or place is wrong
in another, is it fair to object when moral laws are broken? If a
practice like prostitution is common, what makes it wrong?

These do not sound like the questions likely to receive a welcome
hearing in the classroom; but it is precisely upon the interest in
such topics as these that the course in ethics should build; for its
subject is right living, a matter in which the student may indeed be
assumed to feel a genuine concern. If the questions that he wants
answered are not all as broad in their significance as the foregoing,
there are others of a more immediate personal kind which arise in his
life as a student, as a friend, as a son and brother, problems in
which standards of fair play and "decency" are involved, and upon
which it may be taken for granted that he has done some thinking,
howsoever crude. These interests are invaluable. Out of them the finer
product is to be created in the shape of better standards, higher
ideals, and habits of moral thoughtfulness, leading in turn to still
better standards and still worthier conduct. The course in ethics
should be practical in the sense that both its starting point and its
final object are found in the student's management of his life.

=Illustrations of the problems of right living=

Consider, for example, how his interest in problems of friendship may
be used as the point of departure for an extremely important survey
over general questions of right relationship. Just because friendship
is so vital a concern of adolescent years, he can be led to read what
Aristotle, Kant, Emerson, have to say upon this subject and be
introduced as well to that larger life of ideal relationships from
which these writers regard the dealings of friends. The topic of right
attitudes toward a friend broadens out readily into such
considerations as treating persons aright for their own sake or
regarding them as ends _per se_, a dead abstraction when approached as
it is by Kant, but a living reality when the students get Aristotle's
point about magnanimous treatment of friends. They can then proceed by
way of contrast to note, for example, how this magnanimity was limited
to friends in the upper levels of Athenian society, and went hand in
hand with approval of slave labor and other exploitations which a
modern conscience forbids. To give sharper edge to the conception of
man as deserving right treatment for his own sake, the class might go
on to examine other notable