The dreaded question: "So, what are you teaching this semester?" When I reply that I teach a business ethics course, more often than not my questioner laughs and asks whether that isn't an oxymoron. And then laughs some more. [This rude response - in which UD lustily joins - reflects the staggering disconnect between a successful life as a capitalist and personal morality. As in Nice Guys Finish Last. As in a statement a journalist made at a recent meeting of the Knight Commission: "Jerry Tarkanian said nine out of ten major college teams break the rules. The tenth one's in last place."]

So it is hardly surprising that the recent cheating scandal at Duke University's business school has fueled cynicism about the teaching of business ethics. ["Fueled" is a bit weak. The writer should try to find a business-related image... Cynicism's stock has gone up? Something like that.] Business schools across the country responded to corporate wrongdoing over the last decade by emphasizing ethics within their curriculums. [Big mistake. Their students, especially at elite places like Duke, are absolutely brilliant personal-advantage maximizers -- that's why they were admitted. Now you're hitting them up with a course that flies in the face of their entire academic preparation. No wonder everyone's laughing.] In the daytime MBA at Duke, students are required to take "Leadership, Ethics and Organizations" as part of an initial three-week summer term. [Requiring people to take dumb courses guarantees an uptick in cynicism. Just ask Berkeley's faculty about the ethics course they've all got to take. Such courses almost always make the problem worse.] Yet close to 10 percent of first-year students in Duke's M.B.A. program were suspected of cheating on a take-home examination. The collective laughter would have been greater only if the accused students were in one of Duke's ethics courses.

Still we should be careful not to infer too much from the Duke cheating scandal. A successful ethics component within a business program does not guarantee that its participants will never behave immorally. [No one claims that it does.] Not even churches or prisons boast that kind of effectiveness. So why should we expect it of an ethics class? [This is getting muddy. We have a category problem. Prisons exist to punish people, not educate them in the finer points of personal morality. Churches are physical settings for worship. Sermons happen in both places, I guess, but they're not formal, graduate level, ethics lessons taught by highly paid experts.] What we expect is that when students complete the ethics component, they will approach moral problems with greater thoughtfulness and intellectual sophistication, as well as be more likely to resolve these problems in the right way. [The very phrase "the right way" suggests a lack of sophistication, at least in terms of the notorious complexity of most serious ethical dilemmas.] The goal is improvement, not perfection. [If that's the goal, ditch the courses. Instead of required courses full of bad faith platitudes, do this: Take that load of money you're spending on business school professors -- Look... why should a person teaching ethics in a business school make $150,000, and a person teaching the very same ethics in an Intro Philosophy course in a liberal arts school make -- let's make this person a part-timer... part-timers tend to get these things... make $3,500 for the course? That's not very ethical. If you're going to hire these guys in MBA settings to convey the same basic moral concepts and anecdotes the other guys are teaching, at least give them a shitty salary.]

The behavior of the Duke M.B.A. students nevertheless gives us reason to pause. How much thoughtfulness and intellectual sophistication are necessary to know that cheating is wrong? [Dat's right. The problem isn't one of content. It's one, UD will argue, of rhetoric.] Surely these young professionals did not need an ethics class to garner this important piece of moral knowledge. But if the students were aware of the wrongness of cheating all along, what kind of knowledge were they missing? What, exactly, could they have been taught in business ethics? [They've got all the knowledge they need, including the knowledge that Enron happens. It doesn't make any difference, because, as Myles Brand recently put it in an interview about university coaches slutting from job to job in search of higher salaries, "Coaches have to be free to move. We call it capitalism. We can't take away the opportunity to earn a living to the best of their ability... " Earn a living to the best... ain't that beautiful? Five million dollars a year, and then lying to everybody about how you're not going anywhere, and then getting the hell out because you got a better offer... fuck the team... These guys are MBA gods.]

There is something more for business students to learn in ethics classes, and throughout their business programs. Ethics is not just about the what of morality; it is also about the whom of morality.

In ethics, the general requirements — the what of morality — are often quite straightforward. Indeed we would be hard pressed to find anyone in our society, let alone a university-level student, who was unaware of the general prohibition on cheating. However, the application of these requirements to individuals — the whom of morality — can be significantly murkier. I dare say it would not be difficult at all to find students who genuinely believe that their circumstances justify them in violating the prohibition on cheating. [I don't see this guy's diction going over well in American MBA classrooms. He sounds like a pastor. A British pastor. Slow, pleasant, deliberative, have some tea? You can hear his students' thoughts as they sit politely in front of him pretending to take notes: Outta my way! Out-of-my-way!]

Doing the right thing in the Duke case therefore required two things. First, the M.B.A. students needed to know that cheating is generally morally wrong. Second, they needed to know that it was wrong for them to cheat in their particular circumstances. [We're getting perilously close to Barney the Dinosaur here, and no smart-as-a-whip MBA student is going to stand for it. It's obvious that the realm of ethics is about personal behavior -- the whom, as the writer calls it. You're not telling anyone anything he or she doesn't know.]

Why do people sometimes believe that moral requirements do not apply to them in the situations they face? The most compelling answer appeals to consequences. People predict that breaking the rules will have high payoffs. And where are the opposing costs? After all, rule-breaking really doesn't seem to hurt anyone else, especially in environments in which others similarly break the rules. Of course the rules of morality generally ought to be followed. But only as long as the costs aren't too high.

The consequentialist logic of business education may encourage this kind of thinking. [Encourage? It enshrines it. As one university trustee notes, "[I]n his book Moral Dimension, Amitai Etzioni equates the neoclassical economic paradigm with disregard for ethics. Sumantra Ghoshal's article "Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices," in Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal, blames ethical decay on the compensation and management practices that evolved from economic theory's emphasis on incentives."] There is no mistaking the fact that profit maximization is the chief value within many business curriculums. As a result, brief surveys of business law, discussions of company codes of conduct, or even introductions to ethical theory — the what of morality — are very likely to buckle under the comparative weight given to considerations of profit, goal achievement, cost-benefit analysis, and shareholder satisfaction.

Does this mean that business ethics really is an oxymoron? Not if business schools are willing to take the whom of morality seriously and educate students throughout the curriculum about the application of ethical requirements to all business actors. [I'm sorry. This won't do. Again, the whom is implicit in all discussions of morality.] Among other things, this kind of education would draw on traditional academic disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, and politics to help students understand their place in the world and the role of business in society. [These lame phrases - understand their place in the world... role of business in society... tell you that when taught from this angle, these courses will go absolutely nowhere, or will make matters worse.]

Ultimately, business ethics requires that we rethink the business curriculum. Business is not a closed system with its own set of values, motivations, and rules. The curriculum should reflect this fact. First, students must be able to think deeply and critically about conflicts between wealth and other values. Second, students should know more about ordinary human psychology, especially the tendency to overestimate our own importance and the importance [of] our goals. Third, students need a greater awareness of the interdependence of business and the rest of civil society. Unfortunately, students cannot get this kind of education from a curriculum that focuses only on the business "fundamentals." [Well, here we're at another impasse. The writer is calling for business schools to become peace studies centers. If the writer objects to the essential immorality of MBA-ideology -- what Myles Brand rightly identifies as capitalism pure and simple -- he should teach in a divinity school.]

So it is not enough for business students to hear yet again that certain behaviors are generally prohibited by morality. They must also come to see that these prohibitions apply to them even when morality conflicts with self-interest, the bottom line, and the interests of investors.

When business schools start taking ethics seriously, maybe people will stop laughing.

A generation from now, as you watch your children graduate, you will want to be able to say that whatever success you achieved was the result of honest and productive work, and that you dealt with people the way you would want them to deal with you. … I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.