CONTACT - Volume 7, Number 2
Message from the Dean

When is the right time to stand with a group or to stand alone? When do we support our family, friends, or colleagues and when do we "leave home?" When do we support the law and when do we seek change in the law.

These questions crept into my mind today after seeing an article in the paper. A young man killed a woman and her eight year old son to protect his brother against the child's potentially damaging testimony in a murder trial. Of course this seems simple; thou shalt not kill. But the man was supporting his kin, his family, his brother. How am I best my brother's or sister's or husband's or child's or colleague's keeper?

What about the less dramatic but more obscure questions? We say that family values are important. When do we encourage an abused woman to take her children and leave the family? What do we say or do when she chooses to return home to more abuse. We say that supporting our cultural "family" is important. Thou shalt not make Polish jokes in my presence. When do we say it's wrong to give a classmate my homework to copy because she is from my country? She needs help and she is a member of my "family." When should a child be returned to his father and when do we have the duty to remove the child in favor of other competing values? When does a nurse stand in association with her/his professional colleagues and when does s/he testify that a colleague's practice was unsafe or unethical?

We say somewhat glibly that we should stand for what is right, and each of us thinks we know what right is. How do we negotiate the increasingly large gray area between what is more clearly right and wrong, and what is a "difference of values?"

Values are determined by each of us as we enter and negotiate adulthood. They are influenced by our individual and family experiences and traditions, by our education, and certainly by the cultural and religious beliefs we learned. Can a value be wrong? Can it be right now and wrong in another situation? Some say, "Just follow the law." We have laws in this country which are the accumulated wisdom of the community but they are not always right or else we would still have legal slavery and the rule of husband over his wife with a stick the size of a man's thumb. Sometimes even laws should be changed.

The more ethically mature we are the less dependent we are on "the law," the more questions we raise, and the more we realize that others have strong life values that are not ours. How difficult it is to choose among competing values to reach a decision for our own actions. How much more difficult it is to step into the skin of others to judge their value-based decisions when we struggle with our own.

It is critical that we take time to consider the values supporting the decisions we make, and those values underlying different decisions of others. Sometimes our value-based decisions force us to stand alone and other times we join with others with like values to make life decisions. Always we should be open to examine our underlining values and those of others in search of a better law, a better right.