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Update your vocabulary with news clips from around the world 

Can you teach ethics?

Most ethicists, however, still Greek Philosopher Socrates, who concluded 2500 years ago that people can be taught to do right.

While ethics courses “have a very low chance of changing people's behavior in the long run,” they’re still an essential starting point for laying out expectations, said Howard Prince, a former Army general now heading an ethics program at the University of Texas in Austin. “It’s the first step. What really matters is the .”

The training proposed for forces in Iraq will be no different, Prince noted. “You increase the odds people will perform the way you want them to.” The training will reinforce what troops learned before coming to Iraq. The focus is on “core warrior values,” the military said.

That could be useful for those who “have come to doubt that the rules they learned in the states applied anymore,” said Michael Davis, a philosophy professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “You can also give them practice handling the new situations, thinking about what they would do.”

For real or for show

“If a person doesn’t understand…[basic] right from wrong, they don’t need an ethics class,” said John Maxwell, a speaker and author of the book, Ethics 101. In the end, the program could amount to little more than “PR” and “damage control,” he noted.

The same is true in the , where ethics training can be for real or merely for show, Maxwell said.

Enron criminal trial

Enron corp., synonymous with scandal and fraud, in its heyday was considered enlightened about enforcing ethical principles without stifling innovation.

As he testified in his own defense at the Enron criminal trial in 2006, former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling told the jury with no trace of irony, “Our control systems were very good.”

Vocabulary Focus

in the long run (idiom) ---at a time that is far into the future; in the end

starting point (n phr) ---a basis from which something begins

for show (prep phr) ---indicating something that has no practical value and is used only to improve the appearance of something else

trace of (n phr) ---a very slight amount

Specialized terms

PR---abbreviation for public relations, the activity of keeping good relationships between an organization and the people outside it

control system (n. phr)---a combination of elements that work together to maintain a desired output

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