Conscientious Objector

Walk down the corridor of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, and you’ll find a sketch by French satirist Honore Daumier. The sketch shows a lawyer celebrating his client’s not guilty verdict with a courtroom hug--while the client is picking his lawyer’s pocket.

A part of Michael Josephson’s art collection, the sketch may well reflect his sense of life’s ironies--including the fact that the money used to found his institute came to him almost by accident.

His father was a New York entrepreneur whose business failed. Josephson, then a University of Michigan Law School professor, wanted to help him out. So, he created a bar-exam review course for his father to run.

His father “believed certain things were OK, including overselling a product. But it was my reputation on the line,” recalls Josephson, 54.

The result was “many, many” conflicts, father and son frequently slamming the phone on one another. The business took off, however--and Josephson sold it in 1985 for $10 million, considerably more than his professor’s earnings.

His lifelong financial needs met, “The question became what was I going to do for the rest of my life,” he says.

More to the point, he now had a son and “I realized I couldn’t teach him the [legal] profession’s cynical approach to right and wrong. I thought, ‘There’s got to be something I believe in,’ ” he says.

So, Josephson took $1 million of his self-described windfall and created the largest private ethical institute in the world.

The first three years saw the institute solidly in the red as income from classes rose but fell short of expenses--and Josephson continuing to ponder ethical questions. Did “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” for example, describe ethical or religious behavior? If he had somehow come across the conspirators plotting to kill Hitler early in World War II, would he not be ethically bound to help them, saving the lives of others?

On a smaller scale, was good ethics synonymous with good business? Not necessarily, he concluded. A whistle-blower, for example, might end up losing his job or his business.

The more Josephson explored, the more he realized that “People wanted to think more broadly about this.” And what did it all matter, anyhow, if ethical answers remained theoretical? The most meaningful answers, he realized, were those applicable to real life.

So, five years ago Josephson hosted an invitation-only conference of educators, religious leaders, civic leaders and the like in Aspen, Colo. In time, conferees agreed upon six key ethical values: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and good citizenship.

From these, Josephson created Character Counts, a program to teach ethics in schools. He also created an ethics training for government officials, including some of the upper echelons of the CIA, the IRS and the military, as well as for business executives.

Ralph Larsen, chairman of Johnson & Johnson, which employs 80,000 people, calls the impact of the training “profound . . . particularly the session [Josephson] had with our executive committee made a big difference in the content and directness of our conversation.”

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In 1996 the institute released a “Report Card on American Integrity,” based on a survey of nearly 12,000 respondents ranging in age from early teens to late 60s. Among its findings:

* Two-thirds of high school students admitted they had cheated on an exam during the past year; nearly half had cheated repeatedly.

* Seventy percent of all high school students and half of all college students said they had lied to a parent repeatedly during the last year.

* More than a third of all high school and a sixth of all college students said they had stolen something from a store in the past year. A slightly smaller number had stolen from a parent or relative.

* About half of all respondents said living a “religious, righteous” life was very important. A third of these, however, admitted to stealing from a store; 60% said they had cheated; and about a sixth of them--slightly more than their nonreligious counterparts--said they had lied on a job application.

Concluded Josephson: Not only were American ethical values on the wane, religious instruction had made little headway fighting the slide.

During a recent training session primarily for educators, most denied that it was their students who cheated. Rather, they insisted, the two-thirds of all students who cheated were all at the other schools.

Was this statistically possible? Josephson asked.

Finally, an administrator admitted he looked the other way to help maintain his school’s competitive edge. If he stopped the cheating, his students would score lower in national test scores, and his school would lose students to rival schools.

The school’s real message, Josephson concluded, was not that students shouldn’t cheat. Rather, with cheating a fact of life, its real message was that each student should cheat better than the others.

Summarized Battle Creek, Mich., corrections officer Tracy Iagnoco, 29, “For a lot of people, right is what they can get away with; wrong is getting caught.”

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Josephson insists, however, that Americans are not inherently more selfish than before. Instead, he says, we have swallowed whole the prevailing pop psychology that happiness derives from “looking out for No. 1.”

We have also lost the countervailing social obligation voiced by President Kennedy when he says, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

We live in a fog of rampant materialism, jockeying for status and position, Josephson says.

“But our fundamental capacity to see clearly hasn’t gone away. That’s why I call it a fog--because it can be blown away. . . . In a democracy, every citizen is a public official. Ethically, it’s not proper just to vote your pocketbook; each citizen must consider the welfare of the community.”

This concept of the greater good is critical to Josephson’s thinking. For example, he says, former Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams “demanded what amounted to extortion when he threatened to sue the city if his contract was not renewed.” Ethically, Josephson says, Williams should have put his demands on public money behind the greater needs of the city’s citizens.

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Ethical decision-making does not necessarily lead to consensus, however. Americans may heatedly--and ethically--debate the proper outlays for, say, the environment, education and the military, he says.

What ethics does call for is public debate in which respect for one’s opponents is a paramount value. Thus, he says, it is always unethical to lie about or misrepresent an opponent’s views.

Similarly, he says, many choices are neither inherently ethical or unethical. Rather, the ethical quality of any choice is determined by the reasons behind it. For example, a citizen who believes a needle exchange program encourages drug use may ethically argue against it. If, however, his argument is based on a bias against a class of people, his argument becomes unethical.

Nor is the law-abiding citizen necessarily ethical.

“We’ve tried to legislate ourselves into morality and want to think that anything that’s legal is ethical,” he says. But ethics surpasses the law. Thus, he says, lying to one’s spouse is legal--but unethical. Favoring a natural child over an adopted child is likewise legal--but unethical.

Widespread unethical behavior, in turn, destroys the common values and social programs by which we have built society. Thus, programs that benefit needy people have been corrupted by John Q. Public’s entitlement mentality, he says.

“Once a person feels entitled to something, he feels he has a right to it, and then he’ll do anything to get it,” Josephson says. “So, you have wealthy individuals hiding assets to get Social Security benefits,” imperiling the social safety, and students from wealthy families lying to get college scholarships, making such aid unavailable for many in need.

The inevitable result is “a growing belief that it’s stupid to be ethical, that ethical people can’t compete,” he says. “The answer is, they can compete, but the ethical person may have to work harder and smarter.”

Not that exercising our sense of ethics is simple or painless. Indeed, Josephson frequently emphasizes how often our actions differ from our knowledge of what’s right.

Thus, Josephson recently landed hard on a training participant who admitted that, even if she had the money to move, she would falsely list a sister’s address as her own to enroll her child in a better public school: “You’re part of the problem.”

In this take-no-prisoners type of atmosphere, only about three of the 35 participants, each of whom had paid upward of $750 plus air fare and hotel to take the 3 1/2-day training, will be certified as an instructor. Even among them, about half will drop out within a year.

Nevertheless, Josephson says, Character Counts has licensed about 1,200 trainers, causing the institute to double its annual budget within the last year to $2 million.

Not that all of Josephson’s decisions are noncontroversial. Indeed, he has undergone his own trial by fire. His second wife, Anne, a former institute volunteer, is just six years older than his 21-year-old son, Justin. Although his marriage broke “the cultural norm” and “raises eyebrows,” Josephson insists, “When you fall in love, you fall in love.”

Equally controversially, Josephson has decided to bequeath most of his money to charity rather than to his four children.

“I want to raise my children with good values. If they knew the money was coming, it would negatively affect them,” he says.

Insisting on their right to privacy, Josephson made none of his family available for comment.

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Controversial or not, however, Josephson is still attracting recruits. Thus, former television writer Joyce Brubaker, 63, is now one of Josephson’s full-time employees.

“In Hollywood, I didn’t see I had a chance in hell to make a difference,” she says. She started out as an institute volunteer because “I thought I could make more of a difference here.”

Other volunteers include actor Tom Selleck, who first heard Josephson on the radio. Selleck threw himself behind the cause because “the more I talk ethics, the more I’m apt to walk it.”

Especially in his dealing with his 8-year-old daughter, Hannah, “I’d like to think I wasn’t a hypocrite before. But it certainly has made me more aware of how I try to fool myself.”

Similarly, Sen. Pete Domenici (R.-N.M.), has talked up the program “because I am absolutely positive that values and character are leaving the American lifestyle. . . .”

“Teachers are frightened by society equating values with religion,” he says. “But Josephson has succeeded in adapting character values so that no one can object.”

The result is that as many New Mexico schools have adopted Josephson’s program. “Angry kids are less numerous; cheating is down; kids are taking care of each other,” Domenici says.

But the ethics training has yet to impact Washington.

“Government can’t perfect the program, but the program may perfect government,” he says wryly.

Marine captain and recent training participant Vince Vertin, 27, who commanded 135 men during the peacekeeping mission in Somalia, summed it all up:

“Even if I don’t agree with another man’s decisions, I can live with them if I respect his character. For me, character is not an additional option. For me, character is everything.”