Can Ethics Be Taught?

Pinjam dari perpus Pardee, baca bab 2 (Is it too late? Young adults and the formation of professional ethics) dan bab 4 (A program to integrate leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility into management education) setelah ngobrol sedikit sama Adi di HBS.

Despite its publication date in 1993, it doesn't actually feel too dated, although I wonder what changes they have made/how their approach has evolved since obviously the world has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

Chapter 2 is quite interesting, and the authors' answer to the question it posed in its title is–unsurprisingly–no, it's not too late to teach ethics to twenty-something and thirty-something MBA students. Instead, no time is more strategic as they are ready for ethical reflection! But they are vulnerable to ‘vacuous credos' such as “I must do my personal best–which would depend on what company I work for–doesn't matter which company I work for.”

The authors wrote, “Some of these young adults, however, seem to hold deeply cherished values such as dignity of all persons, or a commitment to working on behalf of a specific social issue. But they do not yet appear to have at hand a publicly legitimized, comfortable language whereby they might forthrightly and gracefully articulate those commitments. Without an adequate public language, ethical commitments tend to remain a matter of personal morality and are thus rendered impotent for social and corporate transformation. Many of these students are well motivated, but they are not yet adequately prepared to articulate their values whether in the classroom, the company, or our wider public life.” Personally to me this brings back memories from IM training where Pak AB admonished us for snickering at the phrase ‘role model' (this was before more netizen picked up Jaksel lingo).

They further illustrate the privatized sense of morality through the MBA students' answer to this (I think a very good question): `“You have commented on some of the things you would like to accomplish; as you think across all the years ahead, who do you think you may hurt?” The typical response was, “I hope I won't hurt anybody.”' The authors noted, “they do not yet seem to have a correspondingly clear consciousness of systemic hurt and injustice and its relationship to their own action in the world. They do not readily recognize that many of them will make complex decisions that may affect hundreds or even thousands of people whom they will never see and/or aspects of the ecosystem not immediately evident.”

On noblesse oblige: “When asked, ‘How much money would be enough?' the typical respondent answered, ‘Enough to support my lifestyle.' For most, lifestyle was defined by the norms of material success in the culture. No one mentioned the category of need. It was difficult to ascertain at what point the typical student would decide that enough ‘noblesse' had been achieved to set in motion the activity of ‘oblige'.”

Overall, this was an interesting read, although I didn't get what I was looking for when I picked it up (how does one teach ethics effectively?) but I found it interesting anyway and I will probably get to use the questions to friends from across the river, with a little hope to fluster them to produce interesting answers.