Business Ethics

Explore how to apply a variety of practical and ethical approaches with interactive practice exercises.

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Course overview

Online

CPD Accredited

34 online lessons

Digital certificate

5 practice exercises

2.5 hours of learning

Course outcomes

Grasp why business ethics is essential to business success

Apply the habits of business ethics to your daily life

Make well-informed decisions when faced with a moral dilemma

Recognize your own ethical and moral strengths.

Participate in crucial conversations about business ethics with colleagues

Contribute to a healthy workplace environment

Help your company exceed its bottom-line goals

Practice exercises

Access the practice exercises either online (in your browser) or in virtual reality (if you have a VR headset).

Maintaining a high level of ethical standards

In this course, you'll learn about ethics, morality, and business ethics in ways that you haven't before. You'll be guided to reflect on your ethical character and moral attributes so that you can apply what you learn to both your professional and personal life.

You will experience moral dilemmas first-hand through simulated and embodied experiences and have the opportunity to choose what you think would be the right decision if you were faced with these dilemmas in real life.

Part One

In this part, we establish some clarity about the meanings of ethics and morality, and why the principles and practice of business ethics are so crucial for you and your team to create and maintain long-term business success.

We explore the similarities between the five ethical approaches we will be adopting, as well as the differences between them:

We are calling these five approaches:

  1. Ethics as Excellence
  2. Ethics as Responsibility
  3. Ethics as the Greatest Happiness or Pleasure
  4. Ethics as the Production of Good Consequences
  5. Ethics as Empathic Care

We will then consider the practical significance of ethics and morality by considering their relation to both the legal system as well as corporate by-laws. We will examine how our individual ethical behavior relates to, fits with, and is governed by an organization's code of ethics, as well as the establishment of the protocol.

Finally, we will accentuate the importance of this formal structure and emphasize the importance of, and need for, teamwork and collaboration whenever we are faced with complex moral dilemmas in the workplace.

Ethics course menu

Part Two

In Part Two, you will have the chance to practice what you've learned by applying these principles to a few, complex, simulated moral dilemmas.

You'll experience 5 different scenarios of common moral problems that often contribute to unhealthy workplace environments:

  • Harassment: Bullying in the Workplace
  • Sexual Harassment
  • Embezzlement
  • Misappropriation of Funds
  • Taking Credit for Another's Work

In each scenario, you will have the chance to make a number of difficult decisions, and each decision you make will take you down a certain path and lead to a unique ending.

Online learning, done differently

This course combines online learning with practice exercises for a unique learning approach. At certain points throughout this Business Ethics course, you'll be prompted to experience what you've learned.

Learn online courses

Online classes

Learn through a series of videos, quizzes, and case studies online - available to access at any time.

Practice in exercises

Practice exercises

Practice what you learn with interactive exercises. Deepen your understanding of ethics by being put in the situation and see how you react.

Feedback

Improve with feedback

Receive feedback on your performance to help identify ethical areas you need to learn more about.

Course content


  • Welcome
  • A Tale of Ethics
  • What to Expect
  • Beyond Belief and Opinion
  • Five Approaches to Ethical Thinking and Practice
  • Ethics and Morality: What are the Differences that Matter
  • Business Ethics: Case Study Examples
  • The original meaning of "ethics"
  • Habit, happiness, and doing well
  • Virtue as Excellence
  • Two Roadblocks on the Path to Greatness
  • The Need for a Strong Foundation for Ethics
  • Goodness as Good Will and Intent
  • Some Imperatives
  • The Categorical Imperative
  • The Ethics of Epicurean Life
  • Is Hedonism Ethical?
  • The Calculus of Happiness
  • The Levels of Pleasure or Why Are Not all Pleasure is Pleasing
  • Principled Behavior versus the Production of Good Consequences
  • The Pragmatic is the Good
  • James on the Moral Life
  • Habit Formation and Experimentalism
  • What is Empathy?
  • A Pluralistic Account
  • Empathic Care
  • Morality and Development
  • Introduction
  • Morality and Ethics versus Legality
  • Following Protocol or an Established Code of Ethics
  • Peer Pressure and Whistleblowing
  • Difficult Situations and Unique Contexts: On Making a Judgement Call
  • Teamwork and Collaboration
  • Harassment: Bullying in the Workplace
  • Sexual Harassment
  • Embezzlement
  • Misappropriation of Funds
  • Taking Credit for Another's Work

Your instructor

Mark Fagiano

Dr. Mark Fagiano

Dr. Mark Fagiano is an internationally recognized author and scholar in the subjects of philosophy and ethics. His 2019 essay describing his unified theory of empathy was awarded the Papazian prize and was published in the International Journal for Philosophical Studies. He is currently finishing his book on empathy and will be publishing it with Bloomsbury Press.

After teaching at four different universities for the last 10 years, Dr. Fagiano launched his own education company in Los Angeles California, Elevate Ethics, which creates and distributes visceral and embodied experiences of common moral dilemmas and empathic situations.

This Business Ethics course has been designed based on Mark's research into neuroscience, psychology, and the history of ethics.

Practice exercises

Experience different ethical situations with immersive videos. At key points during the online course, you'll be prompted to experience what you've learned in one of these exercises.

Note: These exercises can be completed online (in your browser) or in virtual reality (if you have a VR headset).

Explore all the exercises available on the VirtualSpeech platform.

See all exercises

350,000+

Online learners

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Faster than classroom training

6

Learning awards

"The combination of ethical scenarios and online classes is highly effective because you get to experience difficult situations, see how you react in a risk-free context, and then learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the ethical theories that your reactions resemble. It's a chance not only to experience and practice handling difficult situations but also to understand what sort of reasoning is behind your preferred way of handling those situations."

Christopher Murphy - Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin