Minnesota Student Leadership Seminar Blog

Poor Values or Lazy Thinking?

Posted by Minnesota Student Leadership Seminar Team on Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Can you have strong values and still act unethically? Of course.

Declaring your values is not enough. Your actions must support your values. Acting in accordance to your values requires continual attention and thoughtfulness because each situation is unique.

Being able to think critically about a situation is imperative to living in accordance with your values.
Critical thinkers:

gather and assess information and then interpret that information to understand a situation
test their ...

Real World Ethics -- PR Firm

Posted by Minnesota Student Leadership Seminar Team on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 In : Real World Ethics

This comes from POPS, a blog about the public relations industry by Jeremy Pepper.

Jeremy talks about the sometimes uncomfortable position that firms will put their interns in -- asking them to do things that don't seem quite right. If you are the intern, what do you do? You want (and need!) the job that the internship could lead to. You are just a newbie in a company and industry that has been around forever. You're not sure if what they are asking you to do really is that big a deal - b...
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You're a cheater - I can tell by your sweatshirt

Posted by Minnesota Student Leadership Seminar Team on Saturday, October 17, 2009

Why do people cheat?

You might guess that it is a consideration of the potential gain and the potential risk (of being caught).

In this video, Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, speaks about his surprising findings on why people cheat- who does it and when.

His findings would suggest that rather than personal gain, and rather than level of risk, a large factor on whether people cheat are the norms of the group. In part of the video above, he relates an exper...
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Does the word "Ethics" turn you off?

Posted by Minnesota Student Leadership Seminar Team on Monday, October 5, 2009

Chris McDonald, Professor of philosophy and ethics and blogger at The Business Ethics Blog, says that his blog deals with business ethics and includes "questions of good and bad outcomes, right and wrong behaviours, as well as questions of character."

He notes that it is sometimes hard to have conversations with people about ethics. He attributes the difficulty to three things: