The Indisputable Mr. Scruples

The audience on this weeknight at St. Genevieve High School in the San Fernando Valley numbers no more than 250--mostly St. Genevieve students and faculty and a handful of athletic officials from other schools--but clearly Michael Josephson needs no added incentive to get himself up for the occasion. Microphone in hand, suit jacket unbuttoned, he paces across the matted gymnasium floor while delivering an impassioned 20-minute prologue on America’s declining sportsmanship. Rivulets of sweat trickle down his face, and his fresh white dress shirt has wilted by the time he turns his attention to the five panelists seated at a dais behind him.

The U.S. women’s national soccer team cheated in the final game against China to win the 1999 World Cup, Josephson declares. On the decisive penalty-kick block, goalkeeper Briana Scurry came off the end line too soon, he says. She intentionally violated the rules and then shamelessly boasted about it.

Does anybody have a problem with that?

This is hardly the genteel, cookies-and-punch demeanor we might expect from the 58-year-old gentleman who delivers those 90-second entreaties on virtue on KNX radio, who trades in the currency of goodness, whose life’s work for the past 15 years has been promoting virtue and raising the level of human comportment. The self-styled ethicist’s teddy bear appearance is unimposing--5-foot-7, a little wide at the belt, fair skin and hair, wire-rimmed glasses framing a round face--but the mind behind that soft facade is deadly. Josephson’s manner reveals the residue of his earlier life as a university law professor skilled in the art of interrogation. Partial to the Socratic method, he begins a dialectic strip search of the panelists, sparing only the lone student, a St. Genevieve football player rightfully terrified by the proceedings.

He requires but a few rounds of sparring to elicit agreement from Marlon Archey, the school’s soccer coach and athletic director, that Scurry’s crucial World Cup play was unsportsmanlike. But Archey was thrilled with the victory anyway and would be thrilled to see his goalkeeper at St. Genevieve make such a play.

“I’m having trouble reconciling those things, Mr. Archey,” Josephson says in his scratchy voice. Then he turns his attention to Brother John Montgomery, principal of downtown Los Angeles’ Cathedral High School.

“Suppose this is happening at your school, Brother John. Are you thrilled, too?” Montgomery, the picture of rectitude in his black robe and white collar, contemplates this hypothetical dilemma for a moment. Like Archey, he was proud of the World Cup victory, never mind what Briana Scurry did.

“I think this is why people don’t like lawyers,” Brother Montgomery says. “If you’re not careful,” Josephson parries when the laughter and applause die, “we’ll show why they don’t always like priests either.”

A risky quip in such Catholic company, but it goes over well enough. Certainly nobody’s bored. In short order the ethicist has everyone on the ropes. Parent Tom Iaccino thinks the burden should lie with the officials, and athletes should be coached to probe the limits of what they can do without getting caught. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Eric Sondheimer stakes out the same position.

Josephson asks if it’s all right for kids to cheat in the classroom as long as the teacher doesn’t catch them. Why don’t we just drop the pretense that you care about sportsmanship, he suggests, and authorize coaches to teach athletes to get away with whatever they can? “Would you be in favor of that, Eric?”

Sondheimer rambles off in an unresponsive direction.

“I must have been unclear with my question, since you obviously didn’t understand it,” Josephson says, “so let me ask it one more time. The question I asked you was--”

“I’m not answering the question,” Sondheimer says

. “And I’m not relenting in asking it.”

Josephson has made sportsmanship one of his focuses because he believes that the values youngsters learn through sports influence their behavior as adults. Before the evening closes, he has unflinchingly laid out his case. Coaches bent on winning often fail to make the distinction between playing hard and violating rules to gain an edge. Administrators look the other way. The system tacitly endorses cheating. Is this the message we want to send to our children?

“You guys are so larcenous in your hearts,” he says, “and you’re sitting in front of all these people here and saying, ‘Aw, that’s the way sports is.’ Is that the way it ought to be?”

Josephson found his mission in life the way so many people do-- entirely by accident. He was contentedly teaching “the lawyerly courses”--criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, trial practice--at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s when the American Bar Assn., chagrined over having so many attorneys tarnished by the Watergate scandal, required all accredited law schools to improve their ethics instruction.

Loyola assigned Josephson to teach a course in the subject in 1976, so he prepared by doing the obvious thing: He studied ethics. He remembers taking his “standard approach, which was looking for loopholes and ambiguities, which is the way I had been taught to do it.” It was while comforting his colicky infant son at 3 a.m., though, that this adroit professor of obfuscation, witness manipulation and courtroom deception--all widely practiced litigation techniques--was struck by a sobering realization: “I wouldn’t go about teaching my son ethics the way I’m preparing to teach it in law school.”

That’s how it started for Josephson. He volunteered to teach the course every semester after that until he left academia in 1987. That same year, he established the Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit education and outreach foundation named for his parents and headquartered in a Marina del Rey commercial high-rise. His staff now numbers 34, from writers and editors to program managers, finance types, mail clerks and information technologists. But Josephson is the franchise. “He’s the jockey,” says Tom DeCair, the institute’s special projects coordinator, “and the rest of us are horses.”

Josephson, a 1960 Westchester High graduate, launched the organization with $1 million of his own money, having realized 10 times that amount from the sale of a national chain of bar-review courses he had formed years earlier to provide his out-of-work father with a livelihood. Though he works long hours as the institute’s president and chief rainmaker, bringing in about $500,000 a year through speaking fees and consultancy, Josephson says he has never taken a salary.

By now Josephson has gained a following through his radio commentaries, which he recently began syndicating to markets outside Los Angeles. Not long ago, he started offering free weekly packages of the commentaries via e-mail. Within two months the subscriber list had reached 20,000. The institute trains and certifies 3,000 to 4,000 people a year to teach ethics using its “Character Counts!” program, which Josephson says reaches more children--at least 3 million in more than 2,500 schools--than any of the numerous other character education programs in the country.

The institute also has become a prodigious publisher of books, newsletters, videos, CDs and workshop training materials. Perhaps most eye-catching, though, is the organization’s list of past and present clients, which ranges from Johnson & Johnson, Pacific Bell, 3M and the Los Angeles Times to the FBI, the CIA, the American Heart Assn. and the California Legislature.

Josephson’s quest may seem like a lonely one, this pitching of ethics to a nation of individuals who don’t especially like to be told how to behave, but he is hardly laboring in isolation. A secular ethics movement fomented by discontent with our national character has quietly evolved and intensified since the mid-1970s, gradually finding a role in nearly every niche of American society. Secular humanism, loathed by the religious right for rejecting God, has been around for decades, but the current phenomenon differs in that, while nonreligious, it has nothing to do with atheism.

Evidence of its achievements surround us, from an increased emphasis on ethics in university curricula to the presence of media ombudsmen, ethics officers in business and nonprofit corporations, revived character education in our schools, required ethics courses for public officeholders and an ethics provision in federal sentencing guidelines. An estimated 500 applied ethics centers that didn’t exist 25 years ago have been founded to promote moral thinking and decision making. Most are on college campuses, many funded or endowed by individuals concerned about humanity’s future. In just the last two years, philanthropic donations have created new ethics centers at Penn State, Arizona State and Clemson University in South Carolina.

In the broadest terms, Josephson’s goal is nothing less than to alter America’s moral trajectory by making ethics part of the national conversation. Our indignation over the moral depravity of Sept. 11 and the unfolding Enron scandal can only help, but even without the impact of those events, we may finally be recovering from the quiet disillusionment that began with Watergate. At the very least, we are better positioned to address more than three decades of social decay marked by an all-too-familiar list: drugs, violence, sexual laxity, family disintegration, declining civility, educational malaise, surging prison populations, civic noninvolvement.

But pushing ethics is a tricky business. Just whose ethics are you pushing, and what gives you the right to push them? Inevitably, the ethicist reminds us of our own lapses and imperfections, which we don’t necessarily wish to contemplate. If the ethics of ancient Athens prevailed today, we could simply give Josephson hemlock and be rid of him and enjoy our World Cup victory in peace.

While an undergraduate and law school student at UCLA in the 1960s, Josephson was not an obvious candidate for the ethics business. Named valedictorian in 1967 for all of the university’s graduate schools, he avoided reading his speech at the graduation rehearsal the day before the ceremony for fear the administration would censor his criticisms of Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, California Gov. Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Murphy, UCLA’s chancellor at the time. He has never affiliated with a political party, he says, because, “I’m just too stubborn and a renegade, and I don’t like to accept anybody’s prepackaged views.”

In his UCLA days he was loath to pass judgment on anyone else’s views either, having swallowed whole the precepts of moral and cultural relativism. “I really thought that the only thing that was wrong was to be judgmental,” he says with apparent dismay. “I thought, ‘They eat dogs in Singapore, they burn widows in India. Who am I to judge?’ I probably reserved my most serious moral judgments for moralists.”

He was a product of the times.

In his provocative 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind,” the late University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom decried in plaintive, angry rhetoric the rising tide of relativism in our institutions of higher learning. The university ethos prized nonjudgment to a fault, tolerance to the point of meaninglessness. Aloft with good intentions and flower-child appeal, so-called values clarification blew in with the 1960s, was embraced by legions of students and professors in the 1970s and 1980s, and even now has its disciples. It’s the philosophical equivalent of a shoulder shrug, which is one thing when Briana Scurry cheats off the line in the World Cup finals but quite another when, for example, the Taliban strips women of their humanity.

For a man preoccupied with morality, Josephson still possesses a nonjudgmental streak, largely out of respect for the notion that reasonable people of high character often disagree, sometimes vehemently. He long ago saw relativism for what it is and rejected it, but in a pluralistic society, exactly what values should we promote?

This may be an easy question for sectarian clergy, but in the temporal world it’s more difficult. Certainly Josephson isn’t the only one to wrestle with it. In the mid-1990s, the Institute for Global Ethics, founded in 1990 and headquartered in Camden, Maine, with offices in London and Toronto, did Gallup polling and focus-group research to explore a related question: Is there a set of shared core values that can be taught to any individual or group because they are globally understood to be the moral values of humanity? The answer is unambiguous, says Rushworth Kidder, the institute’s founder and president and a former columnist and senior editor at the Christian Science Monitor.

“When you talk to people anywhere in the world about what they think are the most important values to hand on to the next generation, they will talk to you about five things: compassion, fairness, responsibility, honesty and respect. It’s uncanny the commonality with which those particular five values keep coming up.”

Josephson pursued the same question but used a different technique, studying every major philosophical, religious, psychological and moral system he could find--from Confucianism to the Boy Scout oath--to compare lists of sins and virtues. “I literally put them on a template and asked, ‘What are the similarities here?’ ” he remembers.

His research resulted in what he calls the Six Pillars of Character, five of which--caring, fairness, responsibility, trustworthiness and respect--are essentially identical to the values identified by Kidder’s organization. The sixth is citizenship.

Josephson’s objective was not only to determine universal values but to define them in language clearly acceptable to conservatives and liberals, secularists and religious people. “Then we had political immunity, the bulletproof curriculum,” he says.

Whenever someone challenges his authority to lecture others about ethics, he replies that he’s just someone who thinks and worries about ethics a lot and has some insights to share with those who are willing to listen. And then he asks, “Which of these six pillars do you have problems with?” Trustworthiness? Fairness? Respect?

The secular ethics movement appears almost darwinian when one contemplates how much greater the potential consequences of immorality have become. While at the Monitor in the 1980s, Kidder interviewed eminent people in various fields--Jimmy Carter, author Norman Cousins and historian Barbara Tuchman, among others--for a series on the most important problems the world would have to address in the 21st century. Six issues emerged above all others, five of which Kidder considered fairly obvious: the threat of nuclear catastrophe, environmental degradation, overpopulation, education reform and the global economic disparities between the haves and have-nots.

“The sixth one I found fascinating, and I kept hearing it again and again,” Kidder says. “And that was, as Barbara Tuchman first put it to me, the breakdown in private and public morality. Here was a group of people from all around the world who, looking into the 21st century, were saying, ‘Look, if we don’t get a handle on this question of ethics, it has the capacity to doom us.’ ”

Human ingenuity has indeed raised the stakes exponentially, and will continue to do so. Sophisticated weaponry, nuclear waste, human cloning, genetic manipulation--every blessing of science and technology also carries a curse. Even the Internet, for all its magnificence, increases beyond calculation the risk to personal security, property and even life itself, facilitating the ability of immoral people to connect and conspire or gain technical know-how for their malevolent designs.

“I’m coming to the conclusion more and more that ethics is absolutely essential to our survival,” Kidder says. “We probably won’t survive the 21st century with the ethics of the 20th century. Something profound has got to change, and unless we begin thinking very hard and very systematically about this, we run the risk of having the technology get so far ahead of the ethics that there really is no restraint on it.”

Many Americans wistfully remember better times. Schools’ biggest problems were running in the halls and fistfights at the flagpole. You could walk the streets at night without a care. Song lyrics didn’t celebrate cop killing or misogyny. Ten-year-old boys weren’t openly profane and dismissive of adults. The most controversial thing on television was Elvis’ pelvis. Television news programs valued news over entertainment, and the president of the United States had enough sense to keep his pants on in the Oval Office, or so we assumed.

But any longing for those quieter, more innocent times requires a certain revisionism or, better yet, amnesia. For all its merits, the “Ozzie and Harriet” era also gave us college basketball scandals, television quiz show scandals, disk jockey payola scandals, McCarthyism, unchecked racism and institutionalized sexism. Is America really a less ethical place now than it was then?

In recent national opinion polls, the majority has said yes: the moral climate is worse than it was in the 1950s; the positive influences of religion and the family are declining; education should have a positive effect on morals but is failing to fulfill that responsibility. A 1998 Christian Science Monitor poll found that nearly 80% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats said the country’s morals had fallen significantly in the previous 40 years. Three of four Americans old enough to have experienced the 1950s expressed that view.

Josephson’s verdict is more mixed. “There are certain areas in which we’re better than we ever were. Our sensitivity to civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, being sure that we are more diverse as a culture, dealing with sexual harassment--” Then again, he adds, “I do believe there has been a moral drift that is very troublesome. All across the board. As a country we have so degraded the idea that there really are values, core values, a way a human being ought to be, that we have packaged [our behavior] in all kinds of rationalism and excuses . . . We’ve had all the books of self-indulgence and all the books of looking out for No. 1 and the like. I believe we are probably individually more comfortably selfish than we used to be.”

Josephson allows himself to go only so far down that path before he dismisses the usefulness of such assessments. “We keep wanting to measure whether it’s worse or better, and then we get hung up with every example, which can tie us into knots,” he says. “My analysis is simpler: We’re not good enough.”

The notion that Americans, and by extension America, are not good enough can get lost in a haze of self-congratulatory moral isolation, as David Sedaris points out in his book “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” “Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth,” he writes. “And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure 60-by-80 inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are, ‘We’re number two!’ ”

It’s one thing to intellectualize about good and bad or right and wrong, but how do you communicate about ethics on a practical level? How do you apply it to the real world in a way that actually makes a difference in how people behave? How do you talk about virtue and character and responsibility in ways that don’t alienate people?

These constitute particularly vexing questions in a society that, beginning with the cultural revolt of the 1960s and 1970s, has moved significantly away from received morality toward a more relaxed ethos--the age of designer ethics. More than ever, we insist on determining for ourselves what it means to be virtuous rather than allowing doctrinaire codes from higher authorities to be imposed on us.

Thoughtful observers of American values, including David Brooks in his 2000 book “Bobos in Paradise” and Alan Wolfe in “Moral Freedom,” published last year, describe a culture in which even those who consider themselves religious choose what they like from the moral doctrines of their religion, or from several religions, and discard the rest. “There is a moral majority in America,” Wolfe writes. “It just happens to be one that wants to make up its own mind.”

From his earliest days as an ethicist, Josephson has recognized the need to be strategic, “to package this in a way that doesn’t turn people off.” Don’t be self-righteous, he counsels others who want to teach ethics. “I suppose I’m exceptionally sensitive to this because I’m real easily turned off by self-righteous, finger-wagging moralists.”

His direct methodological opposite is Laura Schlessinger, who, as radio’s Dr. Laura dispenses swift, decisive moral advice to her callers based on Orthodox Judaism, her adopted faith. The combination of religious judgment on secular airwaves earns her a large, diverse audience, but also fierce detractors.

“I have a point of view,” says the 54-year-old talk-show host. “So does the pope, so does the president. If the fact that somebody has a point of view and they represent it and defend it is now worthy of attack--that’s the problem that we’ve had in the culture wars. Somebody who has a conviction gets attacked simply for the conviction.”

Individuals are free to do whatever they please, she adds, but, “God made the Commandments, and there’s really no room for disagreement with them.”

Josephson finds Schlessinger’s tone “harsh.” Kidder recoils at her rigidity. “I have never felt that it was as helpful to the public discourse to tell people what they ought to think as to tell them how to think,” Kidder says, rejecting the notion that “the way you ought to go about ethics is to stake out sort of a take-no-prisoners position on one side of the moral spectrum and say, ‘This is what I believe, and anybody else who doesn’t believe this is a dunce.’ You’re teaching people that the way to go about public discourse about ethics is at a high volume, with a certain amount of belligerence and an unwillingness to listen to the moral nuances. I don’t think that’s the way we’re going to advance our culture.”

It remains to be seen whether the growth in secular ethics, with its less dogmatic persuasions, can advance our culture either. Ethics, unfortunately, is not a natural product of human maturation. Whatever attributes one may choose to assign to goodness, they must be learned, developmental psychologists tell us, which means they must be modeled and taught. The family and the church have traditionally functioned as provinces of moral instruction, but these days many families rarely sit down to dinner together, let alone discuss values. The church undoubtedly remains society’s dominant moral institution, but a majority of polled Americans have said that religion is losing its influence.

Clearly there is room--some would say a dire need--for the growing secular ethics movement to play a role in determining how America behaves, but reliable studies on whether it is doing so are scarce. Character education in schools logically represents the best hope to improve future generations, but even that movement’s umbrella organization, the 8-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based Character Education Partnership, admits to “a dearth of substantive research supporting its effectiveness.”

A notable exception may be an ongoing South Dakota State University study of Josephson’s character education program in middle and high schools in four South Dakota counties. The study, currently in its fifth year, relies on student self-reporting; nevertheless, findings from the past two years show reductions of between 32% and 56% in the commission of several types of misdeeds, including theft, vandalism, using fake IDs, taking illegal drugs and engaging in racial or ethnic harassment.

No matter how well conceived or intelligently delivered a program of ethical guidance may be, however, its success depends entirely on how receptive people are to its message. In early 2000, the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District asked the Josephson Institute to assess its organizational ethics. After considerable research, Josephson and his staff rendered a highly unflattering written report alleging, among other transgressions, “concealment and distortion of information, persistent unaccountability and finger pointing, backbiting, leaking to the press, violation of confidentiality rules and agreements, personal attacks, discourtesy, [and] mischaracterizations of motives and positions.”

The day after the report came out, Josephson was scheduled to go before the school board to discuss these rather disturbing findings. Less than two hours before he was to appear, LAUSD’S executive officer, Jefferson Crain, called Josephson’s chief of staff with a last-minute change in the agenda. Josephson’s presence, it seemed, would not be needed after all.

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Lee Green is a freelance writer living in Ventura.