When Moral Awareness Isn’t Enough

Abstract

The traditional case-based method used to teach ethics in business classrooms gives students valuable practice identifying and applying key moral principles. This approach builds on a rational model of decision making and emphasizes moral awareness and moral judgment, encouraging students to describe moral dilemmas and assess the consequences of various responses. Unfortunately, moral awareness and moral judgment do not necessarily lead to moral action; organizational variables and social influences frequently trigger emotions such as fear, anxiety or desire, motivating employees to act in ways that they know are wrong. A review of ethics education articles and a sampling of business textbooks and learning objectives indicate that attention to the role of social influence in ethical decision making is limited in business classrooms. The contribution of this article is to heighten the awareness of this deficiency among business faculty and offer a set of instructional strategies that can be used to expand the current use of case studies across the business curriculum so that our students will recognize and respond ethically to social influence tactics.