A more modest and judicious goal fo

A more modest and judicious goal for business ethics is to focus on the cog¬nitive 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 aims to indoctrinate students. Few teachers would think that it is the role of an ethics course to tell students the right answers or proclaim what they ought to think and how they ought to live. The role of an ethics course should not be to convey informa¬tion 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, on this view, involve students thinking for themselves. The unexamined life, Socrates claimed, is not worth living.