Educating for Extinction? Ethical Simulation, Ideological Student Grooming, and the Future of Management Education

Abstract

Business schools increasingly proclaim commitments to ethics, sustainability, and responsible leadership, yet these often operate as ethical simulations—performative displays that secure legitimacy while preserving the managerial and market logics driving inequality and ecological harm. This theory-led essay draws on debates in JME and related literatures to identify four interlocking mechanisms—ethical simulation, epistemic refusal, pedagogical inauthenticity, and planetary harm reproduction—through which responsibility is converted into reputational capital. We introduce ideological grooming to describe how students are trained to recognise and disavow harm simultaneously. We then advance three normative commitments for reimagining business education: epistemic completeness, pedagogical honesty, and planetary responsibility. The article outlines implications for curriculum, pedagogy, governance, and student formation, concluding by urging educators to confront the contradiction of teaching care within systems complicit in planetary destruction.