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When polled, a staggering four in ten young people said that the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was justified. And according to a poll on the Stanford internal social app Fizz, six in ten believe that Luigi is a “hero.” A year ago, Stanford students stormed the president's office spraying “fuck America” on the wall. And a year before that our president resigned because he falsified his research.
What happened to decency at Stanford?
Although they may seem unrelated, these moral failures represent a common thread: subjective—rather than objective—morality. Whether it's justifying a CEO's death, dismissing campus vandalism as "justified protest," or rationalizing research fraud as necessary for career advancement, we increasingly substitute subjective suggestions for moral principles.
Why should we care about objective moral values? We need objective (i.e. true if no one believes it) values to guide us, because otherwise we will often be swayed by personal incentives or the “wisdom” of the crowd. The crowd can always be wrong—just look at the southern United States in the 1850s.
And if we forgo the crowd, and tie our moral code to what feels “right” to ourselves, that leaves us in an even worse place. Who cares if I falsify this research report, or ChatGPT my Pset? It doesn’t hurt anyone? While this may be true, objective moral reasoning tells us this is wrong. We need objective moral values, not only in our classes, but as we go on to lead companies, communities, and countries—the world will require us to make decisions that are (1) against our best interest and (2) unpopular. We should be able to make them.
British philosopher and writer C.S. Lewis noticed the lack of objective moral values in education. In 1940 he wrote, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Lewis lamented that modern education neglects the nurture of “chests,” what we use to regulate reason and emotion with moral standards. Failing to build this “chest” results in men who are great, but not good—the type of people able to justify cheating, fraud, and even murder.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis explains how modern education schools us out of objective moral values. Lewis uses The Green Book, a high school English textbook, as an example. He notes how the book emphasizes that statements about the world are simple reflections of feeling, not observations of Ground Truth.
Lewis argues this distinction, though minor, has catastrophic consequences. If we call all observations just subjective value judgments, then objective moral frameworks don’t exist. For example, consider a student about to ChatGPT their essay. They will likely feel guilt. Listening to this guilt, they might choose to write the essay themselves. But what if the feeling of guilt never arrives? (There’s no guarantee it will.) Or what if someone feels proud of their cleverness instead? Society can’t simply function when morals depend solely on feelings.
The solution, according to Lewis, is students learning from and deeply internalizing what he calls the Tao: a timeless tradition of moral wisdom stretching from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Confucius’ Analects and the Bhagavad Gita. Lewis argues that by teaching content grounded in these great books, students will be able to make tough moral decisions grounded in objective value.
Some may argue it’s not Stanford’s job to supervise moral formation. After all, we’re young adults, and maybe we should take building moral codes into our own hands, and not cover morality in class. But that’s not consistent with Stanford’s mission: to build students that lead “lives of leadership and contribution with integrity.” To fulfill this mission, students should be working through the moral wisdom of the greats—Lewis’s Tao (notably, not morality prescribed by any administrator). How might Stanford do this?
The obvious answer is COLLEGE—Stanford’s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education requirement for freshmen. In theory, these classes assemble an impressive collection of moral wisdom. For example, in COLLEGE 101, students take a reasonable tour of the Tao—Plato's cave allegory, Confucian teachings, Epicurean ethics. All Stanford freshmen should be reading and internalizing these texts!
However, in most cases these classes drop straight to the bottom of busy Stanford students' priorities list. Why? COLLEGE uses contract grading—meaning mediocre works qualify for full credit. As a result, many students fail to engage in class, and even fewer do the readings. Stanford could strengthen students' moral education by motivating busy Stanford students to read these timeless moral writings for a real grade.
While there may be other philosophy or ethics classes that encourage and facilitate moral development, these classes will not be taken by the majority of students. As a result, many students will fail to consider what objective values might exist, and how they can honor them.
Lewis warned us. The moral relativism we wade through shapes how we think, how we act, and who we become. When we treat all moral intuitions as mere feelings, we may be able to rationalize anything, yet we remain haunted by Moral Law we can’t quite articulate. It really matters—not just for us, but for the world—that Stanford students have the objective moral framework to make hard decisions: picking the right thing to do even when it hurts us. Turning in a less than perfect Pset today will allow us to delay a product launch when it doesn't meet safety standards, or be honest with an investor even if it means losing funding, or acknowledging political mistakes despite risking reelection.
Stanford excels at making smart grads. We should make wise ones too.
