4 questions to Bastiaan van der Linden on the challenges and rewards of teaching ethics at business school
In this interview, Bastiaan van der Linden, Associate Professor at EDHEC, explains how he invites "disagreement and creativity" in his ethics courses, to resist easy answers and short term learning.
Trained in Business Administration, Philosophy and Sociology, EDHEC Associate Professor Bastiaan van der Linden spent years navigating diverging interests as a consultant before completing a PhD on business and the creation of value(s). He found his way to EDHEC in 2016 where he now teaches business ethics across several programs and founded the MSc in Sustainable Business & Transformation.
His conviction: the most important questions in business resist easy answers. What makes his classroom unusual is not the subject matter but the method: students are not asked to converge on the right answer, but to know when they genuinely disagree. Rigor and openness are not in tension as they depend on each other.
You've been teaching ethics for more than 15 years. Has the way students approach, resist and adopt it changed over time?
I have the feeling students find it easier nowadays to accept that we must confront and embrace a quite profound pluralism of ethical views in business ethics. I have no real explanation for this, but they seem more at ease disagreeing with each other. Maybe it reflects something broader in how younger generations have grown up navigating differences.
What stands out to me is how openness to pluralism enriches conversation. The resistance isn’t so much about preferring a single, simple answer: it’s more about genuinely grappling with complex problems. That shift, if it proves to be a lasting one, is encouraging.
You invite disagreement and creativity, but ethics also demands rigor and systematic thinking. How do you hold that tension in practice?
In order to be sure that we have a disagreement and not simply a misunderstanding, we have to be rigorous and systematic in understanding each other. When we do that work properly, we sometimes find a real disagreement. But oftentimes we discover dilemmas where all alternatives are equally right or equally wrong, and where there are simply no reasons left that can help us convince each other or ourselves. That is a very different situation from a disagreement, and it matters to know which one you're in.
If there is real disagreement, understanding it more clearly can help us respect each other and navigate conflicts better. In the classroom, we develop this, for example, through a systematic exercise where students discover their own and each other's responsible leadership mindsets. If we jointly encounter a dilemma in the classroom, we can use our creativity to find new ways out. Then, at the end, we may still be left with a hard choice where reason cannot help us anymore. And at that point, it's about who we want to be. We encounter this in case discussions, and we can also experience it in thought experiments.
In a field where questions have several valid answers, how do you make sure it does not turn into relativism?
I have not come across any student so far embracing a really profound form of relativism. Maybe this goes back to the fact that stronger forms of relativism are ultimately self-refuting: if relativism is true, then relativism itself would also be relative. There is something students sense intuitively there, even before they can articulate it. What I hope they develop is a certain humility in the face of the ethical challenges of our time - and the plurality of responses we often find - but also an appreciation of the importance of reason, respect and consistency in engaging with one another's thinking.
That combination, humility and rigor, is not relativism. It is something more demanding than that.
You've ruled out AI grading for business ethics, but could AI have any legitimate role at all in how ethics is taught or explored?
Absolutely. AI is great at developing cases that help us test our assumptions, experience specific conflicts of values and interests, even different moral logics. That is genuinely useful.
The trouble with using AI for grading is that business ethics questions are oftentimes open-ended, as they should be. It connects back to what I said earlier: I have not yet succeeded in creating grading rubrics that can assess student work reliably without closing down the very openness I am looking for. The moment you fix the rubric tightly enough for AI to apply it consistently, you have already constrained the answer space in a way that defeats the purpose.
That is not a technical problem waiting to be solved. It is a characteristic of ethics. But if anything, that reassures me. It means there is still everything to play for, in the classroom, in business, and in how we choose to engage with each other.
