We've had enough business ethics - Editorial

Business Horizons, May-June, 1993 by Art Wolfe

Courses in business schools labeled "Business Ethics"--by no means an oxymoron, as the witty pundits put it--are a drop in the river of the heavy mental conditioning for capitalism. Over the past 12 years, a colleague from the Philosophy Department and I have developed and taught the business ethics course in the College of Business at Michigan State. About 20 MBA students enroll for this elective course, which is offered once a year. Enrollment has held steady as courses in other business departments have increased in number and enrollments. In fact, whole new majors (a professional five-year program for accounting majors, logistics and materials science, an international business emphasis) have been added. In the eyes of students, our course in business ethics is interesting but really does not challenge the substantial intellectual conditioning in the "functional areas" of business at universities and in society at large. In long-term impact on our students or our business culture, the course is way too little, way too late.

I offer three suggestions. First, we must prominently identify capitalism as the moral belief system that it is. Capitalism shapes our lives, contours our social relationships, builds our major social institutions, drives our legal system, and guides our political process. A step in this direction would be to designate all of the abstractionoriented courses in business and economics as courses in "Capitalism." Economics could have course numbers ranging from 2 to 99 ("Capitalism 1" should be a biology course that teaches students the first moral law of capitalism--that business life is competition; lions eat lambs and the strong are preferred; they deserve all they can own or can control.) The next set of 100 numbers ("Capitalism 101") would designate accounting courses. Marketing would be Capitalism 201. Let's be honest about what we teach; at Michigan State University it is a fair guess that we offer 500 courses in capitalism under our quarter system.

Second, if we must train for capitalism in our universities, we should swap the last two years of undergraduate work in "capitalism" for the first two years of humanities and liberal arts education. This would require students to take upper-level, demanding courses in such areas as literature, philosophy, and history before they depart the university for life in the business world. As a result, students can begin to understand that few of life's contingencies can be reduced to an abstract formula and that scant "correct" answers exist to the most important questions of life.

Business ethics cases reveal a clash between fields of knowledge. They are, generally, action required by the moral dictates of capitalism ("maximize profit") that clash with more basic moral maxims, such as "Treat no person as a mere means to a social end." We must balance abstraction-oriented, science-like knowledge about our business system with fundamental principles about how to lead a "just" life--lessons learned from past civilizations about the more cherished notions of "the good." One of the first such lessons is that the strong will not inherit the earth.