A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Since it was introduced last January, TIME's Ethics section has examined the dilemmas of conscience posed by such modern practices as surrogate motherhood, tests and treatments for AIDS, removal of feeding tubes from terminally ill patients and advances in genetic engineering. This week our ethical inquiry is set on a much wider stage. It is an exploration of the rules and practices of American politics, business and society at large.

Helping frame the issues and answer the questions are the authors of this week's cover stories: Senior Writer Walter Shapiro, Associate Editors Stephen Koepp and Richard Stengel and National Political Correspondent Laurence I. Barrett. The final segment of the section was written by Senior Writer Ezra Bowen, who acknowledges an intense, longtime interest in ethics. Bowen is a 1949 graduate of Amherst College, where he studied history and philosophy (and starred at first base on the baseball team). His belief in ethical obligations underlay a major part of a commencement address he delivered earlier this month at Texas Lutheran College in Seguin, and he will return to the topic on May 24 at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., when he receives an honorary doctor of letters.

"What has been lost today by families, many lawyers, young people, evangelists, Wall Street speculators, Presidents, and industrialists and bureaucrats who allowed the Challenger to blast off is the sense that they are accountable to others, as well as themselves, for their actions," Bowen says. "We live in a time characterized by intense self-centeredness."

As Bowen demonstrated in his first Ethics story (on AIDS, Feb. 2) and in his discussion of the legal views of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (ESSAY, Aug. 11, 1986), he does not shrink from judgment. "I'm no holier-than-thou type," says Bowen, "but it has been my experience that the best guys I've known in life have had profound ethical concerns." At the top of his list of ethically minded people is his late mother, the prominent biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen, whose books chronicled the lives of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., President John Adams and 17th century English Legal Scholar and Judge Sir Edward Coke. Her well-known work Miracle at Philadelphia vividly described the making of the U.S. Constitution. "She cared very much about right and wrong, but not once did she talk to me directly about it," says Bowen. "She was a silent force who set an example in her own living I cannot forget."