Title: Teaching Environmental Ethics to MBA Students
Abstract: This essay explains the author’s approach to teaching environmental ethics in the graduate school of business. The approach is based on a religious rather than a philosophical perspective, taking its light not from theology or religious studies but from anthropology. The author discusses the origins of the course, then explains the anthropological model of religion as a cultural system and briefly applies that model to economics, focusing on the worldview that undergirds it. The course then shifts to how others understand the world in which they live, introduces Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and ends by speculating on what might come next if the course were a third longer than it is. Loyola University Chicago has had an environmentally oriented class in the MBA program since 1988. That course, Business and the Environment, was my course; I always squeezed environmental ethics into the last three weeks of the ten-week quarter, using films (God’s Earth), books (Daniel Quinn’s Ismael), and chapters of books (“The Land Ethic” from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac). In late spring 2004 I was asked to offer an environmental ethics course. It would be part of our business ethics certificate program but open to all graduate students in business. Thus was born Global Environmental Ethics. It has been offered every spring quarter since and has drawn an average of 30 students each quarter (a high of 35 and a low of 27). The two most important issues I faced in planning this course were how to make it global and how to make it something I was comfortable teaching. Making it global was easy; making it something I was comfortable teaching was more challenging. Because I am not a philosopher, nor philosophically trained, I was not comfortable teaching the course as applied philosophical ethics. Besides, my sense is, along with Harold W. Wood, that as far as ordinary people are concerned, “it is religion which is the greatest factor in determining morality” (1985, p. 151). Anna Peterson agrees: “Religion remains the primary way that most people conceptualize the ‘big questions’ of ethics and metaphysics” (Peterson, 2001, p. 5). But neither am I a religious studies scholar. To solve my problem I turned to anthropology, and in particular the anthropology of Clifford Geertz. 2, 3
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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