Emotion As Well As Reason: Getting Students Beyond "Interpersonal Accountability"

Abstract

The paper notes the recent spread of business ethics courses in American higher education, observing that teachers trained in economics have not readily incorporated ethical notions or theory into regular courses, such as finance, management, accounting, and marketing. The presumed ethically neutral, value-free approach of economists, who dominate business courses, is increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of business managers – or of business students. Technological and political changes, creating an interdependent environment within which managers operate, have eroded older ethics based on tradition and common backgrounds. They have also raised ethical issues of new orders of complexity. With corporate business managers finding ethical concerns more pressing matters than do many teachers, the paper offers some tentative answers to three questions about how to interest business students in ethical issues: What Approach to Business Ethics Gets student's Attention? What Is the Value of Simulations and Games? What Can Be Said About the Business System And Its Values?

The answer to the first question is simulations and games. Case method analysis is serviceable, engaging students' intellect, but all too often without emotional involvement or self-revelation. Experiential learning through class-room games accomplish both engagement and involvement in ways that are exceedingly helpful to business students, who have had "less occasion for critical reflection on self and world than have others of their age."

The answer to the second question is: They engage the whole student, stimulating the player to examine the source of her ethical strengths and the reasons for ethical lapses. Generating emotional involvement the games leverage and enhance reasoning, allowing students to learn more about their own values and question their own behavior.

The answer to the third question is: A socially justifiable (community-legitimated) competitive market system requires of its managerial participants an emotionally informed response – as well as a rational analysis and use of business techniques. Business operates with enhanced effectiveness efficiency at appropriate levels of such virtues as loyalty, trustworthiness and cooperativeness; they ensure externality benefits as well as promote justice for its own ultimate social justification.