The nature of responsible leadership has been outlined in previous chapters and it is the ethical aspects within responsible leadership that we examine in this chapter. We seek to outline how ethics within responsible leadership can be made salient through the notion of discourse ethics – enabling managers to explore how ethical or unethical behaviour becomes manifest in the contexts in which they practice leadership. It is uncommon in many organisational contexts for managers to examine ethics within their decision-making; it is simply not part of everyday organisational discourse. We outline why this is so, and the implications of this for the hopes for establishing responsible leadership; and we place such hopes alongside a critique of those ethical leadership theories that underestimate the difficulty of drawing ethical expectations into leadership practice within an organisational context. To do this we consider how ethics are typically explored in the educational context through the use of hypothetical case studies in the classroom and we problematise such an approach in light of our critique of ethical leadership literature. Whilst hypothetical case studies can have pedagogical value in catalysing discourse, they have limited resonance with the complexity of everyday managerial context – they lack the necessary nuance of lived experience which is provided by real life cases. This chapter explores how real life cases can be created within management education through the use of the critical incident technique, and how such incidents enable rich debate in the classroom. We consider what practical action is needed to bring ethics within everyday pragmatic discourse on decision-making in the organisation. The chapter suggests that engaging in discourse ethics is a mechanism for enabling responsible leadership to become manifest and so provide a sense of connecting grounded and framed realism of the organisational context with romantic possibilities of what it might be to improve everyday practices.