Empathy in Business Ethics Education

Marc A. Cohen

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Empathy in Business Ethics Education

Marc A. Cohen

Seattle University, USA

Volume 9: 2012, pp. 359-376: ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the tactical question of how we ought to proceed in teaching business ethics, taking as a starting point that business ethics should be concerned with cooperative, mutually beneficial outcomes, and in particular with fostering behavior that contributes to those outcomes. This paper suggests that focus on moral reasoning as a tactical outcome - as a way of achieving behavior in support of cooperative outcomes - is misplaced. Instead, we ought to focus on cultivating empathetic experiences. Intuitively, the problem we need to address in business ethics is not that our students (and that we ourselves) sometimes reason poorly, or that moral decision-making is subject to characteristic kinds of errors. The problem is that our students (and - again - we ourselves) do not always care enough, we do not modify our behavior consistently enough.