Hippocratic oath for MBA Students?? FT Article.

Agreed, people will go to any level for 'profit', it varies from person to person. But, the point is how much "taking an oath" is meaningful ?

It's just like teaching "Ethics & professional conduct". MBAs (or people from any profession for that matter) are all 24+. I don't think there is any need to tell them what is wrong & what is not. People who cross the moral limits do know that they are crossing & take that risk to get more profit.

Although I don't have a vast banking experience to draw upon but I find it interesting how this 'MBA oath' compares to the Hippocratic oath for medical practitioner. The reward structure is no doubt very different in both professions and some might argue that at many levels, 'saving a life' is a reward in itself for doctors, as opposed to making a profit for the firm, but there might be another way to look at this:The field of medicine is concerned with something very pertinent and visibly important, the well-being of a human; in a very different aspect compared to the well-being of people who are at the receiving end of the decision taken by bankers. A sick patient be it someone with a cold or mild-flu is tangentially observed to be sick and is quite unlikely to be somehow swindled by the doctor in to something which might earn the doctor an extra buck (although at a small scale, this happens quite a lot). On the other hand, an underpressure-to-perform banker is quite likely to flirt or outright transgress the moral and/or legal boundary. I am trying to invoke Peter Singer's morality argument here in a reverse fashion which argues "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.." He elaborates on it by means of an example: "If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing". Considerations of distance, or of how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant to Singer: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond, he argues. (Guardian). So basically those doctors come across the child in the pond, while bankers hear of malnutrition on the news. Extrapolate this to the legislative level and you have extensive regulations defining exactly the code of conducts for medical practitioners, take it to a wilder level of imagination and you can see why a victim of malpractice will have a more solid case in front of a jury compared to a victim of some financial fraud thats equally hard to give a verdict upon.

Completely egregious nonsense. Worrying in it being done because it is entirely unnecessary and simply a vehicle for pomposity.

haha this is just funny. Having an oath in place will not prevent business people from being greedy.