A new context for ethics education objectives in a college of business: Ethical decision-making models

Objectives for ethics education in business school courses generally appear to be based on custom, intuition, and judgment rather than on a more unified theoretical/empirical base. These objectives may be more clearly implemented and their effects studied more rigorously if they could be rooted in the components of ethical decision-making models shown to be influential in ethical decision making. This paper shows how several widely used ethics education objectives can be placed in the context of current models of ethical decision making.Neil Herndon is University Lecturer in the Department of Business and Management at the City University of Hong Kong. His major research interest involves the influences of the ethical content of corporate cultures on the people within an organization. His work in this area has been published in the Journal of International Consumer Marketing and the Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science.