Towards an Understanding of Business Students’ Ethical Perspectives:
Implications for Moral Awareness, Moral Reasoning and Moral Decision Making
Objectives & Scope
The many well-publicized ethical missteps in the business arena have lead to criticism of the
academic community for not incorporating effective ethics education into the business
curriculum (Earley and Kelly, 2004; Madison and Schmidt, 2006; Cohen 2012). Whether our
business students become future small enterprise owners, chief executive officers of multimillion dollar corporations, work in government organizations or in the not-for-profit sector, they
will need to be aware of, and respond to the many and varied moral issues that arise.
As advocated by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)
(AACSB, 2004) a comprehensive ethics education is a fundamental element of a business
curriculum to prepare students to be able to identify, reason and to resolve moral dilemmas.
While there is no agreed upon best practice approach to teaching business ethics, many business
degrees incorporate ethics into the curriculum either as a standalone unit or integrated into the
program to support students’ moral awareness, reasoning and decision making processes
(Martinov-Bennie & Mladenovic, 2013). The aim of this study is to explore two popular online
tools: The Ethical Lens Inventory (Baird & Niacaris, 2010) and the Hot Topic Simulations from
the Ethics Game (EthicsGame, 2013) to address three research questions. First, which ethical
perspectives (deontological theories, justice theories, consequentialist theories, virtue theories)
do business students tend to employ when faced with moral dilemmas? Second, are certain
ethical perspectives associated with heightened moral awareness? Finally, are certain ethical
perspectives associated with more moral decisions?
The Ethical Lens Inventory & Hot Topic Simulations
The Ethical Lens Inventory (ELI) is an online instrument that contains thirty-six pairs of
statements or words with forced choices, students are instructed to choose the item that would
indicate their value or action if they had to choose (Baird & Niacaris, 2010, EthicsGame, 2013).
Choices determine the preferred ethical lens with the assumption that one's default lens is the
favored perspective taken when analyzing all moral dilemmas. Thus, the values and the language
of the lens tend to be the place where one begins to analyze a problem from when faced with a
disruption in the flow of action due to the presence of a moral dilemma (Baird & Niacaris, 2010).
The ELI places students in quadrants that correspond to one of four major ethical perspectives:
Deontological theories, justice theories, consequentialist theories or virtue theories allowing for a
more specific delineation of ethical preference in decision making. These four perspectives then
correspond to the four Ethical Lenses: Rights/Responsibilities, Relationships, Results, and
Reputation. The ELI also offers information regarding students’ gifts, blind spots, vices and
crises when making moral decisions (Baird & Niacaris, 2010).
In addition to identifying the four ethical perspectives, the ELI also relies on two continuums that
address values often found in tension in moral dilemmas: Autonomy versus equality and
rationality versus sensibility (Baird & Warnell, 2013). The ELI measures a student’s preference
for privileging autonomy or equality and rationality or sensibility in resolving a moral dilemma
(EthicsGame, 2013). Below is an illustration of the quadrants and values in tension that comprise
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the ELI (Baird & Niacaris, 2010).
Hot Topic Simulations (HTS) are scenarios that cover a variety of issues (i.e. sexual harassment,
embezzlement, whistle blowing, bribery, fraud, etc.) and put students into real-world dilemmas
that ask them to determine their course of action using multiple perspectives from the ELI. In
combination, the ELI and HTS offer students a fine-grained analysis of the perspectives from
which they make moral decisions while also asking them to consider courses of action from
lenses different from their own; a valuable skill in a business climate marred by a spate of ethical
missteps that stem from a lack of ethical understanding and awareness.
Moral Awareness
Rest (1986) viewed moral awareness as an individual’s ability to simply recognize that a moral
issue exists while Butterfield, Treviño, and Weaver (2000) defined it as, “a person’s recognition
that his or her potential decision or action could affect the interests, welfare, or expectations of
the self or others in a fashion that may conflict with one or more ethical standards” (p. 982).
However, Reynolds (2006) suggested that moral awareness is, “a person’s determination that a
situation contains moral content and legitimately can be considered from a moral point of view”
(p. 233) in line with earlier work by Baier (1958) which suggested that individuals must actually
concede that a moral point of view is actually valid.
We build on research by Reynolds (2006, 2008) that examined the impact of ethical
predispositions on moral awareness as well as the impact of moral attentiveness on behavior.
Rather than a measure of preference for formalism or utilitarianism (Brady & Wheeler, 1996),
this research uses the ELI because of the additional information offered by placement in one of
the quadrants. By examining students’ responses to the HTS we are able to determine their
ability to recognize (or not recognize) the moral issue(s) in each scenario. We can then look at
the same students’ ELI to determine if particular lens(es) lead to greater moral awareness.
Moral reasoning
In order to understand the moral reasoning of students we must identify how they arrived at the
“correct” decision or strategy (Weber, 1990) and understanding their assessment of the theories,
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frameworks and models they used while making moral decisions is key (Rossouw, 2002).
Similar to previous authors (Lau, 2010; Ritter, 2006), we “measure moral reasoning, “in terms of
one’s ability to analyze and evaluate different courses of action and outcomes when determining
one’s stance, by taking into account some ethical principles or decision rules” (Lau, 2010: 569).
We will use students’ analyses and responses to the HTS as the measure of their moral
reasoning.
Moral Decision Making
Years of research have determined that moral behavior is the result of a multi-stage process
(Ferrell & Gresham, 1985; Hunt & Vitell, 1986; Jones, 1991; Rest, 1986; Treviño, 1986). Rest
(1986) proposed the four stages that serve as the foundation of this research. First one must
recognize the existence of a moral issue (moral awareness). Next they must make a moral
judgment (moral reasoning), and then resolve to act morally (moral decision making). Finally
they act on their moral decision by engaging in the moral behavior. We are able to examine
moral decision making by looking at students’ responses to the HTS. The student responses
provide qualitative data that offer insight into how they went about determining that the moral
concerns of the situation were the most important.
Method
The analysis for this research paper is currently being undertaken and will be completed early in
2014. To address the first research question, the business students’ responses will be classified
according to where they fell in the ELI quadrants (deontological theories, justice theories,
consequentialist theories, virtue theories) in order to determine the ethical perspectives business
students tend to employ when faced with moral dilemmas. Research question two, the
relationship between students’ ELI and their responses to a question asking them to “identify the
moral issues in this case” of the HTS will be examined to ascertain if certain ethical perspectives
are associated with heightened moral awareness. The final research question is addressed by
exploring the relationship between business students’ classification in the ELI and their overall
HTS responses to determine if particular ethical perspectives are associated with more moral
decisions.
Implications
Understanding the link between a students’ ethical perspectives, moral awareness, moral
reasoning and moral decision making will provide insights into how we design the ethics
curriculum and how well we prepare our students to deal with moral dilemmas in business and
society. If the results reveal that business students tend to rely on a particular perspective when
solving moral dilemmas, assisting them to understand and reflect upon their ethical perspectives
preferences enables them to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses that each
theoretical perspective offers when reasoning through moral dilemmas and making moral
decisions. Furthermore, if the results reveal that certain perspectives tend to result in greater
moral awareness and improved moral decision making, this provides the foundation for the
development of teaching interventions to increase student’s flexibility to utilize other
perspectives. Moreover, if for example, we come to find that students in the Reputation Lens are
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more likely to exhibit moral awareness and moral decision making, we could design learning
activities that focus on the cultivation of characteristics held by an individual that is thoughtful in
their reflection and has noble intentions (Baird, 2005).
Link to Conference Theme
“Recent organizational history is replete with examples of bad things happening. For a society
ethics and ethical organizations are important. Unethical organizations can hurt society” (Lau
2010: 562). Currently, the poor decisions of a few individuals have lead society to view the
business school graduates as corrupt and nefarious, an unjust reflection of business students as a
whole. The microscope under which ethics educators find themselves due to these high-level
ethical transgressions necessitate changes in how business ethics courses and modules are taught.
This paper explores how business students identify, reason and resolve moral dilemmas and how
we might be able to support their development to ensure they make decision that have a positive
rather than destructive impact on society. Understanding more about the types of ethical
perspectives that lead to higher levels of moral awareness, better moral reasoning and moral
decision making enables ethics educators to foster these perspectives in business ethics courses.
This will support students to recognize, reason and resolve moral dilemmas they encounter in the
business world and have a positive impact on society.
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