Ethics education

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has announced a pilot program that will give school pupils the choice of studying religion or secular ethics. (Mansur Mirovalev, “Russian pupils to have choice of religion, ethics,” Washington Post, July 22, 2009) This program is Russia’s response to the widespread turbulence and moral chaos that has followed the demise of the officially atheist Soviet Union.

Although humans may have a genetic predisposition toward reciprocal altruism, that by itself seems insufficient to shape an ethical foundation and structures on which a society and its members can lead lives that promote human flourishing. Ethical instruction in families, schools, and religious institutions is important if we wish to teach succeeding generations our accumulated wisdom about human flourishing.

Christianity implicitly recognized this need for ethical formation through its doctrine of original sin. Original sin refers to the idea that the first sin, mythically depicted in Genesis as Adam and Eve sharing in the forbidden fruit, has destroyed, from birth, the relationship between every human and God.

This concept of original sin impelled the belief that a newborn in peril for its life should receive Holy Baptism as soon as possible in order to receive forgiveness and enter into the everlasting fellowship of God's people. In time, people recognized that whatever original sin may mean, God’s love certainly extends to innocent newborns; both the unbaptized infant and the baptized infant that die tragic, premature deaths enters the fullness of God's embrace.

More recently, some Christian scholars have recovered Irenaeus’ suggestion that the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit represents a step in human development, becoming like God in that humans achieved self-awareness, a necessary component of free choice, creativity, and other human qualities that reflect the Creator’s image. Rabbi Harold Kushner advocates the same belief. This understanding of the Garden of Eden story coheres better with evolution, the widely accepted modern scientific theory about how creation occurred.

From this perspective, we can more helpfully think about original sin as our collective inheritance of millennia of rebellion against God, an inheritance deeply embedded in our cultural milieu that lures each successive generation away from God. This luring counterbalances the human genetic predisposition toward reciprocal altruism and makes ethical (and spiritual!) formation essential.