Does it make sense to teach business ethics?

I am one of the contributors to the Ethics column in the Legatus Magazine.  Here is this month's column, on teaching business ethics:

Does it make sense to teach business ethics?

I’ve had a nagging suspicion for some time now that teaching business ethics in a university is not delivering on what’s expected of it. The big question is this: Does teaching business ethics make business more ethical?

At the Catholic University of America (CUA), just like at every other university with a business program, we teach the obligatory business ethics course; the accrediting agencies insist on it, after all. But I think there’s a problem with this approach. Some time ago, two of my students were in their business strategy class with one of my colleagues, a professor of management. During this class, they delivered a presentation about Wal-Mart’s strategic challenges.

At the end of the presentation, my colleague challenged them with the following: “I happen to know that you’ve been discussing ethical issues about Wal-Mart in Dr. Abela’s class. Why didn’t you bring up those issues in your presentation today?”

Without missing a beat, the students’ response was: “Well, that was an ethics class; this is a strategy class.”

There you have it. A separate business ethics course teaches students that ethics is separable from the rest of business — that you can “do” ethics separately from doing finance, marketing or HR. It teaches them what my former professor — Ed Freeman of the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School — calls the “separation thesis,” the (false) idea that business issues and ethics issues can be clearly separated.

This thesis is false because there’s no such thing as an amoral, ethically neutral finance theory or management theory. ...

Read the rest here.

Comments

[John Médaille]

At the University of Dallas, we have a required course for Business majors on Catholic Social Teaching and Business, which I have the honor to teach.

But as a general comment on Business Ethics courses, it has become a cottage industry, but frequently the texts are consequentialist; that is, they are anti-ethics.