Ethics BuilderFor business ethics courses
Ethics is a skill. Teach it like one.
Ethics Builder is the online course built on The Business Ethics Field Guide. Students learn to recognize the dilemmas they'll face at work and practice deciding them.
Built around the 13 dilemmas
The Field Guide sorts business ethics into thirteen dilemmas that come up again and again at work. The course teaches students to recognize each one and find a way forward when their values conflict.
- Standing Up to Power
- Made a Promise and World Has Changed
- Intervention
- Conflict of Interests
- Suspicions Without Enough Evidence
- Playing Dirty
- Skirting the Rules
- Dissemblance
- Loyalty
- Sacrificing Personal Values
- Unfair Advantage
- Repair
- Showing Mercy
What's in the course
- Exercises that grade themselves. Scores land in a gradebook you can export, so nobody emails you a worksheet. You read and grade the written reflections.
- An AI advisor built to coach, not answer. Students can talk a dilemma through with an advisor grounded in the book. It's built to ask questions and guide their reasoning rather than write their answers.
- The book is included. Students read the Field Guide inside the course, so there's no separate textbook to buy.
- Slides and a full preview. Slide decks and teaching resources come with the course, and you can go through every module before you assign it.
From the authors of the Field Guide
Brad Agle and Aaron Miller teach business ethics in Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management. Bill O'Rourke spent 36 years at Alcoa, including three as president of Alcoa–Russia. The Field Guide has been part of the curriculum at Notre Dame, Fordham, Texas Christian University, the University of Florida and Brigham Young University, among others.
“A compendium of remarkable, real-life dilemmas that force readers to think and decide. World-class authors from both academe and the C-suite make this book a must-read.”
“Ethical dilemmas are part of the natural terrain in business, yet it is often hard to figure out a path from ethical theory to those practical realities. This Field Guide does that, starting from common ethical challenges that arise in business and then providing guidance based on examples and ethical theory.”
For instructors
Your account is free. Use the whole course or only the modules you need. Your dashboard flags students who haven't worked on an activity in the last week, are below 70%, or have turned in three or more activities late.
For students
Your instructor will give you a class code or link. Create an account with your school email, then join your class with the code.
Class started in fall 2026? It's still on the previous site, ethicsbuilder.meritleadership.com.
Pricing
- $79 per student, with the Field Guide included
- Free for instructors
- Department or multi-section pricing: email hello@meritleadership.com
For organizations
A cohort program that gives managers a shared language for hard calls, with completion tracking and certificates.
See it before your students do
Request an instructor account and we'll set you up to preview the whole course.