Slate says corporate ethics training is generally stupid — a waste of time with case studies designed to cover the boss’ backsides while not really dealing with real issues.
Its key takeaway:
Regulators pressure companies to implement training programs in hopes of reducing corporate crime and malfeasance. Executives implement training programs in hopes of protecting themselves against lawsuits and prosecution. Employees see through executives’ motivations and ignore, or even rebel against, the lessons of the trainings.
What Slate doesn’t say is why: There’s not much ethics involved in most moral training. Most corporate ethics training is disguised legal training — the minimum standards of what you must do or not do to keep yourself, your boss and your company out of trouble.
Legal training is necessary, but it’s nowhere sufficient. If this were not true, then Doing Ethics in Media: Theories and Practical Applications would have ended at Chapter 2 instead of Chapter 13.
Ethics is ultimately about moral development. And as James Rest and his colleagues have shown, moral development has four components:
- moral sensitivity – the ability to identify the ethical dimensions of a situation.
- moral judgment – the ability to decide what action is the most morally justified.
- moral motivation – making sure that the desire to follow that decision, instead of taking another path. (It’s one thing to know what’s right. It’s something else to do it.)
- moral character – working to remain moral throughout your life.
Until ‘ethics’ training actually deals with ethics, let’s find another name for it.