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Too hard.

[B]usiness ethics lacks a core body of knowledge and an agreed methodology. With calls for business schools to “teach ethics”, this confusion is damaging. Courses can be added, but it is impossible to assess how well they fulfil their purpose without a sense of what that is.

Martin Sandbu, in the Financial Times, calls for serious moral philosophy to be taught in business schools. He contrasts traditional analytical thought to “faux-analytical concepts of strategy management and corporate responsibility,” and insists that rather than try to make business students into good people (he points out what UD has pointed out since this blog was a baby, that universities can’t make people good; they can only train them in strong forms of self-consciousness about goodness), b-schools should sharpen students’ moral self-awareness in general by teaching them how to argue intelligently about morality, and how to distinguish bad arguments about morality from good.

His idea will never fly because it lacks glamor. It’s not new, whereas “business ethics” is new (even if, as Sandbu points out, it doesn’t mean anything). It’s not based on specific workplace examples so it lacks that whole Group Project / Psychodynamics thing that people seem to like so much. It’s not based on charts (it has instead to do with unpredictable collective reflection), so it doesn’t work with the PowerPoint bullets many business school professors like to read.

Finally, moral philosophy is hard.

Margaret Soltan, May 2, 2011 7:23PM
Posted in: beware the b-school boys

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3 Responses to “Too hard.”

  1. david foster Says:

    Why in biz school rather than studying moral philosophy as an *undegrad* before even applying to biz school?

    There was an article somewhere a few months ago, also I think in FT, calling for business schools to teach students how to *write* effectively. The same question applies there: why not require them to learn decent writing skills as undergrads? The idea of remedial writing in a graduate program seems a little ridiculous.

    I’ve probably linked this before, but Michael Hammer’s ideas are interesting.

  2. dmf Says:

    I’ve said it before but if ‘ethics’ isn’t woven into the fabric of how they are taught to do business, then any add on after the fact class will be a waste regardless of its quality/content.

    For a parallel in medical ethics see Annemarie Mol on care ethics.

  3. david foster Says:

    Also: “lacks a core body of knowledge and an agreed methodology”…should an “agreed methodology” really be the sine qua non of a worthwhile field of study? I don’t think there was an agreed methodology for bacteriology in Pasteur’s time, nor was there an agreed methodology for computer programming at the time of Von Neumann, Hopper, etc, nor an agreed methodology for the study of corporations when Peter Drucker did his initial work with GM and GE. Indeed, it is precisely the areas where there is *not* a standard methodology that are often most intellectually exciting.

    I think too many people, among MBAs but also in many other areas, are excessively focused on methodology. (Mark Helprin borrowed the term “equipment weenies” from climbing in reference to the technique-obsessed in art.) We have lots of people running around with hammers, and when they run out of nails there are always screws to be fastened or pieces of metal to be joined.

    See management education and the role of technique

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