What does it mean to be ethical in Donald Trump's America, rife with corruption and scandal?

Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. 

Or as we say in 2019 — a sucker.

What else can you say these days, in this culture?  A culture of doping athletes, abusive priests, Wall Street scammers, piratical corporations, sexual predators, college admissions cheats and a swaggering chief executive, now rapidly barreling toward impeachment. 

Ethics — defined by Merriam-Webster as "a set of moral principles" — sometimes seem to have vanished, like the passenger pigeon, from the American landscape. 

Nor do you have to look to Washington, D.C., for examples. There are others, closer to home. As the November elections near, we can't help but wonder: is the local mayor or council person we pull the lever for today going to be resigning in disgrace tomorrow? Certainly there are ethical boondoggles enough in New Jersey: nepotism in Palisades Park, political skulduggery in Englewood Cliffs and Rockaway Township. And of course, the Matterhorn of Jersey scandals: "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

And yes, there are unethical journalists. Even if it is the ethically questionable Donald Trump who says so.

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Scout's honor

Playing by the rules, it would appear, is a chump's game in 2019 — something best left to Boy Scouts, whose famous 1908 "law," quoted above, might sound quaint in an era of Bernie Madoff, Felicity Huffman and Paul Manafort. "Boy Scout," these days, can be almost a sneer. As in, "He's a real boy scout."  Not a compliment.

Yet Ryan Hanley, 15, of Dumont, takes the scout oath at every meeting. And he means it.

"Society, in general ignores these principles that describe what a model citizen should be," said Eagle Scout Hanley, a member of troop 1345. He's been a scout for 10 years.

"We, as a society, are preoccupied with things that we feel are more important," Hanley said.

Is America on the verge of an ethical extinction event? Are principles, standards, moral codes as endangered as the polar ice caps?

Or have we always been this way — and just too naive to know it?

The story continues below the quiz.

"I don't think we have evidence to say it's worse than it's ever been," said Elizabeth Kaye Victor, who teaches "value theory" — aka ethics — at William Paterson University in Wayne.

"There were robber barons, oil barons, 100 years ago," Victor said. "But one of the things we're getting more evidence about is that people are making more subjective judgments about what's right and wrong."

'Americans have always had a dual consciousness'

Officially, Americans value honesty. We're a nation of Sunday schools, honor rolls,  gentleman's handshakes.

But we're also something else.

We are also, famously, a nation of liars, flim-flammers, con men.

Among our heroes: P.T. Barnum, The Wizard of Oz,  Frank "Catch Me if You Can" Abagnale, and Harold Hill, the bogus musical instrument salesman in "The Music Man," which is coming back to Broadway in 2020 with Hugh Jackman.

We love the guys who Get Away with It. The ones who are wised-up. The ones who look out for No. 1.

There used to be a synonym for ethical: "square." A square deal, a square meal, treating someone fair and square. Square, because all sides are equal.

In the 1930s and '40s, a new term came into use. It referred to people who were conventional, naive, high-minded. People who played by the rules.

They were called "squares."

"Americans have always had a dual consciousness," Victor said. "We do like the noble person, the George Washington, the paragon. But we also like the renegade, the man who pushes and breaks and redefines the rules."

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Is there such a thing as a Noble Lie?

Americans, in short, have struggled over ethics for centuries — ever since George Washington chopped down the cherry tree.

That famous story, which biographer Parson Weems used to teach kids not to lie, was a lie.

"We tell all sorts of lies to get children to behave, to adhere to our system of ethics," Victor said. "This gets into the whole question of the Noble Lie. Is a lie sometimes better than the truth?"

Many of us would agree that ethics can be situational. Lying is bad — but so is telling your friend what you really think of his singing. Stealing is wrong — but letting your family starve is worse.

From there, of course, it's a short step to the Felicity Huffman defense. Cheating on a college admissions test is criminal — but so is not helping your kids succeed.

The judge who fined the actress $30,000 and sentenced her to 14 days of jail time didn't agree.

"That's a classic struggle in ethics," Victor said. "Do we allow exceptions to our ethical code?"

George Washington, for his part, really did care about ethics. He was very conscious that he was setting an example. Everything he did, including famously relinquishing power after two terms, was about personal honor. There's a term for this in philosophy: "Virtue Ethics."  Leading a good life — because being good leads to happiness. Aristotle and Confucius were big boosters.  

"In Virtue Ethics, you're asking what kind of person should I be,"  said Lisa Cassidy, who teaches a course on ethics at Ramapo College in Mahwah.

The ABCs of ethics

Meanwhile, Americans, over the last 400 years, have found lots of other reasons to Do the Right Thing.

Preachers, from Cotton Mather to Martin Luther King Jr., have proclaimed ethics from the pulpit. The Ten Commandments has the ultimate endorsement: God. The Divine Command Theory, it's called.

"The Ten Commandments came from God," said the Rev. George Maize IV, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Hackensack. "The further we get away from God, the more unethical we get."

Others, like your mother, subscribe to the theory of Duty. We are obligated to not behave badly — because what if everyone else did the same?  Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher, championed this idea.

"All mothers are Kantian, because they always tell you, 'What if everybody else did that?' " Cassidy said.

Then there are utilitarians — the greatest good, for the greatest number overall. Consider the hero firefighters of 9/11, who sacrificed their own lives to rescue others. Philosopher John Stuart Mill is their spokesman.

"Utilitarians are very concerned with the greatest outcome, overall, for everybody," Cassidy said. "You almost have to do a calculus: the unhappiness of some, compared to the happiness of most."

Compassion, too, is an ethical ideal. "Care Ethics," Cassidy said, has feminist roots. "Caring is a rational activity," Cassidy said. "It involves choices to preserve relationships, to preserve what matters to us."

The virtue of selfishness

But America is also the land of "individualism." So it's no surprise that selfishness, here, its has cheerleaders.

Ayn Rand — the thinker beloved of libertarians and conservatives like Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan — is most associated with this viewpoint. But Rand, said Gregory Salmieri, co-editor of a book on the subject, is often misunderstood.

Rationality, not greed, is really the point of the "Objectivist" philosophy that Rand espoused in books like "The Virtue of Selfishness," Salmieri said.

"It's about treating people rationally, which means justly," said Salmieri, who teaches at Rutgers University. "Which means above all else leaving them free to lead their own lives, by their own judgment, and for their own sakes."

Living for your own sake does not mean living dishonestly, Salmieri points out. 

But in practice, if winning is everything, and cheating helps you win…?

Such attitudes, by the way, are not confined to the so-called far right — even if that's where the media spotlight is right now.

In 1971, activist Abbie Hoffman published "Steal This Book," a paperback that urged hippies to shoplift, swipe food from restaurants, and use slugs in vending machines. A quarter-million people bought the book, though it may have reached more — given how many radicals and college students likely stole it from each other.

Can't we all just get along?

So what, at the end of the day, is ethical behavior? And who gets to decide?

No secret that our culture is fragmented. More and more, we're marching to our own drummers. Fundamentalist Christianity, radical socialism, predatory capitalism — each has its cheering section, greatly magnified by the media. 

But ethically compatible? Not so much. Rules, we may have  — but no one set that everyone agrees on.

The "social contract" is the basis on which the state exists, according to philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Now, some fear, it might be unraveling. Much as the state itself might be unraveling.

"One of the things that's really broken down, in the last 30 years, is trust in experts." Victor said. "Experts including journalists, politicians, professors. Even those we might think of as the source of ethics in our community, like church leaders. People don't know who to trust."

We're growing more isolated

"Ethics," Salmieri points out, means more than just social rules. The word  "Ethos" is Greek, meaning habits or customs. But more casually, most of us would probably define ethics in terms of our relations to others. It's our principles of behavior in the larger world. 

If we are less ethical now than in the past, Joseph Chuman wonders, could it be because of our relationship to other people? Is it because we're more solitary?

"People are more alienated and isolated than they used to be," said Chuman, leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, a Teaneck-based chapter of a 142-year-old national organization that promotes social justice and ethical behavior.

More people these days, he said, are interacting with each other second-hand, on  iPhones and computer screens. We spend more time alone, texting and tweeting, and less time in groups, in churches, in social and fraternal organizations.

Including — yes — The Boy Scouts.

"Scouting guides us on how to become a leader, from teaching younger Scouts how to tie a knot, all the way through giving back to the community through an Eagle Scout project,"  Hanley said.

Scouting, in other words, is inherently social. Scouts interact with the community, with adults, with other scouts

People who don't relate to others, face to face, are also likely to spend less time thinking about how they should relate to others. Our neighbors — and the rest of the world — become abstractions. As in the old ethical test: "What if you could press a button and get a million dollars…on condition that somebody you didn't know dropped dead?"

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That's what Chuman worries about — as the 21st century barrels on, and the crimes and scandals mount. 

"Social institutions — call them unions, clubs, fraternal organizations, churches — command less attention and membership," Chuman said. "When people are isolated, they are not reinforced to act in ethical and moral ways. Hyper-individualism is not good for strengthening the ethical fiber of a society. If we suffer from radical individualism, ethics erodes. People need to be together. "

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com; Twitter: @jimbeckerman1