Abstract
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s death, during 2006 quite a number of cultural events were launched (cf. http://www.ibsen.net/). The article suggests celebrating Ibsen as a potentially useful resource for business ethics teaching. Departing from a short presentation of Ibsen’s plays An enemy of the people and A doll’s house the main focus of this paper is on two selected scenes from the␣latter piece – both as raw material for developing scenarios for moral maturity assessment (one of them is strikingly similar to and different from Heinz’ dilemma), and for teaching business students moral reflection and imagination. As an open end of the article a few wider questions are asked about the use of literature in addition to or instead of ethics when it comes to triggering moral reflection and imagination.
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Acknowledgement
Thanks to my daughter Katrin Lenander for inspiring discussions about this paper, as a matter of fact both for the idea to write such a article in the first place and for the suggestion to take a look at Richard Rorty’s reasoning.
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An earlier version of this article was presented at the 13th Annual Conference Promoting Business Ethics, Niagara Falls NY, October 2006. Cf. also a somewhat different Norwegian version of this paper where the same Ibsen scenes share attention with scenes from Brecht’s moral school operas The One Who Says Yes and The One Who Says No (forthcoming).
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Brinkmann, J. Using Ibsen in Business Ethics. J Bus Ethics 84 (Suppl 1), 11–24 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9688-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9688-1