The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fulfilling God’s Kingdom on Earth. Dallas Willard

been developed in our contemporary context to deal with specific circumstances and situations, but rarely if ever do they deal with actually “being” an ethical person. Instead, “professional ethics,” or “business ethics,” only educates people about ways to stay out of trouble with the law, fellow professionals, and customers or clients. Ethics have come to be defined only as legal behaviors or practices, not qualities of character in moral agents who are tasked to pursue and achieve general flourishing and common welfare.

      This was demonstrated during the “tech bubble,” in which several Wall Street securities firms were fined huge sums by the SEC for misleading clients with investment advice. Yet five years earlier, the SEC commissioned a study on compensation and demanded across the board “ethics training” for investment brokers.³ One wonders if regulators truly believed such “ethics training” would prevent breaches of fiduciary responsibilities and unethical treatment of clients. Is it knowledge alone that will stem the tide of unethical abuse?

      In fact, neither the SEC nor any other governing agency has the power to achieve what ethics training must actually produce in practice. What all our ethics training courses, both secular and religious, fail to do is forge moral agents. The result of any course of study in ethics must be both the knowledge