Integrating Ethics into the Wharton Undergraduate Curriculum

When the Wharton School implemented its new curriculum, the Ethics Program focused on incorporating ethics into a variety of courses central under the new requirements. A business ethics component was added to twelve courses in various disciplines including accounting, finance and marketing. The following excerpt is a summary from The Ethics Project Report produced by Wanda D. Foglia for the Wharton Ethics Program.

"Students, educators, business leaders and the public agree that business education should cover business ethics. The Project on Integrating Ethics into the Wharton Undergraduate Curriculum contributes significantly to students' awareness, understanding, and ability to deal responsibly with ethical issues in business.

In each of the participating courses, ethical issues are presented to students in one or two classes, or emphasized periodically throughout the semester along with regularly covered subject matter. The Ethics Project attempts to provide students with a comprehensive and varied experience with issues of fairness and social responsibility. With the options available under this curriculum there will not be uniform exposure to ethics, but the number of courses integrating ethics makes it likely that students will consider ethical issues in at least several courses while at Wharton. The variation in students' exposure is not problematic because the goal is to teach a general approach for handling ethical issues rather than a specific answer to particular ethical dilemmas.

The Ethics Project does not guarantee that all Wharton graduates will behave ethically. Rather the goal is to teach an approach for handling ethical questions and to dispel a common attitude among business students that the bottom line is the only relevant consideration. The intellectual understanding of ethical obligations may not be sufficient to insure ethical behavior, but can be an important contributor to that goal. With the potential for exposure to ethics in nearly all their Business Fundamentals courses, many of their upper level courses, and in the courses they must take to fulfill the Social Environment bracket, Wharton students receive repeated and varied experience grappling with ethical questions in realistic contexts."