Ethics @ Kellogg
- Zohaib Akhtar MD MPH
- Oct 6
- 2 min read
The most conflicting EMBA course I have been in is Ethics, because it made me uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t expected.
I’ve studied ethics before (in medicine, in public health, in postgraduate programs), and all those courses were excellent at teaching principles: what’s right, what’s wrong, and how to lead with integrity. It was all meant to help me understand what it meant to be an ethical leader.
Prof. Maryam Kouchaki’s class at Kellogg shook that confidence. It made me look at how I think about ethics itself - and to see how much of what I had considered “ethical” was really a story I had told myself to live comfortably with my choices.
The discomfort led me to explore her research. Prof. Kouchaki is a Professor of Management and Organizations at Kellogg and a leading scholar in behavioral ethics, with a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Her work shows how ordinary, situational forces, such as culture, incentives, power dynamics, and even something as small as the time of day, - can shape our moral choices, often more than we realize.
Her focus on ethics is far from abstract philosophy. Kouchaki frames it as a behavioral practice shaped by the environments we create, reminding leaders that part of their job is to design those environments so that doing the right thing becomes easier, for themselves and for others.
Seems I had been confusing being ethical with feeling ethical. We like to believe good intentions are enough. But often, the space between what we intend and what we actually do gets quietly filled by self-justification. Somehow our brain convinces our choices are right so we can live with them.
It made me ask deeper questions......... why try to be ethical at all? If almost anything can be rationalized, what does it really mean to be good..... and who decides what “good” is?
And while wrestling with this, I even wondered if there is any real foundation for ethics at all...... or if it’s simply something we have made up?
Perhaps that’s why her class felt so uncomfortable: it highlighted my sense of being “good” is actually fragile and likely situational. And if I could misunderstand that after years of studying ethics, many others likely do too.
I can recognize a familiar tension: many of us want a universal, fixed definition of “good,” but what we call morality often grows out of our nature as social beings, it’s shaped by cooperation, shared needs, and the environments we build.
It seems "Ethics" turn out to be the constant negotiation between who we believe we are and the contexts that shape our choices.
I share this because I think learning ethics often meets a kind of guarded resistance. We push back because it challenges our beliefs and makes us question ourselves........... and that discomfort makes the topic feel sensitive.
But that resistance is exactly what makes it valuable. That self-awareness is often the difference between merely believing we are acting ethically -AND- actually creating the conditions in which we and others can do the right thing.
(Z)