The Business Ethics Blog

Maybe this blog was a mistake. Apparently, I may not be very well
qualified to write a blog on business ethics.

Forget the peer-reviewed publications. Forget being a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Business Ethics. I just took a Business Ethics Quiz and just barely passed. In particular, I scored just 3 out of 5 on this multiple-choice test.
I won’t bore you by explaining why I blew the questions I got wrong. (I long ago came to grips with the realization that my philosophical tendencies implied that I’m morally stunted on Kohlberg’s “Stages of Moral Development.” Stuck around Level 3 or something, as I recall.)
The interesting question here is whether there’s anything to learn from quizzes of this kind. Despite my initial reservations, I have to admit that I think there IS something to learn here. I’m not at all sure that this is any kind of way to gauge character.
But the explanations offered are at least a good starting point for discussion. Of course, constructing a *better* quiz (with better explanations of which answers are right & wrong) wouldn’t be hard.
Sounds like a good assignment for an undergrad course, actually.

A secondary issue is whether the “expert” deciding the correct answers for this quiz has any business claiming expertise. It would be churlish, I guess, to point out that his bio doesn’t mention any special qualification in this regard. But the question of expertise might well be parasitic on the previous question about pedagogical usefulness. So what if he’s not an expert? If the point is to get people thinking — even in a primitive way — about the justification for their choices, any half-way reasonable quiz will do.