There Is No Neutral Ethical Act

Trump's Response To Someone Who Fainted In His Office

How would you describe Trump is this picture? We will come back to it. I want to frame this blog by the words that I would see and hear in the picture if the picture could talk. Ethics is certainly about what one does, but it is also about how wrong something could be if a person doesn’t do something when action is required. Ethics states that actions or inaction are all ethical decisions. There is no neutral ground in living the ethical life.

The image that I would use in my Ethics class is if you are passing an area where students usually gather and you see someone attacking someone else, if you don’t intervene and do something, you have committed an unethical action or response.

The quality of “looking the other way” is just as much unethical behavior as overt unethical behavior. Not to decide is to decide. Students have shared with me that they are uncomfortable with this ethical truth, but how better we would be as a society or a school if we adhered to this approach.

It should be noted that some colleges and the various service academies have some rendition of the importance of acting. The honor code at the service academies is there for a reason. Each state that “you should not lie, cheat, or steal AND YOU SHOULD NOT TOLERATE ANYONE WHO DOES THAT. YOU ARE DUTY BOUND TO REPORT THAT BEHAVIOR.

The service academies have had their scandals as outlined in the article below. Honor codes came into being for trust, honesty, and integrity were necessary to guarantee that a solider could depend on their colleagues and never second guess their actions. But now this issue that “integrity and honesty” should be a given is in the process of being restored after a history of cheating scandals at those schools.

Mikie Sherrill, Govenor Elect of New Jersey, has an incredible resume, but there is one thing that is left out in most publications. She attended the Naval Academy but was not permitted to walk at graduation in 1994. She wasn’t allowed because she refused to name classmates she knew had cheated. She still graduated and was commissioned as an officer.

Cheating at the Service Academies

Most people including my students in Ethics classes as well as the service academies comment that the hard part of the honor code is the second part which states “and will not tolerate anyone who lies, cheats, or steals.” Notice that some of the high numbers in the article, a 100 in one school, are people who tolerated the infraction, but did not call those individuals out to the appropriate authorities. It was their lack of action that caused them to be in the same boat as those who broke the rules. They were passive participants.

Students in my Ethics class did not see an honor code working at our school UNLESS YOU STARTED IT EARLY. THEY THOUGHT THAT IT IS SOMETHING THAT MUST BE PART OF YOUR GROWING UP. They had no problem with part one of the code but thought it would be difficult to have part two work as loyalty is a top value among older students.

I haven’t done an official study, but I would say that EA has produced more students who enrolled in service academies than most any other institutions. We are the only school who had three members of the Naval Academy football team on their starting lineup at the same time.

When I talk to our alumni/ae members of these academies and the honor code, they have indicated to me that they experienced high expectations of honor and character at EA, but admittance to the service academies is self-selected to an extent. You also know what you are expected to do and sign off on the honor code as integral to your life as a soldier. You give up a lot to attend those schools but love of nation surfaces as what you will do to maintain that new sense of loyalty. Your friends or teammates could be people that you encounter later in life in a challenging time.

I knew our students very well who went to the service academies. They lived lives of fine character. They knew what you do and what you don’t do that counts in ethical decision making.

I began with the picture of Trump and his obvious indifference to someone who fainted in his office. A picture is worth a thousand words. We see the attention moving away from him, his indifference to the needs of another, and his failure to act even if it was simply to stand by to help in some way. He is all transactional. That man who fainted could not provide him with anything in return. Contrast that with his run for the Presidency when he was showing up at train wrecks, natural disasters, etc. for a good photo op of how he would by present and caring in the future. It was a lie which is one of the best examples of ethical failure along with his saying that he doesn’t know someone that he just pardoned, the head of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, who has made Trump a richer man after the pardon.