Educating for ethical-legal business practice

Appointed as a lecturer to teach commercial law to BCom students in the UBC Sauder School of Business close to 40 years ago, I looked forward to using the cases that I had studied in law school to help my students understand their obligations as future business practitioners. My enthusiasm waned, however, when I was handed a syllabus linked to an 880-page textbook and instructed to “teach this.” The conflict between my understanding of the law as providing bannisters to guide ethical-legal business practice and the law as a set of rules to be mastered dominated my teaching practice for much of the next 40 years. I recently discovered that my confusion reflected a 70-year-old debate between Raphael and Frascona about whether teaching business law should be aimed at promoting ethical-legal practice or at mastering relevant legal propositions. Both goals are featured in current business law curricula. Sauder’s intended curriculum aims at “infusing ethics throughout every facet of the UBC Sauder experience,” consistent with Raphael’s views; the official, taught, learned and assessed curricula, however, reflect Frascona’s focus on knowledge acquisition consistent with his claim that “truth discloses that all things are to be used for good.” Fortunately, the UBC EdD program introduced me to Hannah Arendt, whose scholarship provided resources to help me understand my challenges and responsibilities—and how I might act accordingly. Much of Arendt’s early work involves reimagining the vita activa for a modern pluralistic democratic society to respond to the development of totalitarianism. Eichmann’s trial, however, revealed how the destruction of private and public spaces can eliminate the requisite conditions for democracy and democratic law. Eichmann knew better—indeed, he could repeat Kant’s Categorical Imperative—but he did not act on what he knew. Arendt’s response in The Life of the Mind involves reimagining the vita contemplativa and linking it to the vita activa with novel understandings of thinking (challenging knowledge claims), willing (accepting responsibility for acting ethically) and judging (deciding how to act). My thesis aims to show how Arendt’s resources can help me prepare business students for ethical-legal business practice.