Our Lack of Moral Vocabulary

By Peter Wehner
Friday, September 16, 2011

Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote a fascinating column on young people's moral lives, basing it on hundreds of in-depth interviews with young adults across America conducted by the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his team.

The results, according to Brooks, were "depressing"—not so much because of how they lived but because of "how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues." Asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life, what we find is "young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don't have the categories or vocabulary to do so." What Smith and his team found is an atmosphere of "extreme moral individualism—of relativism and nonjudgmentalism." The reason, in part, is because they have not been given the resources—by schools, institutions and families—to "cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading." the rest