Teaching & Learning Guide for Business Ethics: An Overview

Business ethics is often taught by philosophers, but rarely to students pursuing a degree in philosophy. It is a service course designed primarily for those in business and allied programs (e.g., marketing, accounting). These students typically have little patience for the abstract questions that occupy philosophers. So it is useful to spend time motivating the issues through a consideration of cases drawn from, or modeled on, actual events. Most texts and anthologies are brimming with such cases. From here, the instructor can transition to a careful exploration of the underlying philosophical issues. While the ethical questions raised by business activity are complex and varied, they involve familiar concepts, such as responsibility, autonomy, truth, justice, exploitation, and relativism. The diversity of the field of business ethics allows the instructor to tailor the content of the course to her audience. A course for accounting students may consider the ethical failures leading to Enron's collapse; one for marketing students may consider the ethics of advertising to children; and another for finance students may consider the ethics of insider trading.