Why business schools struggle to teach ethics
Filed in archive Ethics by leon on June 26, 2007
Smith says one reason why business schools struggle is because there's a lack of case studies for the basic courses like finance, organizational behavior and strategy. As a result, they are failing to incorporate ethics and social responsibility into every subject, from operations to economics.
"It's not a matter of preaching about right and wrong," he says. "It's about helping students understand how ethical issues arise in business and giving them some tools to make choices. There are certainly bad apples out there, but many people make the wrong decisions because they don't see the big picture and what the consequences could be for themselves, their companies and society."
The trouble is that unless ethics is incorporated into subjects, it becomes meaningless. The experience of former US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, is instructive here. In his biography In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, the former business executive wrote:
"The defining moments in my education... came in my Mathematics
and philosophy curricula. The ethics courses forced me to begin to shape my values; studying logic exposed me to rigor and precision in thinking. And my mathematics professors taught me to see math as a process of thought - a language in which to express much, but certainly not all, of human activity."Could it be that the training in rigor undermined ethical values, notwithstanding what was learned in the ethics courses? You might ask whether the focus on analysis undermined the so-called "soft data" - the devastated peasant family crouched over the body of a dead child as opposed to relying on body counts? And could it be that focus on analysis resulted in a war that was fundamentally ill-conceived, badly conducted and ultimately immoral?
Certainly those questions come to mind again when we consider the record of the first MBA president, George W. Bush.
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