Courses Offered

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Awards Offered: Bachelors degree,Masters degree,Doctors degree - research/scholarship

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Current Course Catalog Subject: Business Ethics

  • Bioethics

    This course does not seek to provide answers to ethical questions. Instead, the course hopes to teach students two things. First, how do you recognize ethical or moral problems in science and medicine? When something does not feel right (whether cloning, or failing to clone) what exactly is the nature of the discomfort? What kind of tensions and conflicts exist within biomedicine? Second, how can you think productively about ethical and moral problems? What processes create them? Why do people disagree about them? How can an understanding of philosophy or history help resolve them? By the end of the course students will hopefully have sophisticated and nuanced ideas about problems in bioethics, even if they do not have comfortable answers.

  • Biomedical Engineering Seminar Series: Topics in Medical Ethics and Responsible Conduct in Research

    This seminar based course explores techniques for recognizing, analyzing, and resolving ethical dilemmas facing healthcare professionals and biomedical researchers in today's highly regulated environment. Guest lectures by practicing clinicians, technologists, researchers, and regulators will include case studies, interactive small group discussions, and role-playing simulations. Professional conduct topics will include authorship, conflict of interest, data acquisition and management, and the protection of human subjects and animals involved in research programs.

  • Competitive Decision-Making and Negotiation

    This course is centered on twelve negotiation exercises that simulate competitive business situations. Specific topics covered include distributive bargaining (split the pie!), mixed motive bargaining (several issues at stake) with two and with more than two parties, auctions and fair division. Ethical dilemmas in negotiation are discussed at various times throughout the course.

  • Engineering Ethics

    This course introduces the theory and the practice of engineering ethics using a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach. Theory includes ethics and philosophy of engineering. Historical cases are taken primarily from the scholarly literatures on engineering ethics, and hypothetical cases are written by students. Each student will write a story by selecting an ancestor or mythic hero as a substitute for a character in a historical case. Students will compare these cases and recommend action.

  • Ethical Practice: Professionalism, Social Responsibility, and the Purpose of the Corporation

    This course is an introduction to ethics in business, with a focus on business management. Over the course of thirteen sessions, students explore theoretical concepts in business ethics, and cases representing the challenges they will likely face as managers. Individual sessions take the form of moderated discussion, with occasional short lectures from instructor.

  • Introduction to Technical Communication: Ethics in Science and Technology

    This section of Introduction to Technical Communication deals with ethical issues associated with the design, use, and propagation of technology. At virtually all stages of development and use, any technology can carry with it ethical dilemmas for both creators and users. Of particular interest is how such dilemmas are resolved (or complicated) according to how effectively they are communicated to stakeholders.

  • Leadership Lab

    This five-day interactive and experiential workshop focuses on how leaders lead innovations that both promote social responsibility and produce business success. The workshop is organized around three main parts: observation, sense-making, and creating. During the observation phase, students spend a full day inside the Boston office of the design company IDEO and visit some of the most interesting proven innovators in corporate social responsibility such as Ben and Jerrys, KLD, MBDC, Plug Power (fuel cell technology), PwC, Schlumberger, or core team members of the UN Global Compact. After returning from their company visits, students describe to one another what they saw and learned. In the final part of the Lab, students conceive and implement innovation projects that serve the needs of a local community. Each team presents its practical accomplishments on the final day of the Lab. Starting in 2004 this course will be renumbered as 15.975.

  • Managing Transformations in Work, Organizations, and Society

    The course focuses on skills managers need to adapt to current sweeping changes in the nature of work and the workforce, in business organizations and their roles in society, and in the institutions that interact with work, particularly the labor market, community and family-centered groups. This year's teaching will be the basis for a workshop session at the Sloan School's 50th Anniversary Convocation.

  • Negotiation and Conflict Management

    Negotiation and Conflict Management presents negotiation theory strategies and styles within an employment context. 15.667 meets only eleven times, with a different topic each week, which is why students should commit to attending all classes. In addition to the theory and exercises presented in class, students practice negotiating with role-playing simulations that cover a range of topics. Students also learn how to negotiate in difficult situations, which include abrasiveness, racism, sexism, whistle-blowing, and emergencies. The course covers conflict management as a first party and as a third party: third-party skills include helping others deal directly with their conflicts, mediation, investigation, arbitration, and helping the system change as a result of a dispute.

  • Social Studies of Bioscience and Biotech

    In this course, social, ethical and clinical issues associated with the development of new biotechnologies and their integration into clinical practice is discussed. Basic scientists, clinicians, bioethicists, and social scientists present on the following four general topics: changing political economy of biotech research; problems associated with the adaption of new biotechnologies and findings from molecular biology for clinical settings; the ethical issues that emerge from clinical research and clinical use of new technologies; and the broader social ethics of access and inequality.

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