GBUS 738 Business Ethics

The purpose of this course is to enable students to reason about the role of ethics in business administration in a complex, dynamic, global environment. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to think deeply about the nature of business, the responsibilities of management, and how business and ethics can be put together. Cases without easy answers that raise a range of problems facing managers in the contemporary business environment will be used. Discussions will focus on developing a framework for analyzing the issues in moral terms and then making a decision and developing a set of reasons for why the decision was justified. Students will be pushed to think carefully about how they make decisions and develop their capacity to defend their decisions to other stakeholders. This is important as a way not only to foster integrity and responsible decision making, but also to push students to take leadership roles in dealing with complex and difficult choices they will face in their careers. Operating from a managerial perspective, students will address a range of themes in the class, including basic concepts in ethics, responsibilities to stakeholders and the building blocks of markets, corporate culture, the sources of ethical breakdowns in organizations, managerial integrity, value creation, and personal values and managerial choice.