To listen to audio recordings of Dr. Mun teaching Business Ethics click here, here and here.
Some philosophers might regard an introductory business ethics course to be the kind of course that one has to teach in order to teach the kind of courses that one wants to teach. In response to such concerns, I decided to showcase my PHIL 225 Business Ethics course. Although business ethics falls outside of my primary area of expertise (philosophy of emotion), I was in fact very excited to teach business ethics when I was first approached to do so. As a concerned consumer, I think about business ethics as a matter of fact in my everyday life. I think about how the decisions I make as a consumer not only effect my well-being, but also the well-being of those who are involved in the supply chain of whatever product I am consuming, as well as the ethical implications of the externalities that are involved in the practice of business. I also often think about the ways in which education is a business and the kind of ethical principles that ought to govern institutions of higher education, as well as its members, especially today, in the face of the proliferation of the business model in academia. For example, read my APA Blog post and Symposion article on the use of SETs in higher education. I also like to keep in mind that ethical decisions, in real life, are often made under conditions of inequality, and that matters when making ethical judgments.
I also think a lot about business ethics as a concerned citizen, living in the United States. As a capitalist country, with a representative government that is often influenced by big business, through the work of lobbyists and policy analysts working for big business, I can’t help but think about the various ways in which big business not only effects consumer decisions, but also our public policies. For example, consider the effects of big business on our public policies about healthcare. It should not be a surprise to anyone that President Joe Biden, and President Donald Trump and President Barack Obama before him, were all against establishing a universal healthcare system in the United States. To put things briefly: US healthcare is big business.
When I thought about how one might address these ethical problems, I always ended up tracing them to the same root: the way a businessperson is taught to think about and practice business, which includes how they ought to think about business ethics. Although capitalism and ethics are often thought to be mutually exclusive, this is in fact false. Business can be ethical. Not only is this the case, but it must be the case. What matters is the way in which an ethics in business is practiced. And while reviewing several business ethics textbooks in preparation for my first Business Ethics course, I concluded that one problem with how business ethics was taught at the introductory level was that business ethics textbooks typically teach business ethics from a business perspective rather than a philosophical perspective.
The central aim of most business textbooks is not to teach students how to think ethically about business, it is instead to teach students how to ethically analyze and “solve,” according to some pre-established business framework (e.g., the stakeholder framework), the ethical problems that arise within a business context. It’s all a very business-like way of doing business ethics. It is efficient and straightforward, and in being so, it abstracts away from the messy, heart-breaking, consciousness raising, critical thinking that makes applied ethics one of the most frustrating and difficult areas of philosophy. Elizabeth Anderson has made a similar criticism against contemporary economic theorizing in general.
Sometimes one just must come to terms with the fact that the world is such that there really is no good, ethical solution for a particular problem. That is, until we figure out how the world needs to be changed. And there’s a significant difference between the decision one makes based on the analysis of a case study, where the decision-maker (the student) is nothing more than a third-person observer, and the decision one makes in an actual, real-life, real-time situation, where one is a first-person stakeholder. We also know that in many cases, ethically bad decisions are made as a matter of ignorance: one’s ignorance in imagining or understanding the causal relations involved between one’s decision and the potential consequences of one’s decision, one’s ignorance in entertaining a variety of possibilities as potential solutions to the problem at hand, and one’s ignorance in understanding the central values that are important for the pursuit of a good life—including in business—which can only be done in cooperation with others.
So my central concern was to figure out a way to teach my students how to become an ethical businessperson, which includes providing them with 1) opportunities to gain an embodied understanding of ethical frameworks as approaches to ethical decision-making, 2) opportunities to have practical, first-person, decision-making experiences implementing these ethical frameworks as a matter of ethical decision-making within a business context, and 3) opportunities to gain practical, first-person knowledge of the possible causal connections between the decision one makes, in accordance with a particular ethical theory, and one’s relationship with other members of one’s community and one’s community as a whole. In other words, I was centrally concerned with the question of how to teach my students the skills they will need to ethically pursue a future in business. My preliminary assumption was that each and every one of my students already came equipped with a system of values which informed them about what it means (at least for them) to live a good life. So my main challenge was to figure out a way to teach my students how to understand and practice these values in the context of business, with the aim of living a good life.
My approach was to take a distinctly philosophical approach in teaching business ethics, which was also informed by the way in which businesspeople actually learn ethics. For the first half of the course, students spend the time to gain an in-depth knowledge of the workings of a variety of ethical frameworks (e.g., virtue ethics, sentimentalism, deontology, utilitarianism, distributive justice, ethic of care, and situationism). They do so by not only completing reading assignments about these frameworks, participating in in-class lecture-discussions (during which I use the Socratic method), and completing weekly multiple-choice quizzes and a multiple-choice midterm exam, but also by implementing the ethical theories they are learning in games of Monopoly with their fellow classmates. For the second half of the semester, my students are asked to read a memoir from or about an industry leader in some business and a book that addresses what I believe to be one of the primary causes of unethical decision-making (in general, but also especially in business)—the ideology of misogyny. They are then asked to write a number of mini-papers relating the ethical theories they studied during the first part of the semester with the readings introduced in the second part of the semester. For my Spring 2022 course, my students will begin by reading Tom Digby’s Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance, and then move on to reading Mike Issac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. Last semester, my students were asked to read Robert Iger’s A Ride of A Lifetime and Sylvia Ann-Hewlett’s #Me Too in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward.
I understand the importance of presenting students with case studies in business ethics, but from my perspective, giving summarized snippets of various ethical challenges in business and asking them to analyze these cases in accordance with some business decision-making framework (e.g., the stakeholder framework) doesn’t teach students how to make ethical decisions. Nor does asking students to write a lengthy research paper on a particular case in business, where facts are gathered and analyzed in accordance with some ethical framework. I teach my students to gain a first-person, embodied understanding of the causal relations that are important to consider when making an ethical decision and to understand the underlying principles—including the psychological, social, and personal principles—that mediate these causal relations. I also make sure to help them always keep in mind the central aim of ethics—including business ethics—is to understand how to live a good life.
More specifically, with respect to playing Monopoly, my students are asked to embody the ethical framework in question while playing Monopoly under conditions of inequality. The conditions of inequality are brought about by assigning each student with a status of being privileged ($1500 to start and rolling with 2 die) or being underserved ($500 to start and rolling with 1 dice). The start money represents a person’s starting position in life, whereas the number of die used to roll represents the number of opportunities that are available to a person. Students also switch statuses after each game. As the students play Monopoly, I take the time to observe the students’ game play, reinforce the condition that they play the game in accordance with the particular ethical theory in question, and highlight any ethical questions or concerns that might be pertinent to business ethics, which might arise during their game play. I also end each game play class with some questions for students to consider outside of class, and I suggest that they might also consider at least some of these questions in relation to their mini-papers, which they will have to complete during the second half of the course. Some examples of these questions are as follows: How did being virtuous or being vicious differentially influence the way you thought about the Monopoly (business)? Does Kant’s deontology require a fundamental change in the way Monopoly (business) ought to be played? What kind of limitations does Kant’s deontology place on the way you should act in business, ethically speaking? Can Kant’s deontology be consistently practiced in Monopoly (business) without fundamentally changing it? In what ways does practicing Kant’s deontology influence the way you play Monopoly and the dynamics of the game among all the players? How is practicing Kant’s deontology different from practicing Aristotle’s virtue ethics?
With respect to the readings for the second half of the course, the aim is to encourage students to take their experiences of playing Monopoly during the first half of the semester and relate them to the experiences of industry leaders and how the principle of misogyny can work to create a toxic business environment, while also learning more about some of the particular kinds of ethical problems that can arise in the practice of business. The exact way in which this will occur will differ based on various factors, including the particular books I select for a semester. For example, for my first semester in teaching Business Ethics, I asked students to first read Robert Iger’s A Ride of A Lifetime, and then moved on to discuss Sylvia Ann-Hewlett’s #Me Too in the Corporate World. Although Iger’s memoir gave my students a considerable amount to reflect on regarding what it takes to be an ethical business leader, Iger’s book lacked a significant discussion of the effects of misogyny that are enacted in business through acts of sexual harassment, abuse, and violence against a diversity of businesspeople. I, therefore, supplemented Iger’s book with Ann-Hewlett’s book. Furthermore, with Ann-Hewlett’s book, I was able to bring the point across to my students that a purely business way of thinking about ethics is impoverished, especially when the primary concern is about convincing businesspeople to be ethical businesspeople. For this Spring 2022 semester, my students first read Tom Digby’s Love and War, with the aim of introducing them to the various ways in which the ideology of misogyny works to create a toxic environment of zero-sum competition. We then moved on to a discussion of Mike Issac’s Super Pumped, in which the aim was to highlight those ethical challenges that arose within the context of a courageous start-up trying to hold its own and flourish in the world of business, its evolution in becoming a toxic and abusive business for its employees as well as its fellow competitors, and how—within the span of only seven years, compared to Iger’s 25 years of employment with Disney—the ideology of misogyny is demonstrated in the various decisions which led to the eventual downfall of Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber. Once again, to put things briefly: there is wisdom in experience.
In conclusion, I hope this post was able to help at least some instructors who are struggling with thinking about how to teach a course like Business Ethics, especially when it does not fall squarely within one’s area of expertise or even interest: connect the content of the course with aspects of your own life, with the way you might philosophically think about things, and consider teaching the course from your own uniquely lived experiences, including from your own uniquely philosophical perspective.
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Cecilea Mun
Cecilea Mun is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program, with the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Louisville, KY, the founding director of the Society for Philosophy of Emotion, and the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion. I have a total of 15 years teaching experience at the undergraduate level of education, and have taught at a variety of institutions, including community colleges, public land grant institutions, and one of the largest public universities in the country.
