I love this article in the Tribune .....Peter W.
What do you think?
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Iraqi allegations. Hiring probes. Enron.
Right and wrong seem to be elusive conceptsBy Jodi S. Cohen and Greg Burns
Tribune staff writers
June 7, 2006
Can you teach a person ethics?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."
