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Highlighting Moral Courage in the Business Ethics Course

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“Without moral courage, many of the other virtues are no more than good intentions” (Robert C. Solomon, 1999, p. 83)

Abstract

At the end of their article in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Douglas R. May, Matthew T. Luth, and Catherine E. Schwoerer state that they are “hopeful in outlook” about the “evidence that business ethics instructors are….able to encourage students…to develop the courage to come forward even when pressures in organizations dictate otherwise” (p. 78). We agree with May et al. (2014) that it is essential to augment students’ moral courage. However, it seems overly optimistic to believe that this improvement will result from any course in business ethics. Indeed, we question the appropriateness of their measure of moral courage and assert that business ethics educators must purposely design their courses to develop students’ moral courage. In particular, we advocate introducing business ethics students to works of literature featuring protagonists who exercise moral courage in organizations. Fiction provides rich accessible narratives that show students worlds beyond their experience, awaken their imaginations, and evoke their emotions. Further, we highlight morally courageous exemplars because they inspire the cultivation of character. Joining those who underscore the role of virtue in business ethics education, we argue that exposure to moral exemplars in fiction will help students to build the moral courage they need to carry out ethical decisions in the workplace. Results from 46 students at the end of an MBA ethics course featuring moral courage provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of our approach.

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Notes

  1. There is ancient precedent for the notion that deeds matter more than thoughts. “Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic Law, there is not a single one which says: you shall believe or not believe. They all say: you shall do or not do” (Walzer et al. 2003, p. 85).

  2. Churchill (1937) said the same about courage in general.

  3. Military and paramilitary personnel regularly exercise physical courage on the job. Other working individuals may at times be called upon to act with physical courage in their places of employment. For example, some risked their own lives to shepherd others to safety after the attack on the World Trade Center. Most scholars of courage distinguish between types of courage in terms of what is at stake for the actor (see, e.g., Pury and Lopez 2010). In contrast, Koerner (2014) does not differentiate between the types of risks involved in workplace courage and Harbour and Kisfalvi (2014) assess courage in terms of managers’ subjective perceptions.

  4. In contrast, a co-author of his states that “[her] job as a philosophy teacher…is to make students better thinkers, not to make them better people” (Ackerman, in Boylan et al. 2011, p. 69).

  5. Social psychologists who study the impact of role models equate “inspire” with “motivate” and use the terms interchangeably (see Lockwood et al. 2002, 2004).

  6. Indeed, as we will describe later, at the beginning of the course, each student submitted a personal essay about a workplace incident in which his or her behavior (or lack of behavior) was inconsistent with his or her ethical principles, standards, and/or values. In their descriptions of these incidents, 37 of the 46 students in the sample (80.4 %) indicated that they had experienced moral distress, recalling their feelings with words such as “angry,” “anxious,” “ashamed,” “broke my heart,” “could not sleep,” “defeated,” “depressed,” “disappointed,” “frustrated,” “guilt,” “haunted,” “sadness,” “scared,” “terrible,” “tremendous burden,” “uncomfortable,” “uneasy,” and “was torn.” Those whose incidents did not elicit moral distress gave examples of situations that did not concern them much at the time, but that, in retrospect, they considered problematic.

  7. Similarly, Kierkegaard (2002) disapproves of someone “who fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him [or her], and thus…fails to be or to strive to be what he [or she] admires” (p. 86).

  8. The current culture makes it especially perilous to circumscribe duty too narrowly. As Rosen (2013) observes, people are often so preoccupied with their mobile devices that they fail to notice what is happening to others, and those who do notice may be more likely to videorecord others’ misfortunes than step in to help. She concludes that our absorption with our personal gadgetry has eroded our “sense of duty to others” (Rosen 2013, p. C3).

  9. Schindler’s foibles, by deflecting attention from his exemplary moral courage, facilitated his rescue of more than 1200 Jews during the Holocaust (Schwartz and Comer 2013). Keller (2013) says of Nelson Mandela, “It was because he was human that we can aspire to his example” (p. 9). Kant (1785/1981) argues that those who can overcome their imperfections to become moral are morally superior to those who are naturally virtuous. To Foot (1978), however, the latter, who have no imperfections to overcome, are the truly virtuous.

  10. Following Kidder (2005), Osswald et al. (2010), and Pianalto (2012), we distinguish between moral courage and physical courage. However, courage of any stripe is a virtue, and philosophers Pybus and Urmson do not emphasize the difference between physical and moral courage. Nor do some behavioral scientists. For example, the moral exemplars studied by Walker and his colleagues (Dunlop and Walker 2013; Walker and Frimer 2007; Walker et al. 2010) have been publicly lauded for risking their lives to save others. These individuals have engaged in acts of immense physical courage but have risked no social rejection (in fact, they have done the opposite); as such, although they are moral exemplars and courageous exemplars, they are not morally courageous exemplars (see Osswald et al. 2010; Pianalto 2012).

  11. We focus here on admirable exemplars, but recognize that exemplars “can depict either admirable or objectionable concrete problem resolutions for ethical decisions” (de Vries 1986, p. 193).

  12. Novelist Tan (2013) commented that the best short stories “elicit discomfort and compassion—good and necessary conditions that change me…by putting me in unfamiliar situations and magnifying the details I would have overlooked” (p. 9).

  13. See Schwartz (2013) for a lengthier discussion of this point.

  14. We heed Michaelson’s (2005) advice not to select stories that feature unethical protagonists. Indeed, Baden (2014) found that exposing students to examples of unethical corporate behavior raises their cynicism disproportionately more than exposing them to examples of socially responsible companies gives them hope.

  15. Because acting with moral courage in an organization typically involves speaking up or out, it made sense to us to have students write the second part of this assignment as a play, requiring them to imagine what they would say and how the dialogue with others in their workplace would unfold and thereby focus them on how they would feel. Insofar as participation in roleplays can contribute to business ethics education (see, e.g., Brown 1994; Comer and Vega 2006; Manuel 2010), we considered having students prepare roleplays to perform with their classmates. However, it has been our experience in teaching business ethics that some students, when asked to share with classmates workplace situations in which they observed or participated in unethical—and, in some cases, also illegal—actions, are (understandably) reserved and select incidents from their youth that are less fresh in their minds and involve less significant issues, thus reducing the impact of the exercise on their learning.

  16. The PET instrument assesses individuals’ propensity to do what is right, regardless of organizational pressures and personal consequences. As the sample questions in Table 2 show, the instrument contains forced-choice responses; the adapted questions used in the scenario assignment were open-ended, asking students to indicate what they would do.

  17. Additionally, some of the students selected works of both fiction and nonfiction, but only three mentioned only nonfiction readings.

  18. At the end of the course, a student with more than 20 years of corporate experience wrote in an email that he no longer had to resign himself to inaction, because the course material had enabled him to honor his moral principles: “Thank you for demonstrating to me that even at this stage of my life and career, I still have much to learn about myself and the world. I feel rejuvenated in a way, as I had definitely become jaded [about] things at work.”

  19. Whereas we emphasize the importance of fortifying students’ ability to withstand organizational pressures, Jr. C. E. Harris (2013) proposes greater organizational support for individuals’ moral behavior. We endorse and hope for this outcome, but are not expecting it to occur soon.

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  1. Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University, 225 Weller Hall, Hempstead, NY, 11549-1340, USA

    Debra R. Comer

  2. School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Michael Schwartz

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Comer, D.R., Schwartz, M. Highlighting Moral Courage in the Business Ethics Course. J Bus Ethics 146, 703–723 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2919-3

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