Teaching Behavioral Ethics

Abstract

Teaching ethics is challenging and a teacher needs as many arrows in the quiver as possible. This article explains one approach to teaching behavioral ethics, a new and promising way of thinking about and teaching ethics. This approach focuses on helping good people minimize the number of bad things that they do by understanding how and why people make the ethical (and unethical) decisions that they do. The article goes into detail regarding the author’s idiosyncratic pedagogical approach, but contains lengthy discussions of recent research to serve as a resource for those seeking more familiarity with behavioral ethics so that they can form their own approaches. The article also highlights “Ethics Unwrapped,” a free ethics education resource that contains several videos that can be usefully applied to teaching behavioral ethics, as well as other ethical concepts.

Keywords: Ethics, Morality, Integrity, Unethical Behavior

JEL Classification: G34