Summary
"One of our most important goals as a school is to care for our students outside the classroom, to help shape what kind of people they become," says Steve Bileca, Branson's dean of students. "We don't want to tell kids what's right and what's wrong, so much as we're looking to spur discussion about what it means to be good in the context of Marin County, 2006, United States, Planet Earth."
"Sure, there's always a gray area," [Steve Sanderson] quickly concedes. "Some ethicists will tell you that there's a set of unchangeable universal rules-and it's airtight, so there is very little room for 'what-ifs.' But I'd contend that these people don't live in the real world, where every day we're confronted with a hundred questions that don't have easy answers. That's why most people just kind of make it up as they go along. But when they do that often greed, or maybe just an innate sense of self-preservation that says, 'I have to look out for number one,' takes over. So this is where we have to try to insert some sort of code of conduct, each of us as individuals, where we can make choices based on something other than impulse or fear or self-gratification. Compassion and ethics are closely tied in this way."See the full content of this document
Extract
An Ethical Dilemma
The moment must have seemed strange-perhaps even surreal-to the young Marin minds watching, reading and listening; minds that had grown up believng in the oft-repeated saying "cheaters never prosper."
There they were. A collection of Major League Baseball players scrubbed, shaved and stuffed into suits, lined up in front of a Senate panel to answer questions about the rampant use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs in their sport.They were heroes, MVPs, symbols of our country's National Pastime. And yet there they sat-humbled, humiliated, cut down to size. Some clenched their jaws and issued defensive, knee-jerk denials, sounding less like crusaders of truth and more like the kid who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and defiantly proclaims, "I didn't do it!" Others were brought to the edge ...See the full content of this document
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