Crucial Decisions for the Teaching of Business Ethics

Abstract

After providing some important historical background on initiatives in teaching business ethics through a grant to the American Philosophical Association by the National Endowment for the Humanities and through a four million dollar effort by Arthur Andersen to introduce business ethics into the functional core courses of the business school curriculum, I consider 11 decisions that those teaching business ethics must face. The two most important are how to introduce traditional ethical theory into the course and how to deal with cynicism about the very concept of “business ethics.” Other issues include how to grade the course, how case oriented should the course be, how often should you use business people in the course, and how do you limit the abuse of having laptops in the class.