How Effective Can Ethics Education Be?

Abstract

For nearly two decades, universities throughout the world and specifically in the West have increasingly committed themselves to incorporating ethics education in their curricula for various reasons. Recent fraudulent financial scandals (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco) have led to public questioning whether accountants and auditors have forgotten their professional responsibilities. Many researchers also attributed these ethics scandals to the lack of moral development of managers and the amoral, “profits first theoretical underpinnings of business education”. The result was proposals by bodies such as the Education Committee of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy to increase the credit hour requirements in business ethics education, supporting the importance of ethics training for the current students who will become the new professionals, and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the primary accrediting body of collegiate schools of business, to include ethics instruction in accredited business programs. Managing scientific misconduct is another impetus in the scientific community to provide ethics education to scientific researchers and practitioners. Scientific misconduct ranges from fabrication of data and harming research participants to inappropriate assignment of authorship and withholding details of methodology or results in publications. The growing public concerns with the accelerating development of science and technology, revealed by the public debates of the ethical dimensions of such products, is a third reason that prompted schools to provide students with the right tools to discuss such ethical issues that arise in their academic disciplines. Teaching ethics also matters because there is consensus among specialists on development issues that ethic education is the most important factor in global development and is the major indicator of progression and regression in today’s world. Development is now measured by the extent to which the ethics of human powers understand and use constituents of the technological and scientific revolution.