A Moral Development Unit for Business Courses

Abstract

One of the reasons why many of today’s business leaders are unethical, corrupt, and corruptible is that values transmitted (implicitly) by university business education helps to influence students to ignore ethics. This paper advocates the argument that to help future business leaders become more ethical, business school implicit values should reflect a more ethical direction and encourage students to become more morally mature. The present paper describes an experiential pedagogy designed help students to develop morally. It does so by asking students to 1) participate in exercises sensitizing them to moral development issues, 2) reflect on their own ethical values and decisions they’ve made that either mirror or contradict those values, 3) read about and understand moral development models, and 4) self-assess in terms of stages of their own moral development, as portrayed in the models.