I. INTRODUCTION

I have been teaching ethics courses at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business (MSB) for many years. Such courses, usually designated Business Ethics courses, have long been the subject of gentle ridicule. Mentioning that you teach business ethics often elicits comments such as “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” or “That must be a short course.” When I told my brother that I had accepted a position teaching business ethics at Georgetown, his pithy response was “That makes sense. Only a business school would hire a lawyer to teach ethics.”

Many years ago, the ethics courses taught in business schools could aptly be criticized as overly abstract and too far removed from the practical problems that business people face in the real world. But at many schools, and especially at Georgetown, those days are long gone. Business ethics courses now combine the study of normative ethics with that of organizational behavior, social psychology, economics, and political and legal incentive structures. Contemporary business ethics courses focus not only on identifying what the right thing to do is, but also on what makes it more or less likely that people and organizations will do it. Accordingly, the courses have organizational behavior components that explore how organizations’ internal incentives and lines of communication encourage or discourage employee wrongdoing; social psychology components that study how individuals’ moral blind spots, weakness of will, and tendency to conform create ethical stumbling blocks; and political science components that examine how government regulation creates incentives that can direct an organization’s conduct toward or away from the ethically prescribed path.

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