I was honored to give the Gupta Lecture in Ethics at Michigan State University on October 21.

The Gupta Ethics Lecture series was endowed in 2020 by Dr. Shashikant (“Shashi”) Gupta and his wife, Margaret Gupta, entrepreneurs and philanthropists who are deeply concerned about the erosion of integrity and the precipitous decline of morality and ethics in both private and public life in America today. The Guptas have chosen to focus their philanthropic generosity on “integrity, human dignity, and excellence.”

The Guptas have generously given of their time and financial resources in recent years in an effort to reverse this decline and eventually return America to its rightful place as the moral leader of the free world.

The Ethics Lecture took the form of a conversation with the Provost of Michigan State University, Laura Lee McIntyre, and me, titled “Virtues and Values on Leadership and Democracy.”

I promised Dr. and Mrs. Gupta that I would write an essay capturing the important conversation that Provost McIntyre and I had in their honor. I have titled the essay “America’s Crisis of Conscience and Character.” The essay follows below.

The State News newspaper reported on the lecture. The link to that article is here: https://statenews.com/article/2026/10/judge-j-michael-luttig-urges-msu-students-to-defend-democracy-through-courage?ct=content_open…cv=cbox_latest…utm_source=ig…utm_medium=social…utm_content=link_in_bio

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America’s Crisis of Conscience and Character

Moral conscience and character are the cornerstones of America.

America was founded upon the morals and virtues that had been passed down to the American Colonists from the beginning of time, and the foundations of our Constitution and Government, and of our Democracy and Rule of Law, are correspondingly moral and virtuous.

Since its Founding 250 years ago, America has been the moral conscience and the moral leader of the free world. But America is no longer the same moral leader of the world that it has been for the past 250 years.

As America celebrates the 250th Anniversary of its Founding, the nation is in the throes of an existential crisis of conscience and character, because it has forsaken the foundations of this nation, the morals and virtues that had been passed down to the American Colonists through all of time and the distinctive American character of the American Colonists evidenced in the Declaration of Independence and proven by the Colonists in the Revolutionary war to secure the independence of the United States from the British Crown. The same morals and virtues and the same American character that have been bequeathed to us since the Founding by our forefathers and ancestors.

The question facing America and Americans today is whether we will summon our moral constitution and American character, demand character and moral leadership from our elected and appointed representatives, and reclaim the moral authority necessary to be the leader of the free world that we have foolishly forfeited.

The time of America’s testing of its moral conscience and character has come. Whether America passes this test will determine whether this nation will long endure.

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Individuals can suffer crises of moral conscience and character, but nations can also, and indeed, both Americans and America itself are in the throes of these twin moral crises today. Both individuals and nations can suffer a crisis of moral conscience without suffering at the same time a crisis of moral character, and vice-versa. America and Americans are suffering both crises at the same time.

America and Americans are engulfed in a crisis of moral conscience. The nation and its citizens are struggling to discern and judge what is right and what is wrong and to distinguish the one from the other, if not altogether refusing to acknowledge what is right and what is wrong.

Seemingly overnight, we in America have lost our national and individual moral faculty – our moral judgment – that has enabled us as a nation and as a People to discern and distinguish between right and wrong since our Founding a quarter of a millennium ago.

At the same time, America and Americans are suffering a crisis of character, the integrity, courage, and fortitude to accept the moral responsibilities that come with fidelity and adherence to the moral judgments of our consciences and do what is right as opposed to what is wrong, and to refrain from doing what is wrong. All of a sudden after 250 years, it seems, “We the People of the United States” no longer have the moral constitution to act upon the convictions and dictates of our consciences, either for ourselves or for our country.

As a consequence of the paralysis of our collective conscience and character, the American People lack the ability to address the nation’s failure of conscience and character. We are unprepared and unwilling at the moment to make the personal sacrifices required by our consciences and our character to address the nation’s moral crisis.

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Americans seem no longer even to recognize, much less acknowledge, the morals and virtues and character that have been taught, instilled, and celebrated in our society since the Founding and that were so faithfully nurtured and protected by the generations and generations of Americans that came before us. Honor, integrity, truthfulness, honesty, humility, courage, selflessness, duty, obligation, responsibility — and country. What would James Madison think of America today? It was our Fourth President and the Father of our Constitution who declared it “a chimerical idea” the “[supposition] that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in [its] people.”

Americans no longer seem to agree on what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is to be valued and what is not.

We seem not even to recognize right from wrong. If we do, we refuse to acknowledge that difference.

We seem no longer to possess the moral constitution to act upon the convictions and dictates of our collective conscience.

At least for the moment, we seem to have been dispossessed of the moral constitution and character upon which this nation is grounded and rests.

America cannot long endure in such moral dissonance with the cornerstones of its Founding.

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For two hundred and fifty years, America has essentially been of one moral conscience and character, even during periods when Americans were of divided conscience and character. The American Colonists pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the Declaration of Independence to secure their freedom from the British Crown and to establish this virtuous nation of virtuous people. It has been our shared conscience and character that has made America the greatest experiment in self-government in all of human civilization and the greatest nation on earth.

So, when did America begin its fall?

Since January 6, 2021, America has been in the midst of a moral inversion, led by our political leaders. For these years, we have been told by our political class and taught by their example that the timeless morals and virtues and their opposite vices that define America and that have defined humanity throughout all of civilization no longer exist, that these virtues and these vices are indistinguishable one from the other.

We have even been told and taught by our political leaders in the highest offices in the land that the virtues are actually vices and the vices virtues.

Isaiah 5:20 condemns those who confuse right and wrong, good and evil. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”

Nor is it coincidental that, over this same period of time, the 47^th President of the United States has led the almost complete inversion of our nation’s moral law that has been passed down to us through the ages, our biblical law, as well as our positive law -- the Constitution and laws of the United States.

It is as a consequence of this inversion of our moral laws by our president and political leaders, coupled with the failure of America’s other institutions of democracy and law to defend the moral conscience and character foundations of our nation that America and Americans find themselves in this existential crisis of moral identity.

It is as a consequence of this crisis of moral inversion that the American People are being tested as to whether we even still have or want a collective moral conscience, and if we still have and want a moral conscience, whether we still possess the American character to act upon and in accordance with the moral imperatives of our conscience that are necessary if we are to demand an about-face in our poisonous politics and a sea change in the conscience and character of the political leadership of our nation.

America is also in the depths of political and constitutional crisis – crises in its institutions of democracy and law. America will remain in political and constitutional crisis unless and until it triumphantly resolves its moral crisis by deciding that it once again wants to be a nation of moral conscience and character.

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America’s moral crisis is existential, for the fundamental reason that the morals and virtues that had been passed down to the American Colonists since the beginning of time and the distinctive American character manifested by the American Colonists in the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War to secure America’s independence from the British Crown are the very foundations of the nation.

In a legacy gift to the nation, Jeffrey Rosen, the preeminent scholar of the Constitution, America’s Founding, and the American Character, has illuminated for the nation during its 250th Anniversary that America was founded on the foundational premises that the American People would themselves be virtuous and that in turn the virtuous American People would ensure that their government “of the People, by the People, and for the People” would likewise be virtuous, by electing virtuous representatives to represent them in their government.1

Thus, for example, George Washington in his Farewell Address to the Nation in 1796: “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”2

James Madison at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788: “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks – no form of government can render us secure.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”3

John Adams in 1819: “[W]ithout Virtue, there can be no political Liberty.”4 And in 1798, “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”5

“In Thomas Jefferson’s view, the only thing standing between America and a populist demagogue was the virtuous self-control of American citizens who would find the emotional balance and tranquility of mind to choose virtuous leaders who would sustain the American experiment rather than destroy it.”6

Which is to say that our constitutional democracy is literally dependent upon our conscience and character as American citizens. Our ability to discern and distinguish the morally and virtuously right from the morally and virtuously wrong, our moral constitution, integrity, and courage to act upon the convictions of our consciences . . . and then our insistence upon political leaders of moral conscience and character who will lead America with moral conscience and character.

Our Democracy and our Constitution are not self-executing. They are executed by leaders whom we elect and appoint to office to represent us and our nation – our President, Congress, and Courts. If those leaders whom we choose are not themselves of sound moral conscience and character, then our government will not be of sound moral conscience and character. And we the People will have no one to blame but ourselves.

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Abraham Lincoln, in the context of what he saw at the time as the substitution of rule by mob for rule by law – the inversion of moral constitution and character – foretold of the “danger from within” of the forsaking of the nation’s moral constitution and American character:

We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of [these institutions and liberties] --they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ‘tis ours only, to transmit these . . . to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! . . .

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.7

The existential “danger from within” has finally arrived. America’s time of testing has come.

Do we Americans still want to be the virtuous people of character that we have been since America’s Founding and that we must be if we are to save our constitutional democracy? Do we Americans still want a moral, virtuous government to represent us, a virtuous People?

Will we summon our moral constitution and American character, demand integrity, courage, and moral leadership from our government, and reclaim our forfeited moral authority necessary to be the moral leader of the free world once again?

These are our tests.

It will take the moral constitution of America and the moral clarity of the collective voices of “We the People of the United States.”

If we summon our moral constitution and our American character and speak truth to our government’s untruth, the United States will again be the moral leader of the free world and will long endure as the nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal that was brought forth on this continent by our forefathers two hundred and fifty years ago.

America is calling.