Can
you teach a person ethics?
Iraqi allegations. Hiring probes. Enron. Right and wrong seem to be
elusive concepts
By Jodi S. Cohen and Greg Burns
Chicago Tribune
Published June 7, 2006
DePaul University professor Laura Hartman begins her business ethics
class by talking about a train on a path to hit five people. By pushing
a button, the train would veer off track and hit a different person
instead, but only one.
"Do you hit the button?" she asks the undergraduates.
And the class continues that way all semester, with real and
hypothetical cases to get students thinking about their values and
decision-making. They debate the ethics of marketing sugary cereals to
children, and whether a company's Internet policy should prohibit
employees from shopping online.
"You begin the class by asking them to identify what they think is
right or wrong," said Hartman, who teaches the required course for
undergraduate business students. "Then we discuss how you take those
values and apply them to things you are going to face in the business
world."
From the business world to Iraq, the headline-grabbing consequences of
unethical behavior have renewed debate of an ancient question: Can
ethics be taught?
On the surface, the answer is an obvious yes, as reflected in the
thousands of training programs and academic courses such as the one at
DePaul.
Last week, the U.S. military ordered the 150,000 coalition troops in
Iraq to undergo a mandatory ethics refresher, complete with slideshow,
amid allegations that vengeful Marines slaughtered civilians in the
Iraqi town of Haditha.
Similarly, the Enron Corp. scandal prompted a wave of ethics training
across American workplaces and business schools, in a movement revived
by the May 25 convictions of ringleaders Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.
As always, it seems, examples of lapsed ethics abound, from City Hall
to Major League Baseball. Some view these ever-present lapses as
evidence that widespread efforts to teach ethics have failed, and may
be impeding the development of core values.
Even among recognized experts in the field, doubts persist about
whether ethics training really works.
Asked if ethics can be taught, "My answer is usually, `No,'" said
Jeffrey Seglin, an Emerson College ethics professor who writes a
syndicated column on the topic. "I don't think you can teach right and
wrong. You can help people with ideas about how to make critical
decisions."
Some say formal training programs can marginalize ethics, by separating
the topic from relevant day-to-day conduct. And courses that focus on
debating unresolvable ethical dilemmas could encourage the notion that
almost any action can be justified.
Most ethicists, however, still side with Greek philosopher Socrates,
who concluded 2,500 years ago that people can be taught to do right.
While ethics courses "have a very low chance of changing people's
behavior in the long run," they're still an essential starting point
for laying out expectations, said Howard Prince, a former Army general
now heading an ethics program at the University of Texas in Austin.
"It's the first step. What really matters is the follow-through."
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the multinational force, said
the training will reinforce what troops learned before coming to Iraq.
The focus is on "core warrior values," the military said.
That could be useful for those who "have come to doubt that the rules
they learned in the States applied anymore," said Michael Davis, a
philosophy professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "You can
also give them practice handling the new situations, thinking about
what they would do."
Prince, the former general, said the course could remind soldiers to
contain themselves under extreme stress: "With no training, we would
have soldiers succumbing to their strong emotions."
The announcement raised questions, however, in part because the
allegation that Marines killed unarmed women and children appears to be
a clear-cut violation, with no ethical ambiguity.
"If a person doesn't understand that right from wrong, they don't need
an ethics class," said John Maxwell, a speaker and author of "Ethics
101." In the end, the program could amount to little more than "PR" and
"damage control," he noted.
The same is true in the corporate arena, where ethics training can be
for real, or merely for show, Maxwell said.
Enron Corp., synonymous with scandal and fraud these days, in its
heyday was considered enlightened about enforcing ethical principles
without stifling innovation.
As he testified in his own defense at the Enron criminal trial in
April, former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling told the jury with no
trace of irony, "Our control systems were very good."
Yet in one of the trial's surprises, prosecutors caught the defendants
off-guard with revelations that Skilling and Lay had secretly invested
in an Internet photography company that did most of its business with
Enron.
Under cross-examination, lead prosecutor Sean Berkowitz asked Skilling,
"This is a conflict of interest, according to the code of ethics?"
"It may be," Skilling admitted.
The willingness of Skilling and Lay to violate their own code
"definitely undermined the teaching of ethics," said Maxwell. "People
do what people see. The only way it can be integrated into a corporate
culture is for it to be observed at the top."
Enron's collapse has prompted widespread recognition that business
ethics begins at the top. "Everybody is getting deeper and better
training," said Keith Darcy of the Ethics & Compliance Officer
Association, which has seen its membership double to 1,200 since the
corporate crime wave of 2002. "You've got to be able to prove you've
taken every step necessary."
It's a lesson being imposed on Boeing Co., for instance, which has
agreed to Justice Department monitoring in the wake of two contracting
scandals. A "passive" ethics program has become "active," with the goal
of reining in a "win at any cost culture," according to Bonnie Soodik,
who heads the Chicago-based aerospace company's internal governance.
At business schools, in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals,
accreditation standards revised in 2003 have expanded the requirements
for ethics training, saying students should gain "ethical understanding
and reasoning abilities," and learn about "ethical and legal
responsibilities in organizations and society."
All schools are trying to improve ethics education, said Susan
Phillips, dean of the George Washington University business school and
chairman of the group that revised the accreditation standards. "That
doesn't mean that you always teach people the right thing to do, but
you can provide them with the tools and skills to go about the
decision-making process," she said.
Rev. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, said that
when he taught philosophy, he asked his students to read Plato's Meno,
particularly focusing on the question of whether virtue can be taught.
"It is a deep mistake to think it can be taught the way you can teach
computers," Jenkins said. Rules can be taught, but "the deepest kind of
ethics. ... requires something deeper."
At the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, the only
required course for full-time students includes a section on ethics.
Having that class can help students who may later face ambiguous
situations that could lead them astray, said Steven Kaplan, a finance
professor at the school.
"To have thought about it beforehand, you are more likely to say no,"
he said. "If you haven't thought about it, there is some pressure to
say yes."
Most business schools now include ethics instruction, either as a full
course or incorporated into other classes, according to Hartman. She
recently surveyed the top 50 MBA programs worldwide to learn how they
integrate ethics in their programs.
Harvard, Wharton and other top universities require a full course in
ethics, and universities increasingly are adding ethics discussions to
general courses on management, accounting and human resources,
according to her survey's preliminary results.
At DePaul, undergraduates filled about 70 sections of a required
business ethics class last year, and faculty are considering adding a
requirement for graduate students.
The increase is driven by student and corporate demand, said Hartman.
"When we graduate the next CEO of an energy conglomerate like Enron,
tomorrow's investor believes that we will not allow Ken Lay to
graduate," she said.
So while she begins her classes with relatively easy scenarios, Hartman
asks her students increasingly complicated ethical questions during the
quarter, and then challenges their decisions.
They quickly learn--starting with the train dilemma--how messy even the
seemingly simple act of saving lives can be.
While most students in Hartman's train exercise choose to hit the
button and divert the train--thus saving five people--she challenges
their decision to actively take one life. And for those who choose not
to intervene and let events unfold as they would, she questions their
decision to not get involved.
"It is exploring our power to impact the world around us," she said.
"We are responsible for both our acts as well as our choices not to
act."
----------