For UNC students, particularly graduating seniors, spring is coming, and with it, for most will come employment. Some graduates explicitly want their occupations to effect positive change on others. Many, however, will find themselves in more modest positions initially.
Such modesty may be misplaced. For if society is the residue of collectively apparent but individually affected decisions, then all decisions in all facets of life, and therefore all jobs, will have an impact on others.
In almost all jobs some service is being asked of you on good faith that you will perform it with integrity and conscientiousness. With this call in mind, what will you do?
To paraphrase Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. Integrity and conscientiousness then are not acts, but habits. If your habit is to do the right thing, even if no one is watching, in any job you are likely to serve your fellow people well. This can and should give one both pride and gratitude. If this is not your habit, your collective humanity suffers.
Regardless of how close you are to graduation, you still have time to question your habits and to consider them in the context of larger moral debates. UNC graduates will take this knowledge with them into their initial jobs and forward into their lives. But today’s graduates are tomorrow’s elite, and in order to do a better job than today’s elites, different habits should be cultivated now.
What you will do morally in your jobs is probably, unless consciously addressed and changed, what you have done up to now. Will you do the right thing?
