A 'biased' guide to behavioural ethics

The problem with ethics is that everybody wants to tell you what to do. That's what scholars like to call the "normative" approach, and it lies at the heart of most of the discussion about ethics in business: what's the right thing to do, and what's the wrong thing. There is another approach, one the sounds more like social science and less like theology, however, and it's deeply unsatisfying to those who long for, or search for, the right answer. Behavioural ethics, like behavioural finance or governance, seeks to examine what people do, rather than what they (or, indeed, others) say they should do. According to two scholars from Harvard Business School, this descriptive approach still teaches lessons, just not of the top-down sort. The names Enron and Madoff have resonance even without a rule by which to judge them.

"As business school professors, we are disappointed with what academics have offered to date in response to these increasingly frequent demands," they write. "More importantly, we believe that there are limitations to the strategies used in our efforts as academics to respond, and believe that there are more effective ways that can help reduce ethical failures in both business and society more broadly in the future." So how, then?

The pair set off to recounts their self-confessed "biased" view of the history of business ethics and the attempts by professional schools to address it in teaching and research. Behavioural ethics "sees an opportunity in helping students and professionals better understand their own behavior in the ethics domain, and compare it to how they would ideally like to behave". Reflecting on the experience is itself the moral education.

Source document: The working paper "Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty," by Max Bazerman and Francesca Gino of Harvard, is a 43-page pdf file.