High schoolers explore the ethics of friendship

Aristotle met Frodo and Sam, Shrek and Donkey, and C3PO and R2D2 on Saturday as high school students learned about the ethics of friendships.

The famous film friendships were used to explain something the Greek philosopher taught: that while some relationships can be fun and some can be useful, there are deep commitments that can change both parties in the friendship, and sometimes even change the world.

With the familiar visions of screen friends on slides, students attending the first Youth Leadership Summit on Ethics grasped Aristotle’s concept pretty easily, said J. Michael Stebbins, a Gonzaga University philosophy professor. Dana Mannino, one of his students who developed the program for a class, said today’s students already know the stories of most of those cinematic relationships.

“The key is, do they think about their own friendships now?” Stebbins said.

Getting nearly 150 students to think about their lives and the ethical decisions they face daily was the goal of the summit at Gonzaga, sponsored by the Liberty Lake Centennial Rotary Club. They talked about ethics in sports, business, the media and government in workshops, and heard from nationally recognized speakers on motivation and values.

Core values are the same across most cultures, said Steven Gilyeart, an international attorney and consultant. From the American West to medieval knights to Japanese samurai, people stress honesty, modesty, selflessness.

“You always have a choice,” said Duane Smotherman, who explained how he made a choice to get away from the streets of South Los Angeles and work to build an international consulting firm on leadership and conflict resolution. “No one can make you a victim without your permission.”

Co-founder Ron Schutz said the idea for the summit began about a year ago, when the new Rotary Club at Liberty Lake was looking for its first project. Slowly they built a program of speakers and presenters and hooked up with the Gonzaga Ethics Institute. It was a bigger task than first anticipated, but it came together, Schutz said.

“We were a new club. We didn’t know what we couldn’t do,” he added.

Feedback from the students and the speakers was so positive they hope to make the summit an annual event, Schutz said.