The New York Times reports that it is damned near impossible to teach ethics to business school students.
Robert Prentice, professor of business law at the UT-Austin b-school suggests employing actual lawyers to teach business law to management students. He makes a good point about the business of ethics: in economic terms, "any business strategy or activity that does not maximize monetary reward is suspect." Make it worth it their while to practice ethical business strategies. Don't just go after the really big fish. Fine everyone who refuses to operate ethically. Enforce criminal penalties for those who do not adhere to the law.
Skip the oaths and go straight for the pocketbook.
p.s. Professor Prentice has won numerous teaching awards and collects unusually shaped pickles.
"Centers for the study of business ethics are necessary to represent the ideals to which we aspire. But most business students will always view business ethics as hortatory rather than mandatory, as extra credit rather than required."
What a sentence! It is correct, but even better, you can substitute just about any field of study for "business"!
And no, that is not all sarcasm. My own majors as an undergrad were Chemistry and Applied Math, and an ethics course might have been a good idea even in those fields. Both, for example, are utilized in production of explosives and poisons - useful tools, but the implications...
Ethics can only be taught to those who yern for it. Ethics should be instilled from birth by a culture. This is a failure of our sterile commoditised society.
Posted by: Ozten on August 21, 2002 11:18 AM
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