TUCK SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
From Machiavelli to The Bomb to AI
MORE is a humanities course designed for a business school. We read fiction, philosophy, biography, history and watch some films – all focusing on a series of protagonists, some fictional, some real, across continents, cultures and eras, who faced complex decisions with moral dilemmas at their core. We strive to derive meaning and perhaps some wisdom from their stories and then apply our learnings to actual business cases, recent and present.
MORE is in a lineage of courses sparked by the late Robert Coles, who used great literature in challenging students to develop their own moral architecture, empathy, and a deeper understanding of their own and society’s complexities. It is not a course in what to think,
more a course in ways to think. By engaging with the stories of MORE’s protagonists on their own and then engaging with each other in the classroom students are induced to develop moral awareness, critical thinking and communications skills. The course is Socratic and highly participatory and its workload is challenging. Students gain comfort with difficult questions that have no one right answer - I explain that in accounting if there is more than one right answer it’s probably fraud, but in this classroom if you think there is only one right answer, go think harder – in reaching and defending conclusions and in changing their minds.
This Tuck "Knowledge in Practice" podcast captures the essence of it. MORE’s week-by-week preview will reveal what this description means in practice.
FROM THE SYLLABUS
How did President Harry Truman decide to drop The Bomb, and did he get it right? Machiavelli’s The Prince is among the most influential leadership tracts ever written, but is it a pragmatic handbook for leaders or a rationalization of thuggery? How did Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham think about the business risks and ethical dilemmas involved in defying a lawless President? What can Ishiguro’s masterpiece The Remains of the Day teach us about the pitfalls of amorality and work/life balance? Do AI deployment decisions have moral dimensions? Are Robert McNamara’s 11 lessons in his apologia The Fog of War relevant to business and the business of life?
Leaders regularly confront dilemmas with moral dimensions – often narrow and with limited repercussions, sometimes grand and with significant consequences. They often arise urgently and unexpectedly, are typically complex, and can be career-defining. This course will introduce you to the tools required to grapple with them and to lead an organization through them. It is both abstract, in that it explores complex questions and philosophical frameworks used to address them, and quite practical, in that it deals with the types of challenges that business leaders actually face. MORE’s objective is to enable you to better navigate the challenges of the business world and the complexities of life as it is actually lived.
Course content includes renowned fiction, autobiography, history, journalism, moral philosophy, and film. We unpack several venerable moral theories (e.g. utilitarianism, communitarianism) then utilize them to evaluate the actions of a diverse set of protagonists, fictional and real, spanning centuries, continents, and cultures. Two classes will feature full class exercises – a simulation of a world class consulting firm striving to put its ethical issues behind it, and an Oxford style debate about a very topical issue (MORE26 proposition – “Morality is for Chumps: the law firms that Settled with the administration were right.”). In the final class you’ll use the tools you sharpened over the term on a set of complex business cases, some with AI at the core of the dilemma.
"MORE is a humanities course designed for a business school. In addition to the objectives noted above it is designed to provide tools for critical thinking, for finding the right questions, and for challenging assumptions and conventional wisdom – all required to grapple with complex problems. It is not a course in what to know – more an exercise in ways to think. While success in business requires both hard skills and soft skills, over a 30+ year career in venture capital and private equity I found that this third type of skills, which the study of humanities can provide so effectively, was more valuable."
- Professor J. Lewis
The most recent syllabus is available to Tuck students on the Registrar’s website, or by request.