Do Ethics Classes Influence Student Behavior ?

Does university-level ethics instruction influence students’ practical behavior? Little direct empirical work has been done on this question. I briefly review the existing data: two studies on honesty in laboratory settings and two re-analyzable economics studies on donation to student charities. Although these data suggest no overall effect of ethics instruction on moral behavior, the research is so limited that it is difficult to draw any conclusion. I then turn to the larger literature that examines the influence of ethics classes on students’ self-reported moral attitudes. This literature is so flawed that, again, it is difficult to draw any conclusion, but the most reasonable interpretation appears to be that ethics instruction has at most a small influence on student attitudes. On the assumption that the influence of ethics instruction on students’ practical behavior would be substantially less than the influence on students’ verbally espoused attitudes, I conclude that ethics courses probably have at most a tiny influence on behavior. Finally, I discuss reasons to worry that whatever tiny influence ethics courses do have might as easily be negative as positive.