David Brooks

well, most people can't do that.

If your name is Aristotle, you can maybe come up with a morality.

The rest of us can't do it.

And secondly, we have no sense of a shared moral order.

If we're going to trust each other, we have to agree in right and wrong.

And so we left successive generations morally inarticulate and confused.

And there was a book by a guy named Christian Smith, who's a sociologist at Notre Dame.

He went to college campuses and asked

young people, when's the last time you faced a moral dilemma?

And most of the young people couldn't name what a moral dilemma, they didn't know what it was.

A moral dilemma is when two values you cherish clash.

But they would say things like, you know, I parled in a parking space, I didn't have any quarters.

And you would say, well, that's a problem.

It's not really a moral dilemma.

And he found that many of the young people had just never thought about how to talk about morality.

Fast forward a couple years, a woman named Christine Emba writes a book called Rethinking Sex.

And she's talking to young adults about their sex lives.

And she talks to young women who say, you know, I felt icky after a hookup, but I couldn't tell you why.

And then the saddest story in her book was she interviewed a woman who'd been raped.

And the young woman said, I somehow know rape is worse than a nosebleed, but I couldn't tell you why.