By Randall Smith.

Experience suggests, and multiple studies show, that people don't act as ethically as they think they will. It is easier to imagine being just and heroic than to be just and heroic. But sometimes the issue isn't a lack of character, it's a skewing of our vision of things.

Josef Pieper, in his masterly book The Four Cardinal Virtues, begins his chapter on prudence with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew (6:22): "If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light," which continues: "but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"

One crucial question, then, is how we blind ourselves to the moral character of our acts and enter that darkness. Often, it depends on how the issue is framed.

In one instance, we might be focusing on the act. But then later, we must face the potential consequences. And then we might start doing a "cost-benefit" analysis. (In ethics, this is sometimes called "consequentialism," "utilitarianism," or "proportionalism.") Yes, I thought it was wrong to experiment with stem cells from aborted fetuses, but what if we could cure Alzheimer's? Now the moral balance starts to tip in favor. Consequentialist thinking can make the immorality of the act fade.

Problems of this sort suggest the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas who bids us consider not only the consequences of the act and not only the good intentions with which we presume that we're acting - something about which it is easy to fool ourselves - but also the moral object of the act, which is to say: what we are actually doing.

Even here, though, it is easy to blind ourselves. One common way of doing this is to create "non-moral" categories of acts. The incoming president of a company slashes thousands of jobs, putting thousands of people out of work and harming their families, and then says: "This is a business decision." "Business decisions" are also necessarily moral decisions involving persons. We blind ourselves if we don't recognize this fact.

There may be decisions without much moral weight, like whether to choose chocolate or vanilla - although even here, it might have moral weight if there isn't enough chocolate for everyone. But it's best to assume every decision is a moral decision and every choice is either morally good or not. And best again if we made sure we were considering persons rather than merely institutions or ideologies. You don't want to say things like, "Yes, a lot of people are going to be killed, but the utopian communist worker state is being established."

But lest I make the common error of insulating my own institution and ideology from the criticism and critique I am willing to make of others - academics who live in glass houses love to throw stones - let me propose another example closer to home.

Let's say that a university needs more money. (They always need more money.) And let's say the way they get more money is by admitting students who aren't ready for college-level work: can't read serious prose, write a coherent sentence, or do basic math. Many of these students will flunk out, but you can still get one, maybe even two, years of tuition out of them. Or you can pass them, get additional years of tuition, and graduate students who paid a lot of money but can't read, write, or do basic math.

Now let's say a group of faculty goes to the president and says, "We are admitting students who can't do college-level work, and they're flunking out, so we need to fix the problem." There are two ways of fixing this problem. One is to stop admitting these students. The other is to hire instructors who spend hours doing the kind of individualized remedial training these kids need to succeed and then requiring them to attend.

But that costs money, and the whole point is to get more. So let's say the president says instead: "If we stop admitting these kids, this is the number of faculty positions I will have to cut." ...