Voicing Moral Concerns: Yes, But How? The Use of Socratic Dialogue Methodology Johannes Brinkmann 1 • Beate Lindemann 2 • Ronald R. Sims 3 Received: 24 August 2014 / Accepted: 12 April 2015 / Published online: 24 April 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract After a selective review of relevant literature about teaching business ethics, this paper builds on a summary of Fred Bird’s thoughts about the voicing of moral concerns provided in his book about moral muteness (Bird in The muted conscience, 1996). Socratic dialogue methodology (in the tradition of L. Nelson and G. Heck- mann) is then presented and the use of this methodology is examined, for business ethics teaching in general, and for addressing our paper topic in particular. Three short form Socratic dialogues about the paper topic are summarized for illustration, together with preparation and debriefing suggestions for a Socratic dialogue unit as part of a busi- ness ethics course. In conclusion, Socratic dialogue design is related to the experiential learning approach, and char- acterized by a few basic traits, which imply both risks and opportunities for business ethics teaching. Keywords Socratic dialogue Á Moral concern Á Moral silence Á Voicing Introduction There are two implicit claims in our paper. First, moral concern as a response to an event or to a situation, as an issue, is among the most productive points of departure for business ethics teaching. One could, for example, ask one’s students to recall a self-experienced situation that triggered their moral concern, and then to share how they responded to it. Did they voice concerns (or not), how and why so? Second, Socratic dialogue (SD) is among the most pro- ductive designs for addressing the voicing of moral con- cerns, and at the same time for the ‘‘learning by doing’’ of moral conversations. Such implicit claims translate into three interrelated objectives. This paper presents and recommends moral concern and voicing it as a productive topic for business ethics teaching. Second, Socratic dialogue design is pre- sented and recommended as a productive methodology for business ethics teaching. Third, together with suggesting a dialogue teaching unit about the discovery and voicing of moral concerns, the paper offers instructions for how one could prepare and debrief such a unit for deepening and broadening the students’ learning. Business Ethics Teaching Over the last two decades, numerous papers have been written about different approaches to teaching business ethics. Arguments for adopting a case approach have been presented by various researchers (see e.g., Ardalan 2006; Falkenberg and Woiceshyn 2008; Laditka and Houck 2006; McWilliams and Nahavandi 2006; and Singer 2013). The organizational learning and change literature (Brown and Duguid 2000, 1991; Schor et al. 1996; Wenger 1998) is & Johannes Brinkmann johannes.brinkmann@bi.no Beate Lindemann beate.lindemann@uit.no Ronald R. Sims ronald.sims@mason.wm.edu 1 BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway 2 The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway 3 College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA 123 J Bus Ethics (2016) 139:619–631 DOI 10.1007/s10551-015-2655-8