The Chronicle of Higher Education notes today that there is pressure on the AACSB to do more about teaching ethics in MBA programs. The thread (which I think will only work for subscribers): http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/01/2003010805n.htm The first three paragraphs of the story: Stinging from criticism that it has not done enough to raise the ethical awareness of M.B.A. students, the nation's accreditor of business schools has proposed raising ethics to the top of the hierarchy of topics that business schools must confront. The board of AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business this week endorsed proposed changes in its standards. In addition to highlighting the importance of ethics, the revised standards would encourage schools to develop codes of ethical conduct for M.B.A. students, faculty members, and administrators. But a number of business professors -- many of whom teach ethics -- say the proposed revisions, which must be approved by the association's accreditation council, don't go far enough. Some 120 business professors have signed a letter calling on the association to require that all M.B.A. students take at least one stand-alone ethics course. Uh huh. The article's author is Katherine S. Mangan. In an unrelated move, the American Association of Organized Crime has knuckled under pressure and is now encouraging its members to use smaller bullets.
As a philosopy BA, I can say categorically (or as categorically as a personal opinion can be) that requiring MBA students to take an ethics class in order to improve their ethics would be a waste of time. That's not what university ethics classes do. They teach you *about* ethics, and try to penetrate to its foundations by examining various kinds of problem cases. But ethics classes aren't going to give a student ethics if he or she doesn't already have them. All they will do is demonstrate that there are arguments for and against anything. Taught to an unscrupulous individual, such a class would just create more effective evasion and rationalization. Presumably, students already have a conscience. They know state and federal law, they learn accounting standards and SEC regulations. Brokerage firm analysts already know that selling good recomendations in exchange for investment banking business is unethical. Accounting firms know full well that cooking the books is illegal. They don't need no stinkin' ethics class to tell them that. Where the B-schools can do some good is by researching improved *enforcement mechanisms* that make this crap more difficult to pull off without imprisonment, and by creating ways to make publicly traded businesses and the securities markets that trade their shares even more transparent. But ultimately, it will continue to happen as long as executives can escape with countless millions of dollars by opening their golden parachutes, after driving a business into the ground and by wiping out the shareholders to whom they theoretically were answerable. It will happen as long as it *can* happen, and for as long as it remains so obscenely profitable to do it.
When I did my MBA at National some 17 years ago there was a core requirement to take a Social Problems in Business class. It focused on businesses' roles in society. Admittedly, there was as much altruism as there was trying to leverage being a good citizen into more revenue, but I was okay with that. That requirement is gone, replaced by a management class with an ethics component. Ethics can be taught in an MBA, but not ethical thinking and theory. It has to be applied ethics. Perhaps it shouldn't even be called "Ethics" in order to distinguish it from pure ethics. We teach business ethics at my place of employment. It's not hard.
I took an ethics class as a part of my business undergrad degere. I thought it was helpful, becuase what it taught in the business classes up tot hat point was bottom line, bottom line, bottom line. It is good to have a class, which brings back int he relationship of acheiving the bottom line and the actions. I also had to take a cultural diversity class, I think this is along the same lines. It doesn't teach one not to think in that way, just a perspective.
In my undergrad business degree, I took business courses. Ethics - you got em or you don't got em - just like literacy. Meaningful penalties for ethical lapses would do more than any ethics course.
There are some dynamics that ethics has unique topics in business. Why not have a course that goes over the situations and consequences (though there should be more than the real world serves to the crooks). It could be weaved into Business Law, but I think as more and more business dynamics come online, it is important to learn from the experiences that our society has experienced.
