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.
