Using Ibsen in Business Ethics

Abstract

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s death, during 2006 quite a number of cultural events were launched (cf. http://www.ibsen.net/). The paper suggests to celebrate Ibsen as a potentially useful resource for business ethics teaching. Departing from a short presentation of Ibsen’s plays An enemy of the people and A doll’s house the main focus of Our paper is on two selected scenes from the latter piece – both as raw material for developing scenarios for moral maturity assessment (one of them is strikingly similar to and different from Heinz’ dilemma), and for teaching business students moral reflection and imagination. As an open end of the paper a few wider questions are asked about the use of literature in addition to or instead of ethics when it comes to triggering moral reflection and imagination.