One of the most heated and significant controversies in higher education relates to the value of a liberal arts education and whether Americans should deemphasize the liberal arts in order to devote more public resources to “practical” (read vocational) majors. I have the good fortune to teach at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, so I am not generally required to defend the value of the degrees that my college confers. While others are more qualified than I to defend a broad liberal arts education, I wish to defend the importance of teaching ethics, whether it is done in a professional school or in a (despised by some) liberal arts program.
I teach ethics (surprise!) and one of the points that I try to emphasize to my students is that their ethical values are the core of who they are as human beings. Studies show that when people’s brains start to fail them and their memory fades, their relatives tend to say, “Grandpa just can’t remember anyone’s name any more.” If elderly people become more emotional, their relatives tend to say, “Grandpa has such a temper these days; he never used to.” But if the portions of the brain that contribute to our moral judgments are impaired, relatives tend to say, “He’s just not Grandpa anymore.” For good or bad, our students’ moral lives will compose their very essence as humans.
Nearly as important, scientific studies of happiness demonstrate that when our students are young, the things that make them happy tend to be exciting experiences—having sex, learning to ski, attending a big party, and the like. But I try to impress upon my students that advances in medicine make it nearly certain that they will spend most of their lives in comparatively long-in-the-tooth adulthood where, studies show, their happiness will arise less from specific exciting experiences and more from a feeling of satisfaction that they have led meaningful lives. That human feeling of meaningfulness generally arises from people being able to plausibly tell themselves that they have made a contribution, that they have helped in at least a small way to make the world a better place. Our students should learn now that the more pro-socially they act during their lives, the happier they will ultimately be, all other things being equal.
Needless to say, to the extent we can impress upon our students how important being ethical is to them personally and can train them to improve their moral decision making, the better we will serve their future employers. We read in the headlines all the time about the illegal and/or unethical decisions of employees that cost their companies thousands and even millions of dollars. A single employee’s unethical actions can literally end a company’s existence. Employers realize this, which is why the ability of potential employees to act ethically is one of the most important hiring criteria for many firms.
At a societal level, it will serve us well to remember that the higher the level of ethical behavior in a society, the higher will be the level of trust. In economies where most people act ethically most of the time, trust blooms. Trust correlates strongly with economic growth because in high-trust societies, economic actors need not spend substantial time and resources inefficiently keeping an eye on each other. If we teach ethics effectively in our professional schools and in liberal arts, we can increase trust and thereby stimulate economic growth that we can all enjoy.
Our students, the organizations that will employ them, and our society at large will all benefit from the effective teaching of ethics.
Robert Prentice is a member of the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He teaches in UT Austin's McCombs School of Business where he is faculty director of the Ethics Unwrapped Video Series and Educational Program at the Center for Leadership and Ethics.
