Ethics

I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with a trend I’ve noticed in the numerous business courses I have to take, and I’ve been struck with the urge to rant about it. Basically, (presumably because of the “Enron scandal”) every textbook I use now has some special section on “ethical decisions” and provides short scenarios reminiscent of the sort of thing you’d expect in a 2nd grade curriculum (if you see Bob cheating, does that make it ok for you to do it too?)
 
Now, this is stupid for numerous reasons, the most basic being it obviously isn’t accomplishing anything. Understand, I’m a firm believer in college students not necessarily always being very bright, but I think even they can handle concepts like “lying is wrong” without having it repeated in textbooks excessively. It’s not as if Enron executives didn’t comprehend the concept of lying being unethical.
 
However, even more annoying is every textbook’s reasoning for using ethical standards is that “it’s ultimately good for business,” since it avoids potential lawsuits and scandals. That may be a fair argument, but once you’re doing something because “it’s ultimately good for business,” then it’s no longer an ethical decision anyway, it’s just a business one. An ethical decision would be if something was bad for business, but you didn’t do it anyway because you thought it was simply wrong. However, the authors of business textbooks are so dollar minded that they fail to comprehend that and instead simply say to be ethical because it’s right for business, which is no different than every other lesson in the books and hardly requires a specially selected section.
 
So, maybe it’s not the students who need the ethics lesson.