Business Teaching, Liberal Learning, and the Moral Transformation of Business Education

Abstract

Business ethics often draws from the content of liberal arts disciplines, but rarely from the practice of liberal education. Reconceptualizing the relation of business and liberal education offers a new strategy for promoting ethics within business schools. Under this strategy, ethics develops into more than a supplement to established functional courses. It becomes the locus for a more significant moral transformation of business education.

Keywords:

• management
• ethics
• liberal education

Notes

1. To be clear, I mean to construe “end” broadly here to include any goal, purpose, aim, or aspiration. On this understanding, human beings can certainly have ends, but ends also can inhere in methods, models, and even entire fields. Ends are thus part of any approach human beings adopt or any practice in which they participate.

2. This is so even though business success can lie in the other direction. For example, Tom Chappell (1993) notes how he put our relational character at the core of his business vision. “Running a business by utility was precisely what Kate and I had tried to avoid from the beginning… . Our way of doing business corresponded more to … that inner sense of obligation and human connection that people feel for their friends, neighbors, and family. Kate and I acted out of a recognition of these human bonds” (p. 11).