Is Business Ethics Getting Better? Business Ethics and Business History

It always strikes me as silly, when I read an article about business ethics that begins by saying something like, “because of the global financial crisisCrisis, people have started to pay attention to business ethics.” This shows either a profound ignorance of historyHistory or, perhaps more plausibly, that business and society suffer from an acute case of amnesia, where every scandalScandals seems completely new and unprecedented. Either way, this attitude speaks to the importance of history not only for business ethics but for teaching students about business. This chapter is based on my 2010 Presidential Address to the Society for Business Ethics. It’s somewhat autobiographical, in that it goes back to when I started doing research on business ethics as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Business SchoolHarvard Business School (HBS). I talk about sitting in on Alfred Chandler’sChandler, A. business history seminar and my interactions with other talented historians at Harvard Business SchoolHarvard Business School (HBS) in the mid-1980s. I became very intrigued by the history of HBSHarvard Business School (HBS), especially the early discussions about what business students needed to learn, the role of business in society, and Harvard’s experiences with business ethics and business history courses. As I will discuss in Part III of the book, the humanitiesHumanities teach us about ethics and each other. Except for most business ethics classes, humanitiesHumanities content is largely absent from business education. In this chapter, I suggest that if business schools don’t want ethics courses, history courses might provide an alternative way of instilling responsible business behavior.