Workshop on Teaching Professional Business Ethics

May 29 and 30, 2025

Agenda:

Thursday:
Session 1 – 9:00 am – 10:30 am: Overview: Rationale and Normative Core (Leader: Jason Brennan/John Hasnas) An explanation of the rationale undergirding an experiential learning approach, a description of how to get student buy in to a normative core of ethical principles, and a preview of the remaining sessions designed to show how to use social science to make it more likely that actual behavior aligns with these principles.

Session 2 – 11:00 am – 12:30 pm: The Business Project (Leader: Peter Jaworski/Sahar Akhtar) A description how to structure a business ethics course with a semester long group project that causes the students to become personally invested in both learning to avoid and resolving ethical issues that can arise in business.

Lunch Break

Session 3 – 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm: The Ethics Project (Leader: Jason Brennan) A description of how to make a business ethics course relevant to the real world by empowering students to work outside of the classroom to attempt to effect a positive change in the world while learning important principles of ethics.

Session 4 – 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Interactive Exercises and Role-playing Scenarios (Leader: William English/Peter Jaworski) This session provides a series of in class interactive exercises and role-playing scenarios that illustrate the ethical principles introduced and provide practice in applying them to hypothetical situations.

Friday:
Session 5 – 9:00 am – 10:30 am: Incorporating Moral Psychology into the Course (Leader: Jason Brennan) A description of how the insights of moral psychology can be incorporated into a business ethics course. All moral argument contain both a normative premise that prescribes proper behavior and an empirical premise that describes how the world and human beings actually function. The session is designed to show how to ensure that the empirical aspect ethical argumentation plays it proper role.

Session 6 – 11:00 pm – 12:30 pm: Illustrative assignments/Open Discussion (Leader: All) An account of specific assignments that can be integrated into the course and an open discussion of ways to adopt parts or the whole of the Georgetown approach to the participants’ courses.

End of Workshop