Behavioral Ethics in Practice: Integrating Service Learning Into a Graduate Business Ethics Course

Abstract

Adopting a broad definition that distinguishes behavioral ethics as science and behavioral ethics in practice, we describe how service learning can be a meaningful component of a four-credit, one-quarter graduate business ethics course by blending both normative/prescriptive and behavioral/descriptive ethics. We provide a conceptual and theoretical grounding for our integration of service learning and describe how service learning is used in the course. We explain how we frame the service-learning project, the challenges we have faced, and final student reflections on the experience. Finally, we describe the assessment process used in the course. Based on the assessment of 215 students’ service-learning reflection papers, the results indicated that over 90% of students were able to make direct connections between major themes of the course and their service-learning experience. This is an indication of the efficacy of the use of service learning in teaching behavioral ethics.