Two Barriers to Moral Agency in Business Education

In the fall of 2006 I taught a large lecture course on microeconomics for the first time. I was eager to try some new technology to get students engaged in the class. Because I was naive, and my students were not, I had the dismaying but enlightening experience of discovering a miniature cheating scandal late in the semester, involving at least twelve students (about 7 percent of the class). It was an interesting sample of students. Because I was unaware of the possibilities for cheating in my class, and because cheating in my class had become widespread (the twelve I caught were only the ones unlucky enough to have cheated the day I checked), many of those caught were upstanding students who might not have cheated if I had not let things get out of hand in the class.

All of the students expressed sorrow and regret, with varying levels of sincerity: "I'm not like this"; "I don't know how I ended up doing something like this." What struck me about the conversations I had with these students was the resemblance between their reflections and those of contrite business executives caught up in the various scandals of the last decade. Both students and executives described a disconnect between the actions they took and the persons they were. Both were in some sense shocking to themselves. And I wondered how easy it would be for these students to become those business executives.

One of the mysteries of human nature is that we must give reasons, however flimsy, for our sins. We must hide from ourselves the true nature of the wrong we do, reassure ourselves that we are justified in violating our own moral code. This is no less true in the business world than in other human arenas. Thus, when the convicted business executive, the adulterer, or the corrupt government official reflects candidly on his past, he discovers a disconnect between the actions he took and the person he is: "How did I get to the point of rationalizing something I knew to be wrong?"

This is a perennially human problem, but it is also quintessentially modern. Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, describes the inability of a person to "square who they are with what they do" as a very common modern condition.¹ According to MacIntyre, the ability to lead a morally sound and happy life depends on being able to describe a unified narrative of one's life—seeing oneself as the same person in each of the very different social environments in which one must act. Modern society has lost the sense that such a unified narrative is necessary or even possible; we wear different masks in different social environments, act out different roles in varying situations. People who think they can or must "be" one thing and "do" another may find themselves in the situation of my students or the indicted executives, wondering how they became something they did not want to be.

The solution to the very modern divided self is not balance—the cutthroat persona giving way regularly to the loving husband giving way to the wild sports fan. The solution is integrity—we are each one person, each of us living one life, and we need to be the same person in every situation, in every temptation.

This paper describes two potential barriers to integrity in the modern business environment. Each makes it more difficult to connect actions in business to the moral life, but for different reasons. Both barriers involve useful concepts that have been taken too seriously and too far. The first arises from the challenge of living in a culture in which most issues are regarded as problems to be solved by the application of systematic methods. In such a culture, the dominant mode of knowing is technical. Technical knowledge is deceptively neutral; when important questions are reduced to technical problems such as finding the most efficient or cost-effective method to accomplish a goal, a false distance is created between morality and action. The second barrier is the challenge of...