THE HELPLESSNESS OF INDIVIDUAL MORALITY

Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2010) (From "The Presence of the Past": "Even if learned properly, moral courage is not the only and maybe not even the first lesson to be gleaned from the past. What the past likewise so glaringly shows is the helplessness of individual morality in the absence of institutions in which citizens are recognised and matter, institutions that they can impact by their appeals and which they can depend on to respond and support. Once parties, unions and associations churches and clubs, universities, schools and courts have been forced into line, there comes a point when the ethics opposition survive only in quixotic heroic gestures." Id. at 23, 32-33. "And the lesson form the past is that maintenance of the and other institutions is as crucial a vaccine as assertions of individual morality." Id. at 34. QUERY: In the current political climate in America, especially in light on the attacks on the integrity of the media, the integrity of the election process, the integrity of facts and truth--that is, where false-facts and post-truth are ever-present--is individual morality helpless? From "Stories About the Past": "And I remember the professor whose class I attended in my third year at law school and through whom I came to understand that studying law is more than studying articles and paragraphs; that it includes history and philosophy and is a rich intellectual universe." Id. at 117, 130. QUERY: Is this lesson lost on most of even the "best" twenty-first-century American law students?).