The Influence of Business Ethics on Lebanese University Students: Can Business Ethics Be Learned?

Abstract

When it comes to business ethics, views diverge and conflict. There are those who believe that ethics can’t be taught but is rather a development, such as Aristotle; and there are those who like Socrates, believe that ethics is knowing what we ought to do, and therefore this knowledge can be learned. In the Lebanese society that faces ethical crises, ethical education becomes important. When business students are taught that “business is business” and business deals are “not a matter of ethics, but of business” in class, it becomes difficult to show them that “good ethics, is good business”. In such conditions ethical education becomes imperative. Teaching ethics means that one believes that people can change, that ethical behavior can be taught. However, is this applicable? Can we teach Hitler or Bernard Madoff ethics or as Orwin (2009) implies “Can we teach pigs to fly?” This paper investigated the effects of learning business ethics on various Lebanese university students who have successfully completed the course’s objectives. The participants were the researcher’s students in two local universities, which caused limitations of the results for they couldn’t be generalized. The results revealed that ethics course(s) did positively affect the students’ behavior.