We live in a world that appears to have lost its moral moorings. Fifty years ago Omar Bradley said:

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Ten years later Robert Fitch, in Christianity in Crisis, put it like this:

We live today in an age when ethics has become obsolete. It is superseded by science, deleted by psychology, dismissed as emotive by philosophy. It is drowned in compassion, evaporated into aesthetics and retreats before relativism.

Things have not improved in fifty years and today even the whole idea of right and wrong seems to be up for grabs. Ravi Zacharias, in A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism, sums up his analysis of the situation today:

The logic of chance origins has driven our society into rewriting the rules, so that utility has replaced duty, self-expression has unseated authority, and being good has become feeling good. These new rules plunge the moral philosopher into a veritable vortex of relativisations. All absolutes die the death of a thousand qualifications. Life becomes a pin-ball game, whose rules, though they be few, are all instrumental and not meaningful in themselves, except as a means to the player's enjoyment.

Having come loose from our moral moorings in the brave new world, we find ourselves adrift in uncharted seas and have decided to toss away the compass.

Not so long ago the Times Literary Supplement referred to a society that has never made a movie of Leonardo da Vinci but has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco - famous only for having had a teenage love, Amy Fisher, who shot his wife!

One wag has expressed the vagueness that exists about moral values today in the following verse:

It all depends on where you are;

It all depends on who you are;

It all depends on how you feel;

It all depends on what you feel;

It all depends on how you're raised;

It all depends on what is praised;

What's right today is wrong tomorrow;

Joy in France, in England sorrow;

It all depends on points of view;

Australia, or Timbuctoo;

In Rome do as the Romans do;

If tastes just happen to agree,

Then you have morality;

But where there are conflicting trends,

It all depends, it all depends.

Ian Hassall, New Zealand's former Commissioner for Children, was recently interviewed by Kim Hill on radio. He raised concern about the loss of values in this country and their replacement only by free market instincts. He placed a link squarely between the rise in suicide, particularly youth suicide, and the absence of values to live by. He cited the sociologist Durkheim, who over a hundred years ago noted a rise in suicide, violence and mental illness when a community loses its values base and therefore meaning. Durkheim called this condition 'anomie' and considered it the worst condition of society.

The growing crime rate in many countries is one of the consequences of this lack of moral values in society. In the 1950s, psychologist Sharon Samenow and psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson, sharing the conventional wisdom that crime is caused by environment, set out to prove their point. They began a 17-year study involving thousands of hours of testing of 250 inmates in the District of Columbia. To their astonishment, they discovered that the cause of crime cannot be traced to environment, poverty, or oppression. Instead, crime is the result of individuals making, as they put it, wrong moral choices. In their 1977 work, The Criminal Personality, they concluded that the answer to crime is a "conversion of the wrong-doer to a more responsible lifestyle." In 1987, Harvard professors James Wilson and Richard Herrnstein came to similar conclusions in their book Crime and Human Nature. They determined that the cause of crime is a lack of proper moral training among young people during the morally formative years, particularly ages one to six.

The lack of moral values in society, and the need to do something about it, is becoming increasingly recognised. In a speech which attracted a good deal of media attention (and some flak), our Governor General, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, deplored the lack of values in society and appealed for a return to some basic moral values. He quoted a report commissioned by UNESCO on Education for the 21st Century. It contains, surprisingly, the following statement:

Often without realising it, the world has a longing, often unexpressed, for an ideal and for values that we shall term 'moral'. It is thus education's noble task to encourage each and every one, acting in accordance with their traditions and convictions, and paying full respect to pluralism, to lift their minds and spirits to the plane of the universal and, in some measure to transcend themselves. It is no exaggeration to say that the survival of humanity depends thereon.

The situation in North America is such that, according to columnist Douglas Todd, "More than four out of five North Americans believe a decline in morals is the continent's gravest problem and that ethics should be taught in the schools." One result of this concern is that entire new specialities have grown up overnight. Today medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics and legal ethics are not only serious endeavours but required curricular studies in respected professional schools across the land. Ethics has been spoken of as a "growth industry."