a more modest and judicious gola for business ethics is to focus on the cognitive and intellectual (as opposed to behavioral) side of ethics business ethics as an academic discipline is more a matter of ethical reasoning and thinking than ethical behavior but even here there is a major dilemma confronting ethics courses on one hand few would teach ethics in a way that aime to indoctrinate few teachers would think it is the role of an ethics course to tell students the right answers or proclaim what they ought to thihk and how they ought to live the role of an ethics course should not be to convey information to a passive audience but to treat students as active learners and engage them in an active process of thinking and questioning taking socrates as the model philosophical ethics rejects the view that blind obedience to authority or the simple acceptance of customary norms is an adequate ethical perspective teaching ethics must in this view involve students thinking for themselves the unexamined life socrates claimed is not worth living