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Introduction: What are we to make of the ethical formation of undergraduates?
A colleague with long-standing experience of undergraduate students, and a regular instructor in our Introduction to Ethics class, recently asserted: “These students have no idea of what it is to think ethically. It’s all new to them.” I beg to differ. My own experience with undergraduate business students suggests that they do, in fact, think from within an ethical horizon. Whether they have reflected upon, or thematized, that horizon may be questioned. Perhaps that’s
what my colleague really means: the students have yet to make a critical appropriation of their ethical system, in its splendors and with its warts. (After all, if they didn’t have some kind of a framework in place, how would we account for their ability to transact, so successfully, all of the challenges which have led them to our doors? They may be worshipping one or more of Francis Bacon’s “idols”—tribe, cave, marketplace, theater—but the worship has brought them this far. Now, perhaps, theological reflection may begin.)
If my colleague would have the students as pure raw materials, awaiting the impress of our formation, I see them as “goods in process” and I intend that in several senses. They are, first, despite the stereotyping of their non-business school peers, “good” students. Not good in the narrow sense of adept and proficient at their studies but of good, as we all are, made in the image of God. They are in process and far from “finished goods”: indeed, even at commencement, they will remain unfinished. As educators, we carry the burden of assisting the finishing, not in the sense of brushing on a veneer or adding value in the way that the marketplace calculates, but by fortifying, testing, annealing the good which the parents have brought to our campuses. The provisionality of what we may hope for reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s comment in her “An Introduction to a Memoir of Maryanne,” reprinted in
Mystery and Morals. “In us the good,” she writes, “is something under construction.” The good is us, in this sense, our capacity for living a virtuous life, continues to progress/process and no one alive to the promptings of grace presumes that any one person, or institution, applies a finishing touch.
In what follows, I will pursue four points. The first two are diagnostic: who are the students in our classrooms and what ethical theories are currently in their use? The third and fourth are constructive: given the current theories in use, what perspective might prove more intellectually and morally satisfying and how might that be pursued, concretely.
The students in our classrooms (with special reference to Boston College)
Two of every nine undergraduates at Boston College study business. This percentage aligns fairly closely with the national data, which identifies business as the major choice of one in four students, and is consistent with many other US Jesuit colleges and universities.
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Only four of ten undergraduates, across the university, qualify for need-based financial aid,
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and between fifteen and twenty different countries are represented, annually, in the first year business program. Since international students do not qualify for financial aid, and assuming that our domestic population tracks the university norm, our student body is, on the whole, quite affluent. These are the children of successful upper-middle class students and their tastes and experiences reflect a worldliness that would have been rare a generation ago but is commonplace today.
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What are the sources of our students’ ethical frameworks and orientations?
The best way to answer that question is to ask them, and I have: I’ve followed the suggestion of Ken
Himes, OFM, our Theology chairman, to require a brief, ethical autobiography, identifying unshakable ethical commitments and those that are held but without as great conviction. I make it clear that the assignment is required and will be subject to my comments and questions but not to evaluative grading: everyone will receive full credit. Later in the term, I ask that they respond to my original comments in
1 Georgetown has a lower percentage, St. Joseph’s a much higher one and Santa Clara, and Fordham keep close statistical company with us.
2 Although an additional 29% take some aid—loans—and this has consequences for how students see their possibilities, postgraduation.
3 Yet, the dream of a business education as an escalator remains: at least thirty members of the incoming class self-identify as first-generation college students.

light of our semester’s reading and discussion: again, full credit for all, even if their positions remain unchanged.
I will have more to say about the content of their beliefs in what follows. Among the sources, one finds the usual suspects, with parents most prominent. While they will sometimes cite “dicta,” as in “My mother always says. . .,” they are more likely to identify patterns of hard work, of loving support and of fair treatment, what parents do rather than what they say. Religion , sometimes mediated via the family, also plays prominently. Here, sacred writings—the 10 commandments—and quasi-religious sayings—the golden rule—rather than actual practice dominate. Many will cite the influence of secondary education , particularly in Catholic and Jesuit schools. The rhetoric of the “preferential option for the poor” and “men and women for others” has become part of their language. Finally, and chiefly among young men, the shaping influence of athletics—competition, team work, loyalty, hard work, dedication and courage in the face of adversity—stamps some part of their ethical orientation. I believe it is important to know something of the self-identified sources because an intellectual challenge to their theories-in-use also may amount to a challenge to deeply-held loyalties to family, church and friends. Education may be meant to shake the foundations but a careful inspection should proceed that work.
Ethical theories in use: an adapted typology
In Christ and Cultur
4 e , H. Richard Niebuhr developed a five part typology to describe characteristic ways that Christian believers came to terms with the culture in which they lived. You may recall that he identified two extreme positions—a sectarianism that rejected culture altogether and an uncritical embrace of culture that found no fault—and three mediating types. He ties each type to one or more representative thinkers—from Menno Simons to Aquinas, Calvin and Luther—and associates each with a particular form of church.
I invoke his example for license to “type” the ethical theories-in-use among our students; I will settle on three and save a fourth, our emerging hope, for later in the paper.
Type One: Sectarian Ethics
Some of our students form a counterpart to the “withdrawing sectarians” that Niebuhr associated with Tertullian and, much later, with Simons and the radical Reformation. For them, the choice was for
Christ and church over the world, seen as a place of sin and ungodliness. For our “sectarian” students, the choice are for home over work, person over system, virtue over vice, and, practically, for the not-forprofit organization over the ordinary business enterprise. They would like to be “good at” the disciplines of business but fear that any type of corporate involvement will be corrupting. They will say, as other, less sectarian but troubled, students: “you really can’t expect business itself to be good. So I won’t be a part of it.”
Type Two: Dualistic Ethics
Niebuhr identified a position that was similar to sectarianism in recognizing the profound difference between the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the ‘Kingdom of this World’ but which engaged, rather than fled, this world. Our counterpart students—call them accomodationists—say “you do what you can.”
They believe, rightly in my view, that one can realize aspects of the good and virtuous life in the workplace and via the dynamism of business itself. While they esteem the not-for-profit world, and may contribute vigorously to it in a variety of ways, they have a pragmatic sense that their own interests
(including loan repayment) are better served in the private sector. At its worst, the dualism lapses into the
Sunday-Monday split that we bemoan: one set of beliefs and practices for church and temple, another for the workplace. At its best, as suggested above, it promises good at the level of human relationships and its possibilities via the enterprise of the business.
4 H.Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture , Harper and Row, 1951.

Type Three: Rationalistic Ethics
At one extreme of his typology, as noted above, Niebuhr identified a position that saw no conflict between Christ and culture. The student version of the conflict-free position I dub “rationalistic,” and I encounter two versions of it. There is a rationalism that finds comfort in Ayn Rand’s position lionizing the individual and his calculating—rational, in a very narrow sense—pursuit of his or her own best interests. One must look out for oneself—who else will?—and this self-regard functions as the cornerstone of ethics. Generalized to a higher, macro-level, a second form of rationalism emerges: the wisdom of the market. On this account, apart from breaches of trust and instances of lying or force, the market can sort out, fairly, the vexing questions of allocation of resources and distribution of benefits.
There will be punishment, according to law, for transgressors but apart from this punitive action, no additional effort need be expended on ethics.
Typologies are, by nature, inexact and I have not done justice to the full range of student background assumptions or operative principles. Still, I have found this typing useful as I proceed through our Introduction to Ethics class: it offers a means for anticipating contested positions and difficult hours. Further, it has influenced the approach we have taken to a new effort in ethics, described below in part four.
On the road to more robust theory and practice
I think we can move beyond sectarianism, overcome dualism and give reason its proper play in ethics but there are formidable obstacles. A major one, apart from the power of one’s current theory-inuse, is the common structure of the business ethics text. A smorgasbord of ethical theories—virtue, utility, deontology, rights, justice—usually proceeds a selection of cases. As one seasoned instructor of
MBA students remarked to me, “the students quickly catch on to the fact that a decision outlawed by one school of thought will be approved by another. So, they follow their preferences.” They pay their money, so to speak, and they make their choice. (I do not believe that the authors of such textbooks intend to breed this attitude. They are simply doing the required, scholarly work of reporting on the present state of the question. Students rarely share the scholarly concern: they want to ‘get it,” and move on. Hence, the fishing after cases.)
This search for confirming, or exculpatory, cases has been criticized by Robert Spitzer in the talk he delivered before this body a few years ago.
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More importantly, Spitzer’s combination of principles with a methodology for making proper use of casuistry and his attention to the concrete context of decision-making strikes me as an unusually powerful response to the problems posed by sectarianism, dualism and a thin, technical rationality.
Another approach, pursued by my colleague, Richard A. Spinello, elaborates on the Grisez-Finnis reformulation of natural law theory. He reports student enthusiasm for an approach that begins by identifying intrinsic goods, recognized across cultures then moves from the basic human goods to first moral principles and then to modes of responsibility and specific moral norms.
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Both approaches share a commitment to engaged dialogue about starting positions, proceed
Socratically, and make an appeal to reason—an injunction to ‘Be reasonable’, if you will—that transcends rationalizing. They thus respect, provisionally, the moral starting points of the students and avoid a preliminary drawing of battle lines or trenches across which adversaries may regard each other warily.
5 Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., “Six Steps for Remedying Contemporary Ethical Problems,”
6 Richard A. Spinello, “The Natural Law Tradition and Business Ethics,” in Richard A. Spinello (ed.), Moral Philosophy for
Managers , McGraw-Hill, 2007, pp.173 ff.

Portico: a new Boston College experiment
For over two years, we have been involved in designing a course for first year undergraduate students that would address their ethical formation, and several other themes. In what follows, I borrow heavily from a paper developed for the Notre Dame conference on business education at Catholic colleges and universities.
In our continuing discussion of what a program for first-year students should address, we defined three dimensions to the problem: (1) cultural and social, (2) intellectual and (3) formational/aspirational. I will offer some comments on each and then turn to the ambitious goals we hope to achieve.
The cultural and social dimension has both broad and local aspects. Speaking broadly: our students, and their families, come to us from a cultural context in which the hot pursuit of gain is celebrated on the business pages, and cable channels, and seen as unavoidable, given the high costs of university education and the anxieties attendant upon “globalization.” The local context of the campus, despite its towers, is not immune from those concerns and they may, indeed, be intensified by any number of factors: advertising from major firms in the student newspapers, the queues, virtual and physical, for spots in the internship lines, and so on. Any program for first-year students must acknowledge these tensions.
The intellectual dimension must acknowledge the dramatically abridged and foreshortened perspective students bring to business studies. For them, their education is often nothing more than an instrument one wields to secure a job. (On this view, a former management school dean noted that business schools succeed when they produce “good plumbers,” adept technicians who know their way around the financial piping but are largely innocent of the niceties of hydraulics.) They care very little for the theory behind the time-value of money and are less than curious about how commodities, processes and forms of organization come to be. A first year course in university must be much more than an introduction to a tool chest of useful techniques.
The program, finally, must involve a formational/aspirational dimension. While it must acknowledge the technical question, often on the minds of our students, “what can I do with a degree in business?” it cannot end inquiry there. Learning about the paths from functional specialties, like
Accounting, to the world of work is of great concern to them. It needs to respond to ethical concerns, the question of what should I do when confronted with X? Students bring an all-too-ready assumption that there’s ethics, then there’s business life where different rules apply. Finally, the program must involve a vocational theme, not unrelated to the previous two themes. To the questions what can I do? And what should I do? We must add: who is the person I am now? The resulting self-awareness that issues from an early, preliminary address of this question can inspire the continuing question that looks to the future:
Who is the person that I wish to become? Ignatian tradition, with its emphasis on discernment, must play prominently in business education at a Jesuit university.
We will offer two pilot sections of Portico this fall. A schematic follows

Portico Schematic 1
Pre-Term: One day, group site visit; one day (?) on campus smaller groups
Weeks 1-2: Sections by day, twice a week as the norm; occasional plenary evening sessions to supplement or replace day sections
Week 13: Group extravaganza (!)
Delivery at full launch: 20 sections of 25 with two juniors as TA’s
A Final Type: Contemplatives in Action
The hope we harbor for Portico is to foster an approach to ethics that bears the Ignatian impress.
We hope to assist in the formation of young professionals whose preparation will be informed by historical-mindedness, ethical sensitivity, a capacity for personal discernment and technical virtuosity.
They should be principled but pragmatic, not quick to abandon the hope of principled engagement nor cynical about the possibility of realizing principles at all. Portico should function as a kind of examen that frames their progress through the undergraduate program and offers a model for beginning professional life.
Coda
At the midpoint of Plato’s
Gorgias
—a text we will use in a section of Portico devoted to ethics— the young, brash and threatening Callicles advises the old, reserved and pacific Socrates that he still has time to make something of his life. All he needs to do is “take up the Fine Art of Business and cultivate something that will give you a reputation for good sense.” 7 In the carefully crafted dialogue that ensues,
Socrates brings Callicles to the brink of admitting that the philosophical life, not Callicles’s, is the only one worth pursuing but Callicles finally demurs. He remains unconvinced.
How will we fare with Portico? Might it function more as a faux entryway, a piece of trompe- l’oeil, an intellectually and aesthetically appealing cover masking what Newman called the “hot pursuit of gain?”
We hope, of course, for more: for a real entryway into a life of the mind and the professions that entices, inspires and ennobles. For such a life is genuinely worth a hot pursuit.
7 Plato, Gorgias , (Library of Liberal Arts, 1952 ), p.55