Can Ethics Be Taught in Business Schools? | Dept of Education

Business Ethics can be defined as the study and evaluation of decision making by businesses according to moral concepts and judgments.

Ethical issues range from a company?s obligation to be honest with its customers to a company?s responsibility to preserve the environment and protect employee rights.

Ethics includes the need to produce a reasonable profit for the company?s shareholders with honesty in business practices, safety in the workplace, and larger environmental and social issues.

Business ethics calls for an awareness of social responsibility and this includes addressing social problems such as poverty, crime, environmental protection, equal rights, public health, and improving education.

Many multinational corporations operate in countries where bribery, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and lack of concern for the environment are neither illegal nor unethical or unusual ? all are the examples of Business Ethics.

Government efforts to encourage companies to adhere to ethical standards include President Clinton?s Model Business Principles (1995), in a program overseen by the Dept. of Commerce.

It has been wrongly assumed that the key to better behavior is modifying character.

The key to wrongdoing is much more likely to involve faulty ways of thinking about certain behaviors, namely thinking about them in ways that ?neutralize? them, morally, effectively exempting the wrongdoer from moral blame.

Thus it?s not wrong in claiming that virtue cannot be taught.

While business schools have excelled at producing graduates that demonstrate competence in engineering investment products based on complex mathematical models and implementing students exceptional ability at marketing and optimizing productivity, little has been done to enlighten the student as to how to use his/her acquired intellectual virtues in a manner which promotes morality.

Although students leave the university environment excelling with intellectual resources, there is no attempt being made to demonstrate how these attributes can be used to habituate excellence of character.

Business schools tend to minimize their responsibility to indoctrinate students with a sense of moral obligation or a proclivity towards the pursuit of moral excellence.

It is the connection between intellectual virtue and moral virtue that business schools have to differentiate in order to truly enlighten the student with intuitive reasoning and philosophic vision.

The intellectual virtues acquired are a consequence of teaching and can only blossom through experience, whereas moral virtue is acquired by habituation.

The intellectual virtue helps in choosing good understanding, practical wisdom and good sense?resulting in judgments that are fair and equitable.

Intellectual virtues are required to allow for the habituation of moral virtue which in turn facilitates actions that are aimed towards attainment of an end which all of us in family business have in common ? happiness.

Yes, ethics can be taught in a classroom, if the school/university, professor and the students adopt a practical approach, in preference to a philosophical one.

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Source: http://dept-education.info/2011/07/can-ethics-be-taught-in-business-schools/

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