How to make business ethics not boring

If you have been part of any organization in the United States (or elsewhere) in the last thirty years, you have almost certainly attended a seminar on “ethics.” If you have received an MBA in the last twenty years, you have probably also attended a mandatory class on “business ethics.”

I have attended dozens of these. Almost all of them have felt like a tragicomic waste of time.

I don’t say this as someone who is anti-DEI or anti-ESG, the broad categories under which many discussions of business ethics currently reside. My views on those complex topics are for another time.

I say that business ethics is boring as a pedagogical matter and almost as an aesthetic one. I have a deep conviction that the time we have students in classrooms is a precious, expensive resource. When we as professors (or teachers in general) squander it, we have done something that offends my own sense of morality. And the way that conversations about business ethics are currently structured are mostly an offense to that standard.

Most everyone I talk to agrees with this general sentiment. My MBA students overwhelmingly agree that business ethics conversations are very boring. The executives I teach in various programs say the same thing.

The question for this post and for the thousands of hours I have spent on this topic as a business professor is straightforward:

Why?

I pose this question to students at the outset of every new course on business ethics.

Their answers cluster around a few key themes.

First, many of these conversations are pitched at a level of uniform obviousness that make one wonder why we are even having these conversations at all. Be good, don’t be bad, is not something that anyone but sociopaths need to hear, and the sociopaths aren’t listening.

Second, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, many of these conversations present as obvious conclusions about ethical behavior issues that are themselves hotly contested. This kind of blunt-force ethics does real damage to organizations because it attempts to make a minority view—or even a majority view, in some cases—seem wrong or evil. When you sit down to receive a training on a thorny subject and are told that common, acceptable, legal behavior is in fact unethical for “reasons,” you are unlikely to leave persuaded that your behavior needs to change. You are likelier to leave doubting the reasonableness of the entire enterprise of conversations about business ethics.

Third, many of these conversations appear in the costume of “ethics” but in fact are something else, usually “law” or “compliance.” You are told that you need to be more ethical in your business conduct when what that actually means is “you should obey the rules.” (When those rules come from the state, we will call that “law”; when those rules come from within the organization, we will call that “compliance,” though there is of course great overlap between the two).

These different problems—that ethics refers to the obvious, universal norms that all good people accept; that ethics refers to artificially easy solutions to hotly contested problems; that ethics refers to our need to obey rules, external and internal—essentially amount to the same thing. We have applied the label “ethics” to a host of other issues that have nothing at their heart to do with ethics at its best.

So maybe we bore ourselves, our students, and each other when we present ethics as universal truths, or takes contested ideas and sheers them of their complexity, or simply acts out a performative notion of compliance.

I build my course on business ethics around an alternative to these views. I am trained as a lawyer and have a lot of expert views on my narrow field of the law, but most of that expertise is irrelevant to business students who are trying to grapple with hard problems in their lives, professional and otherwise. Knowing how bank supervision has evolved over 160 years, or how the Federal Reserve functions, have nothing to do with helping students find their way in a world of contested values.

The alternative is to recognize the tensions in this image. I call this the “class tattoo” because if ever I got a tattoo, it would be the Venn diagram at the top of the post (and included here again):

We, each of us, have a different set of responsibilities that we must understand and navigate. These responsibilities divide roughly into three groups: personal, business, and social. The human mind has evolved to resolve any dissonance between and among these responsibilities. In that world, what is good for you is good for your business is good for society. In that world, the responsibility Venn diagram collapses, falsely, into a single simple circle, such as this:

In my class, we stipulate that the single-circle Venn diagram is at best a verisimilitude of what responsibility means. The class tattoo is so much more powerful because it highlights areas of overlap and underlap that cannot be resolved.

Instead, life is full of tradeoffs. For some decisions, what is best for you is also best for your business but imposes real net harm on society; or your business is doing great work making the world a better place, but at enormous personal cost. Or you are doing great work making the world a better place, with great personal satisfaction, but at the expense of your business and its stakeholders.

And that’s the case when you are capturing appropriate responsibility in two out of three areas. In other cases, you are on island alone, doing right for society at the expense of yourself and your business, right for the business but making yourself and the world worse, or right for yourself but imposing harm on the business and the rest of the world.

If this framing of responsibility is correct, then we have some real work to do not to resolve the areas of underlap—the whole point of this exercise is to insist that, in at least some cases, there is no option to eliminate these tensions. The real work comes into understanding what you should do in the face of those irreducible conflicts, including when others in good faith and with similar intellectual capacity come to very different conclusions.

Those are the questions that my course on business ethics focuses on: where good people in good faith disagree about how to navigate conflicting loyalties to personal, business, and social responsibility. Only hard questions allowed: we avoid the tedium of many ethics conversations by hiving off any questions that present unanimity in student sensibilities. We also do not presume that we can get to a “right” answer that will be applicable to all. Indeed, if anything we presume that we cannot reach such a conclusion, which makes my classroom different from those anchored in law or moral philosophy, each with an idea of the “right” answer.

In future posts I’ll describe where we go from here. It’s a wild ride. Whatever else it is, good or bad or ugly, it is never boring.