Assignment:
America's Moral Climate
Perhaps more than ever, Americans are questioning the nation's moral health. Spectacular corporate corruption as noted above, steroid use by professional athletes, an economy seemingly permanently tilted toward the rich, government officials paying more attention to reelection than to the general welfare, sexual abuse of children by clerics and teachers, and so on cause us to question our decency as a society. Gallup's 2012 poll of American values and beliefs found 73 percent of respondents saying that our moral values are deteriorating and a 2013 NBC poll showed that 43 percent of Americans believe "a decline in moral values" is the number-one source of our problems as a nation (50 percent said that economic pressures are the principal source of our problems as a nation).
Sociologist David Callahan's book The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead argues that we are a society in moral decline.12
The result of this winner-take-all ethos, Callahan thinks, is a nation increasingly falling into two groups: a "winning class" who cheated their way to the top and an "anxious class" who fear falling behind if they too do not cheat.
Cheating, in one form or another, does seem to be routine in American life. But we find a glimmer of good news in scholar Dan Ariely's 2012 book The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone-Especially Ourselves, which shows, through a serious of experiments, that almost all of us cheat, but most of us cheat only a little.
We may be further pleased to learn that wealthier people, according to a 2012 study, cheat more than poorer people as revealed in a series of experiments:
People driving expensive cars were more likely than other motorists to cut off drivers and pedestrians at a four-way-stop intersection in the San Francisco Bay area, . . . researchers observed. Those findings led to a series of experiments that revealed that people of higher socioeconomic status were also more likely to cheat to win a prize, take candy from children and say they would pocket extra change handed to them in error rather than give it back.
The study also found that wealthier people were more likely to condone unethical conduct and to value greed. We should note, however, that the study has been criticized for alleged methodological problems.
Do you think Callahan is correct: Is America in moral decline? Or are we basically good people who tend to cheat only a little, as Ariely found? [For the Josephson Institute of Ethics, see https://www.josephsoninstitute.org]
College Students
In perhaps the largest cheating scandal in school history, about 125 Harvard University undergraduates were investigated for collaborating on a 2012 take-home examination in a course on government. More than half of those students were forced to withdraw from school and others were placed on probation.
Certainly we should not be surprised about the Harvard episode because cheating appears to be epidemic. Business st udents seem to be particularly suspect. A large 2006 survey found 56 percent of graduate students in business admitted to cheating at least once in the previous year, the largest percentage of any discipline surveyed.
Among nonbusiness graduate students, 47 percent admitted cheating.
Ninety-five percent of 3,000 undergraduate business students polled in 31 universities admit they cheated in high school or college, although only 1 to 2 percent admit having done so "frequently."
Academic ethics expert Donald McCabe's surveys find about 75 percent of college students cheating on either a test or a paper at some point, with business majors, fraternity and sorority members, and male students being among those most likely to cheat.
The cheating evidence is discouraging, but some evidence of change should also be noted. High school students who said they had cheated on an examination in the past year declined from 59 percent in 2010 to 51 percent in 2012.
Harvard MBA students have received a great deal of attention for their voluntary campaign to sign "The MBA Oath," a pledge that Harvard MBAs will act ethically, "serve the greater good," and avoid advancing their own "narrow ambitions" at the expense of others.
Now an international oath project pledges higher standards of integrity and service by business leaders. [See www.theoathproject.org]
[For a video of The Daily Show's treatment of the MBA Oath, see https://www.thedailyshow .com/watch/wed-august-12-2009/mba-ethics-oath] This clip contains profanity and violent rhetoric.
Questions
1. If you were to sign an ethics oath as a student, do you think your behavior as a student and thereafter would improve? Explain.
2. Do you think ethics instruction, religious commitment, or higher natural intelligence would reduce academic cheating? Explain. See James M. Bloodgood, William H. Turnley, and Peter Mudrack, "The Influence of Ethics Instruction, Religiosity, and Intelligence on Cheating Behavior," The Journal of Business Ethics 82, no. 3 (2008), p. 557.
3. Professor Robert A. Prentice argues: "Those who choose to attend business school on the assumption that an MBA will help them change jobs, make more money, and therefore be happier are very likely misinformed." Do you agree? Explain. See Robert A. Prentice, "What's an MBA Worth in Terms of Happiness?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2009 [https://chronicle.com/article /Whats-an-MBA-Worth-in/49056/].