A Pedagogy for Integrating Catholic Social Ethics into the Business Ethics Course

Abstract. Catholic business schools may better fulfill their religious mission by integrating Catholic social ethics into the business curriculum. But doing so presents a challenge to many business instructors who are unfamiliar with the Catholic ethical tradition. The purpose of this paper is to help overcome this difficulty by describing a pedagogy the author has used successfully to integrate Catholic social ethics into the business ethics course. The pedagogy utilizes the Model of Integrated Course Design, the Method of Shared Inquiry, and a model of moral behavior grounded in the student’s worldview. This framework makes plausible a learning goal of increasing not only students ’ moral awareness and moral reasoning, but their moral motivation as well—a goal particularly appropriate to a Catholic management education. Attitudes of students toward the course are examined and implications drawn for implementing it in the curriculum