Differences in Moral Reasoning Between College and University Business Majors and Non-Business Majors

Abstract

Ethics education has been a topic of hot debate in corporate board rooms, business schools and the media for years (Baxter and Rarick, 1987; Belleville, 1990; David et al, 1990; Herman and Cullen, 1988; McLaughlin, 1990; Schoenfeldt et al, 1991; Sims and Sims, 1991). Business schools are often criticized for providing a curriculum that is too narrow and technical, focusing only on quantitative procedures and ignoring the more qualitative issues. If we assume that these sorts of arguments are legitimate, then it seems plausible to ask whether choos ing business as a major is a self-selecting process such that entering business majors differ in moral reasoning from other students in other disciplines. Our claim will be that there is no significant difference be tween the moral reasoning of business and non-business students. The crux of moral development theory is not whether one should commit certain acts, but rather the reason for committing those acts. One way to determine the reasoning, and hence, the level of one's mor al development is to use James Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest, 1979). The DIT is a widely-used test to determine the level of moral development by presenting a series of scenarios to a test-taker and offering the test-taker solutions based on different reasoning proce dures. Even though two persons may arrive at the same answer, their reasoning, as revealed by the DIT, can reflect a substantial difference in their moral development and their level of critical thinking. The sce narios and responses represent fundamental, underlying structures of

Cite this work

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

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