Questions about moral behavior in business are now prominent against a background of obscenely inflated CEO pay packages, stock option backdating and other scandals. But how do you get a handle on moral behavior in business? Is it about corporate social responsibility? Better treatment of employees?

These are some of the questions in a paper from the Knowledge@Emory series titled Defining and Understanding the Need for a Moral Approach in Business.

Interestingly, it finds that ethics courses in business and law schools don't provide the complete answer. It suggests that business leaders need to start relying on a more "intuitive" response. In other words, the key question to ask is not whether something is legal but whether it's right.

It's a point I have explored in blog entries here and here where I looked at the difference between ethics and morality.

The problem of course is that most business training is about suppressing intuitive gut feel.