Ethics

After a lot of postponement we finally conducted a class on Ethics for the students of Katalyst last Sunday.This was a tough class to plan for us as a team;As much as we understand the importance of the topic, we were also skeptical about whether we can make such a class interesting and whether the students would be able to easily relate to what we were saying.

The idea was to not have another moral science class where everyone just gets bored. We planned instead to discuss ethics through case studies.We selected a number of interesting cases on ethical dilemmas from different domains such as education, NGO sector and consumer affairs and encouraged the students to come up with various ways to solve the dilemma. this proved to be an effective way to discuss various similar situations in our everyday life and how we need to ethically handle them.

The most interesting part of the class was the sharing of our personal experiences on the topic. We were able to discuss our Adhyapana experiences and how we selected those alternatives that were ethical but did not make business sense.Mahalakshmi shared her experience about the day to day activities in Katalyst and why ethics is very important to her. Many students discussed their own experiences.There were some discussions on ethics in student life and why it is wrong to use another person's work and not give due credit.

We wound up the class with some ways in which we can identify which alternative is ethical. We also discussed to need to prioritize and the need to give ethics the highest priority. We hope that the class has had some positive impact on the students and that they would be able to take decisions keeping ethics in mind.