The Philosophers' Cocoon

This is a guest post by Jason Brennan, Georgetown University

I work in a PPE-style department at Georgetown’s business school. I generally teach 2 preps a year, one traditional PPE-style course and one applied business ethics course on a particular subject (such as business and the environment, or social business and non-profit management). Most of my students are business majors. 

Teaching business ethics can be difficult for a bunch of reasons. One is that there just isn’t much good business ethics worth reading, period, so there isn’t much worth teaching. The academic subfield is rather weak. (For instance, one of the most widely cited papers on sweatshops literally contains no argument for its conclusion.) Many of the textbooks are bad—they consist entirely of platitudes, or case studies, or awkward “What would a utilitarian do in situation X”-type chapters. A third reason is that business students are often not that interested in learning philosophical ideas—and (fourth reason?) their lack of interest is largely justified. If you study the moral psychological literature on why businesspeople make moral mistakes, it’s not usually a problem of moral confusion which can be clarified with philosophical training, but instead problems about moral blind spots, conformity, akrasia, or bad incentives created by bad rules.

For the past 8 years, in my PPE course and in some of my business ethics classes, I’ve been using what I call The Ethics Project as my main semester-long class activity.

Here’s the basic description:

Think of something good to do. Do it.

The goal of this project is for you to do something that adds value to the world. To help you complete the project, the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics will provide each group with $1000. However, the university regulates how the money can be spent, and so using the money will require you to navigate complicated spending rules and to deal with often capricious administrators.

On one of the last two days of class, your group will make a presentation that answers the following questions. You will also write up a report answering these questions, due on the last day of class.

Questions: How did you interpret the imperative to do something good? Did you focus on moral or non-moral goodness? Why? How did you navigate the tradeoff between what’s most desirable in itself and what’s most feasible? What were your opportunity costs? How did you allocate labor in your group? What obstacles did you expect to encounter and how did you pre-emptively plan to overcome them? What obstacles did you in fact encounter, and how did you respond? Did you add value to the world, taking into account the costs of your time, effort, and any money spent? Did you succeed or fail, and by what standards should we judge you? What did you learn? What would you have differently?

This project asks students to think carefully about certain metaethical, ethical, management, and economic concepts, and how they interplay. They are asked to deliberate and plan something, actually execute a task of their own design, and then after the fact carefully analyze what they did with economic and philosophical tools. They have to think about principles of effective altruism, issues about cost-benefit analysis and how to commensurate that value of what they do with the value of what they consumed to do it, questions about what they owe to whom and why, issues about ethics of allocating labor within their group, and more.

Over the past 8 years, students have had a wide range of projects, some successful and some not, some impressive and some mundane. One group started an “Unsung Heroes” club which has since spread to multiple campuses and which received extensive national news coverage. Another created a business plan for and donated equipment to poor teenagers in an impoverished part of the world; by the end of the semester, the teenagers were supporting themselves and their families and had greatly improved their income. Others have done fundraisers for various charities—the current record is over $15,000 for the Mocoa mudslide victims. Others have run businesses; one business—Hoya Screen Repair—grossed tens of thousands per semester and had over a 30% profit rate. This past semester, students engaged in arbitrage to turn wasted gift certificates into meals for the homeless, created and distributed hangover kits (which turned out to be high demand), ran a headshot business, and created the first battery recycling pilot program at Georgetown, which was so successful that the university appears poised to take it over and expand throughout the campus.

If this seems of interest to you, I have a lengthier description of the project, its motivation, and how to do implement it (including without money) at The Journal of Business Ethics Education. I’m happy to answer questions in the comments section.