Corporate scandals involving corruption, accounting fraud, bribery, securities violations, corporate espionage, market manipulation, and greed have been far too frequent in the past 20 years.  The massive amounts of data collected, stored, and used by business also raises a number of ethical issues, from data integrity and security to the accuracy of predictive analytics to privacy concerns.  As new technologies emerge, so do new ethical issues.   For example, how do we program autonomous cars to make the ethical choice when a crash is inevitable and one or more fatalities is likely — and what is that ethical choice?  Or  just because companies can collect biometric data of employees, should they?

While statutes, administrative rules and regulations, executive orders and case law specify the minimum legal behavior we expect of American business, this module explores whether business may also owe a duty to engage in ethical behavior that requires more than compliance with the “letter of the law.”    The module also explores some of the behavioral factors that may explain why otherwise ethical individuals and companies make unethical decisions.

There are a number of approaches to teaching business ethics.  Some instructors focus on ethical theory to help students understand how one’s philosophical approach to an ethical problem may influence the ultimate decision.  Others look to the field of behavioral ethics, which looks at how people actually behave when they are faced with an ethical choice or dilemma.  This approach studies some of factors that consciously or unconsciously encourage us to act in certain ways and that may help to explain why otherwise ethical people sometimes make unethical choices and decisions.  Most instructors also introduce students to ethical decision-making models that can be helpful in analyzing more difficult and complex ethical issues that require more deliberation before a decision is made.

The content of this module introduces you to all three of these approaches.  You’ll find readings and videos to help you understand the four ethical theories frequently used to analyze the ethical dimensions of business conduct:  utilitarianism (or consequentialism), Kantian or duty ethics, justice or fairness ethics, and virtue ethics, with its focus on individual character.   In addition, you’ll have an opportunity to examine some of the factors studied by behavioral ethicists, such as our desire for conformity, overconfidence bias, obedience to authority, the role we play in a given situation, our aversion to loss, and our inability to even see the ethical dimension of the problem, as well as “incrementalism” or the tendency to start with small unethical choices that may lead down the “slippery slope” to more significant unethical decisions.   After recognizing that an ethical dilemma exists and being aware of the more subtle, often unconscious factors that may influence your decision, there are a variety of ethical decision-making models that can be used to analyze and solve ethical dilemmas confronting business.

Businesses, particularly larger, publicly-traded companies, also adopt ethics codes to assist their employees in making ethical decisions.  You will have the opportunity to examine and apply some of the topics covered in these Codes of Conduct (e.g., conflicts of interest and rules relating to gifts from suppliers, vendors and customers) and to assess how successful these code provisions might be in establishing a company’s ethical culture.  Your instructor may assign an in-class exercise or other project on Codes of Conduct.

Because virtually all business decisions have an ethical component, the number of applied business ethics topics is endless.  We introduce you to two that are in the news almost daily — data privacy and ethical issues created by emerging technologies — and invite interested students to explore these and other ethical issues in more depth on your own.