To study ethics, of course, is not to live ethically. But to stop reasoning about ethics is to invite the blind embrace of our prejudices. The Ethics in Society Program has been the moral equivalent of trying on my first pair of contact lenses. The study of ethics has also allowed me to see the world with a reflective distance far from my own suburban perspective. I gained just as much insight as from the course reader.
Moral knowledge demands a willingness to have one's world stretched and one's egoism tamed.
The Ethics Honors Thesis is an enterprise in discovering human possibilities and uncovering injustices that often seem inevitable. My own thesis asks what conditions, if any, a just government can place on public assistance. I have decided political philosophy is just as unrealizable as it is inescapable. That combination strikes some as a mark of moral schizophrenia. I came to Stanford largely because it is an institution that values values.