From Silicon Valley to South Asia: Emerging Ethical Frameworks for Wartime Technology in Management Education

This activity introduces a multi-stage experiential exercise that immerses learners in the ethical tensions surrounding Google’s involvement in Project Maven. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ principles of Just War, Gurcharan Das’s interpretation of dharma in the Mahabharata, and Yuval Noah Harari’s warnings about emerging forms of technological imperialism, the exercise encourages students to examine the dilemma through both leadership and employee perspectives. Participants debate, classify, and construct their own ethical decision frameworks before comparing them with Hirschman’s Exit–Voice–Loyalty–Neglect model. The session culminates in a Risk–Reward/Consequence matrix that enables learners to evaluate moral agency under uncertainty. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, the exercise illustrates how Asian management classrooms can generate culturally grounded ethical reasoning that complements—and at times challenges—established Western frameworks, aligning with the conference theme of shifting global centers of management education.