Educating for Values-Driven Leadership

Abstract

Despite four decades of good faith effort to teach Ethics in business schools, readers of the business press are still greeted on a regular basis with headlines about egregious excess and scandal. It becomes reasonable to ask why these efforts have not been working.

Business faculty in ethics courses spend a lot of time teaching the-ories of ethical reasoning and analyzing those big, thorny dilemmas— triggering what one professor called “ethics fatigue.” Some students find such approaches intellectually engaging; others find them tedious and irrelevant. Either way, sometimes all they learn is how to frame the case to justify virtually any position, no matter how cynical or self-serving. Utilitarianism, after all, is tailor-made for a ...