The article in the url below is a series of opinions in response to a problem posed at the top of the column:
“THE PROBLEM: Last week Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, said: "I don't believe that ethics can be taught in class." He was speaking after the arrest of Raj Rajaratnam, the head of hedge fund Galleon Group, and two other alumni of his MBA class at Wharton. Have business schools paid enough attention to ethical questions? Or are ethics a personal matter?”
Responses from four experts from four different business schools are posted. The most insightful, I think, and the position I found to be the most persuasive, was expressed by Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto:
“Anything we know can be taught, but nothing can be learned without desire. Therein lays the business school dilemma. The academic world knows plenty about ethics and it is eminently teachable in a business class or any other class - as teachable as finance or strategy. But the magnitude of habit change following any course will be a function of the desire to learn and to integrate that learning into subsequent actions.”
Take care
David
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
Is it possible to teach ethics to business school students?
938 words28 October 2009
Financial Times
London Ed1
14
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/571d5ee8-c34b-11de-8eca-00144feab49a.html
or
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/FT_CanYouTeachEthics.pdf
