The Case Against Business Ethics Education

John F. Hooker

32 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Business Ethics Education

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Ethics in Business and Education Management and Marketing Education Business Law and Ethics

Abstract

Several popular arguments against teaching business ethics are examined: (a) the ethical duty of business people is to maximize profit within the law, whence the irrelevance of ethics courses (the Milton Friedman argument); (b) business people respond to economic and legal incentives, not to ethical sentiments, which means that teaching ethics will have no effect; (c) one cannot study ethics in any meaningful sense anyway, because it is a matter of personal preference and is unsusceptible to rational treatment; (d) moral character is formed in early childhood, not while sitting in ethics class; and (e) business students see no motivation to study ethics and will not take it seriously. The mistakes and confusion that underlie these arguments are exposed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

References

2007The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits 1973The Hidden Dimension 1970Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years; A Scheme 2001Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice 1981The Philosophy of Moral Development Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice 1982Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning 1991Business Ethics and Stakeholder Analysis 1996Empathy and Moral Development

Cited by

2013When Moral Awareness Isn’t Enough 2022Increasing the commitment of students toward corporate social responsibility through higher education instruction 2011Searching for excellence in business education 2020Factors in the acquisition of ethical training 2019Why learn business ethics?—Students’ conceptions of the use and exchange value of applied business ethics 2015A Role for Ethics Theory in Speculative Business Ethics Teaching

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.