Connect: Dublin City University (DCU) is establishing an Institute of Ethics. Such an institute is welcome although there's a risk it might prove ineffectual or, worse, even unethical. Time will tell. For now, though, while it's only fair to allow that the new institute is based on the best of intentions, it's only ethical to acknowledge the context in which it has been founded.
That context is one in which forces driving an increasingly competitive society are weakening the social bonds between people. Thus ethics are being conscripted to try to bind fractured social relations. Will it work? Will this country become more ethical? Ireland is not the first country to use applied ethics in this way and the practice is spreading.
The US, Canada and South Africa, for instance, already do so, although the remit of DCU's institute is the most comprehensive yet envisaged. It will concern itself with decision-making across a range of disciplines including business, education, healthcare, media and politics. In a sense we are seeing the globalisation of applied ethics.
Attitude is crucial in ethical development. Action is, of course, often required too, but attitude is usually critical to make a desired action possible. It's vital then that the new institute does not just produce a list of mechanical ethical guidelines, because ethics involve more than rote learning. The best results are produced when people internalise precepts and want to do the "right" thing.
Some arguments claim a great deal of ethical (or unethical) development is finished by the time a person is six or seven years old. "Give me the child until seven and I will give you the man" is alleged to be a Jesuit motto. Sigmund Freud said the superego - the "socialising" part of the psyche which responds to rules - was, in most people, all but formed by the age of six.
If Freud and the Jesuits are correct - and there is ample evidence to support them - then babyhood and the early years of primary school may be more important to ethical development than adulthood. The Catholic Church certainly appeared to understand this and, despite its abject authoritarianism, the ethical principles it advocated have not been replaced.
So ethics - principally, applied ethics - are being enlisted to fill an expanding moral vacuum. Concern has been expressed about secrecy surrounding the funding of DCU's institute. It's insufficiently open and transparent, claim critics, who fear undue political, religious or media influence. Still, unless evidence to the contrary emerges, it's only fair to consider the move above board.
After all, some "private donors" (the term was used by DCU president Ferdinand von Prondzynski, discussing the institute on RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland programme) might have reasonable grounds to remain anonymous. Still, the funding "issue" is arguably a first ethical dilemma for the institute. Even if the private donors were known, however, allegations of undue influence would be made.
Such allegations would be made because there's always difficulty whenever ethics and money mix. Arthur Schafer, director of the University of Manitoba's Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, realised this back in the 1990s when he saw a newspaper advertisement selling ethical consulting services that featured the outrageous slogan: "Get the ethics edge".
"Ethics pays - that's the claim being made," he says. "Ethics are being marketed to large national and multinational corporations as profitable. If all this sounds crass and crude, I must admit it does to me too." The irony is that ethics - routinely derided as among the more arcane of ivory tower activities - may be the humanities' best example of profitable academic spin-off.
In a week in which PD Minister for Justice Michael McDowell savaged Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton, dubbing him "the Dr Goebbels of propaganda", the ethics institute brings to mind McDowell's much more serious spiking of Frank Connolly and the Centre for Public Inquiry. Many people still believe political ideology caused McDowell's extraordinary denunciation.
Perhaps it did, but who, other than McDowell, can say? Similar claims - perhaps fair, perhaps not - will be levelled at DCU's institute because, in the field of applied ethics, base ideology can arguably be determining. Even when it's not, it can certainly always be accused of being so. The new institute can expect resistance to as well as praise for its advice.
Anyway, it's engrossing to speculate on how the institute might work. The main driver of unethical practice is invariably the desire for more power and profit, but contemporary Irish society holds that such urges are mostly admirable. It encourages them. There will be tensions between ideas of moral competition and attempts to use ethics to replace the better values of fading Christianity.
Ultimately, there may be no business, medical or media ethics. Of course, some problems will be specific to and likely to recur within these areas. But the ethics of the person, not of the discipline, are what really matter. It's a pity Christ's advice to "do unto others as you would have done unto yourself" has been perverted by some clerics. It's as fine a line of ethical advice as I've heard.