Are Ethical Standards Irrelevant

Are ethics irrelevant?  If you look at what leading figures are able to get away with as long as they make money, maybe so. I'm going to be careful today and not talk about bankers, because my web traffic tells me people have moved on and are willing to accept anything done on Wall Street.

But Chris Christie and others are seemingly able to lie with impunity. My reading of Robert Gates' book, Duty, along with  George Packer's, The Unwinding, has convinced me that Vice President Biden is one of the slimiest characters that's ever been in government. My doctoral dissertation adviser, Michael Sawyer, who was Professor of Constitutional Law and Vice Chancellor of Syracuse University, told me Biden was caught cheating in law school. He also told me how someone we knew, Roger, had been used and dumped by Biden, a pattern Packer said was used over and over in Biden's career.

National statistics told me that every time I gave a test in college, seventy per cent of the students had already cheated before. Clearly we are not producing ethical adults in America and no one really cares.

I remember catching a student who claimed  as her own something written by Mark
Twain in 1895. She vowed to bring me down over this and showed no remorse.
The F stood, but defending it took a lot of time. The institution I was at had no interest in academic standards and would change a professor's grades after the semester was over.

Maybe everyone has decided to fold, but I hope not.

 As to the advantages, you only have to look to China's adulterated products and the fact businessmen there feel no guilt about hurting others in pursuit of a yuan. Hell, doing away with ethical standards may make it easier to compete with them. If that's what America really wants, who am I to stand in the way of progress.