“Every professor thinks that the class they teach is the most important class students take—but I’m the only one that’s right,” jests Associate Professor David Hart, who teaches ethics to students in the BYU Marriott School of Business. Jokes aside, Hart hopes his students come to see that the key to making ethical decisions starts with intentions.
Hart’s interest in ethics began with his dad’s dinner-table lectures on the subject. “I’m a second-generation professor,” says Hart, who started teaching at BYU Marriott the same year his father—also an ethics professor in the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics—retired.
Hart earned an MPA from BYU Marriott in 1991 and a PhD in public administration with an emphasis in organization theory from the University at Albany. Before joining the BYU Marriott faculty in 2000, Hart also taught strategy and international business at Texas Tech as well as organization theory and business-government relations at the then-called Mary Washington College. “I tried early in my career not to do ethics like my father because I wanted to do my own thing,” Hart admits. “But I got to BYU, and the topic of ethics just kept pulling me back in, and now I’m all ethics all the time.”
The gray areas of ethics and the question of “why good people do bad things” have been at the center of Hart’s research for the past 25 years. “The vast majority of my research is in ethical theory, and one of my favorite things to do is collaborate with people who don’t typically study ethics,” Hart shares.
For example, Hart partnered with an HR professor to study the ethics surrounding lateral hiring (poaching). Collaborating with other BYU Marriott faculty, Hart is also studying the characteristics of individuals who make ethical choices while working in corrupt environments.
An ethics class might not help students land a job, Hart explains, but it might help them keep one. “As of a few years ago, the most common reason for firing CEOs became ethics violations like misconduct,” Hart says. “The majority of cases that I read about in the media are people that started out well intended, but they ended up not well intended. What’s going to prevent anyone from acting similarly in difficult situations?”
The answer Hart shares with his students is to live with intention, starting with being aware of their surroundings and themselves. One way Hart encourages students to take an intentional approach is by allocating time for self-reflection. “You can’t be who you can’t see,” he tells them.
Hart practices self-reflection in his own life through endurance running. “When I run for several hours, I get a lot of time to think. And pushing myself, I also get to know myself better and what I’m capable of,” he says. “I get my best ideas for papers when I’m out running, I have my most important insights, and I self-reflect.”
Self-reflection has also helped Hart prioritize what is most important to him—his family and his faith—and he hopes to help his students recognize their own priorities. “Many of my students are right there at the beginning, setting the trajectories for the rest of their lives,” Hart says. “At the end of your life, you’re not thinking about accomplishments. You’re thinking about how you lived.”