The Problem with 30 Years of Business Ethics Education

So apparently that are at least three people out there reading this blog.  I guess it's time to repost, then.  Please bear with me during the academic semesters.  I tend to get busy then.  But I'll try to post regularly during the breaks.

So here we go.  To get back to the  contemplative stuff, last week I did a presentation to Spiritual Directors of Central Indiana on contemplative prayer and moral integrity.  I called it "Being Holy/Being Good: How Hanging Out With God Makes Us Better People."  What can I say?  They wanted a catchy title!

I started out by talking about a problem that many teachers of business ethics encounter.  Actually, it's a problem that many people already recognize: After 30-plus years of required business ethics courses in MBA programs, there still seem to be too many incidents of unethical behavior in business.  One needs simply invoke the names of the businesses that have gotten into ethical trouble - Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart, and the global financial crisis - to drive home the point.

So the question becomes: why?  Why doesn't ethics education in business seem to be working?  My contention is that we are focusing too much on intellectual comprehension and not enough on emotional impetus.  In plain language: it is a matter of the will.  In the modern western conception, the will is understood to be a faculty of the mind.  The ancients, however, understood that while the will (or what they knew of the human person - having no psychological concept of the will, per se), might be a function of the mind, it is driven by the emotions.  Hence, any moral education that seeks to shape or transform the will must change not just the mind, but the heart as well.

Enough for today.  In the next blog post I'll talk a bit about what I try to do in my classroom to shape both the mind and the heart.

Can Ethics Be Taught?

I ended the last blog with the $64,000 question: How can we form professionals to be truly moral and not just rule-followers and compliers?  It's easy to conclude - based on recent press and publications - that trying to make business leaders and other professionals more ethical is an exercise in futility.  In their book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do About It Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel argue that most of us have a higher opinion of ourselves as moral agents than might be warranted.  In fact, their evidence shows that many people fail to recognize a situation as being morally problematic and therefore fail to respond in an ethical manner.  Furthermore,  a recent NPR piece, "Psychology of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things" tells the story of a good person, Toby Graves, who ended up committing fraud after promising his father he would never be unethical in his business practices.  This suggests that even people who have their ethical radar up can still overlook their own unethical behavior.

So how should we who teach ethics respond to this?  Is teaching ethics an exercise in futility?  Is there no hope?

I do no accept that there is no hope.  Even if things aren't perfect it is essential to press on in our efforts to nurture moral sensibility in the young and even the not-so-young.  The question is how?  If the intellectual approach doesn't work, we have to try other approaches.  This is precisely where Padgett weighs in.  As we saw in the previous post, he focuses on the problem of self-fragmentation - that we are divided within ourselves by the various roles that we take on and the different demands these roles make upon us.  This problem of fragmentation is also noted in a recent document emerging from the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace "Vocation of the Business Leader" (more on that at another time). 

Padgett's antidote to the problem of self-fragmentation is to seek a unification of the self.  In the next blog I'll address how Padgett treats unification of the self - especially his appeal to Merton's understanding that the self can be unified and integrated only by being in union with others.

Padgett and Self-Fragmentation

In looking again at the first paragraph of the last post, I realize I have galloped through Padgett without really unpacking what's going on in his book.  Padgett's main concern is the apparent lack of moral integrity among professionals.  To explain this lack, he identifies a gap between our personal sense of morality - our understanding of right and wrong that we were brought up with - and the demands made upon us by our professional life.  Quite often we are asked to do things in our work that we would immediately recognize as wrong if we were not at work and the usual pressures of work - performance, salary, promotion, peer pressure - were not in play.  The tension this creates within us Padgett calls "self-fragmentation."  We are divided within ourselves by the demands of our conscience versus the demands of our profession - and it is usually the demands of the profession that win out. 

But Padgett also notes that the tendency of Western society to focus on the various roles people play is also fragmenting.  We end up with different moralities for all the different roles we play: parent, child, professor, student, business professional, parishioner, tax payer.  So we end up acting according to what is "allowed" in one sector of our lives - which may be entirely at odds with the rules of the game in another sector.  We may think it's OK to cheat a little at our taxes but we would never do so in our church offering. 

This puts us in a "role morality" where our main concern becomes following the rules.  As long as we follow the rules, we're OK; we can't be blamed.  If something is legal - then surely it is moral.  And if something legal is immoral - well, then, fix the law.  This is what Padgett means by "compliance" and game-playing.  Compliance usually sounds to us like something good.  Surely what we want is for business to be compliant with regulations.  But the danger of "mere compliance" is that business and other professionals will use a checklist of rules complied with (There! I've played their little game and followed their petty rules!) rather than using their reason and intuition to decide for themselves what is morally appropriate and not in any given situation - as well as being compliant!

So what to do?  How can we form business and other professionals to be truly moral and not just rule-followers? 

Barry Padgett and the Moral Professional

The thesis I've been working on in these blogs has been how contemplative prayer nurtures moral integrity.  I started by considering Augustine's understanding of how the lover is changed as she or he gazes upon the beloved.  Now I'd like to consider some of the ideas in Barry Padgett's Professional Morality and Guilty Bystanding: Merton's Conjectures and the Value of Work.  Padgett draws on Merton to critique standard understandings of professional morality as "compliance," showing how compliance can be inauthentic game playing rather than true morality.  He uses Merton's categories of the false self and the true self to talk about the need for professionals to move through contemplation from the one to the other to be authentically moral.

Padgett sees the primary problem of professional morality (or lack thereof) as the conflict between our sense of personal morality and the demands made upon us by our professions.  This results in what he calls "a fragmentation of self."  On the one hand, we know intuitively what is right because we learned it at a very early age.  On the other hand, there may be duties we have as professionals that ask us to do things that - if we reflected for a moment - we would recognize as morally questionable if not outright wrong.  The antidote to this fragmentation is to find a unity of self in union with others.  Simple enough - but how to do this?  I'll look at unity of self in union with others in the next post.

Barry Padgett on "Blind Spots and Guilty Bystanding"

Well, I'm back - after 4 months of teaching two great courses and wonderful students.  The highlight of the semester was the annual "Lead from the Heart" professional ethics lecture sponsored by the Center for Organizational Ethics at Marian University.   Dr. Barry Padgett, James M. Medlin Chair of Business Ethics at Belmont University and author of Professional Morality and Guilty Bystanding: Merton's Conjectures and the Value of Work spoke on "Blind Spots and Guilty Bystanding: What College Sports and Corporate Ethics Have in Common."  Dr. Padgett also visited my two classes: Business Ethics and Personal and Professional Ethics.  It was a treat for the students to get to "talk back" to the author of a book they were reading.  To view a podcast of Dr. Padgett's lecture, click here and after iTunes downloads click on "Center for Orga. . . ."

I had the most wonderful opportunity to speak to a group from Contemplative Outreach of Indianapolis on Saturday, January 14 on how contemplative prayer contributes to moral integrity. We had a wonderful day of centering prayer and conversation. If you have read some of the past posts, you get a good sense of what I focused on - St. Augustine's conversion as a model for how we are moved from dis-integration to self-integration through offering ourselves to God.

I'd like to revisit one idea in particular: Augustine's assertion that we become like that "upon which we gaze." If we focus our intention and attention on wealth, power, sex, the latest in technology, and other things that can grab and keep our attention diverted from God, we become like those things: shallow, empty, not lasting, not reliable. Not that these things are inherently evil but if they divert us from God then we are misusing them.

What suddenly came to me in preparing for this presentation is that the key way in which centering prayer contributes to moral integrity is that centering prayer IS "gazing upon the beloved" and that in so gazing we become like the beloved. So, if through centering prayer we focus our intention and attention upon God and sit in stillness before God, we become more like God: patient, kind, peaceful, loving.

"Contemplating Integrity: Centering Prayer and Moral Integrity"

Today is reading day at Marian University, which marks the end of fall semester classes and precedes exam week. A bit of a breather and an opportunity to return to the blog.

Over the break I'm going to be preparing for a talk I'm giving sponsored by Contemplative Outreach of Indianapolis. The title of the talk is "Contemplating Integrity: The Importance of Centering Prayer in the Cultivation of Moral Integrity." As I prepare, I'll share some of my thoughts in this space.

The event will be on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at St. Christopher Catholic Church in Speedway, Indiana. The session runs from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

If you are in Indianapolis (and if anyone is reading this!) and you are interested in attending the talk, please visit the Contemplative Outreach of Indianapolis website for information on how to register for the event. If you do attend the event and heard about it here, please come introduce yourself to me!