We add three further distinctions to davis'.
- First, we have sought to use the ethics bowl as a way to generate feedback for students on their skills in ethical decision-making. Three classes are devoted to each competition. The third class provides an effective debriefing on the competition. It is not always easy for students to receive such feedback, but debriefing activities help them to interpret feedback and put it to good use.
- The ethics bowl provides an excellent opportunity for students to refine their understanding of what Rest terms "intermediate moral concepts." Examples of these concepts include "paternalism", "conflict of interest", "faithful agency", "public wellbeing", and "collegiality". By choosing cases that explore the boundaries of these concepts, the ethics bowl can be used as a wayy of proceeding from clear instances of these concepts to more problematic instances. This activity of prototyping forms an essential part of our coming to understand the thick, complicated moral concepts so essential to everyday moral reasoning.
- Studies like the Hitachi Report demonstrate that much of the moral decision-making that our students will be exercising will be shaped and constrained by the organizational environments in which they work. Companies built around financial objectives elicit one kind of moral advocacy while those built around customer- or quality-oriented standards require quite different strategies. With carefully chosen cases, the ethics bowl can recreate these environments to allow students to practice decision-making under real world constraints. The classroom becomes an "ethics laboratory".
Learning objectives
What are the intended learning objectives or goals for this module? What other goals or learning objectives are possible?
Below are different lists of content and skill objectives of the ethics bowl. Not all of themapply at once. But they can be bundled together to fit different forms or instantiations. For example, a Corporate Governance ethics bowl would differ from an Engineering Ethics Bowl in terms of content objectives. This difference could be reflected in case selection, especially through the different basic and intermediate moral concepts covered by a case. The same would apply to a list of skill objectives; not all the UPRM skills could be covered in a given case or even a given competition. But a wide range of cases selected for student preparation could at least touch upon these skills.
Content Objectives come from the AACSB Ethics Education Task Force Report. In the Corporate Governance class (Connexions course, col10396), a special effort has been made to make the ethics bowl responsive to these content requirements.
Content objectives
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Ethical Leadership (EL) : (a) “Expanding…awareness to include multiple stakeholder interests and…developing and applying…ethical decision-making skills to organizational decisions in ways that are transparent to…followers.” (b) “Executives become moral managers by recognizing and accepting their responsibility for acting as ethical role models.”
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Decision-Making (DM) : “Business schools typically teach multiple frameworks for improving students’ ethical decision-making skills. Students are encouraged to consider multiple stakeholders and to assess and evaluate using different lenses and enlarged perspectives.”
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Social Responsibility (SR) : “Businesses cannot thrive in environments where societal elements such as education, public health, peace and personal security, fidelity to the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, and physical infrastructures are deficient.”
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Corporate Governance (CG) : (a) “Knowing the principles and practices of sound, responsible corporate governance can also be an important deterrent to unethical behavior.” (b) “Understanding the complex interdependencies between corporate governance and other institutions, such as stock exchanges and regulatory bodies, can be an important factor in managing risk and reputation.”
