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The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education
Dr. Emanuel is a physician and the vice provost for global initiatives and a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
We have failed.
When a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard can say that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and students at other elite universities blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7 or even praise the massacre, something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities.
Students spouting ideological catchphrases have revealed their moral obliviousness and the deficiency of their educations. But the deeper problem is not them. It is what they are being taught — or, more specifically, what they are not being taught.
Certainly, not all students wear these moral blinders. But the fact that many students do and that they are at some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities should be a cause for profound concern across higher education.
Those of us who are university leaders and faculty are at fault. We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.
The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. The attackers targeted and killed over 1,000 civilians. They killed babies and children, people attending a concert and people from Thailand, Nepal and more than a dozen other countries who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification. And then the same gunmen took civilian hostages, with the explicitly articulated intention to use them as deterrence and, if that failed, to execute them.
This case offers an unambiguous base to elucidate clear, shared moral principles. It’s what the ethicist John Rawls calls reflective equilibrium. The clarity of this easy example helps identify principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases like how much an army is required to do to reduce and avoid civilian deaths.
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