derived from our moral sense.  And we find ourselves in our current situation.

Mr. Wilson says, “Maintaining limits is a way of asserting community.  If the limits are asserted weakly, uncertainly, or apologetically, their effects must surely be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, confidently, and persuasively.”  So we don’t throw up our hands and say we are who we are.  Instead, we assert ethics boldly, confidently, and persuasively at home, at church, in schools, in college, and in business until we are at a higher level of self governance.  Otherwise we diminish ourselves to the lowest common denominator.