Post: “Working the System” – Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity Operation Varsity Blues is just about in our rearview mirror. Most of the 56 people indicted in this college admissions scandal have pled guilty. Yesterday (May 21, 2020), the highest profile defendants, actress Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky” of the TV series Full House) and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, changed their not guilty pleas, […] View
Post: Moral Lessons from the Taliban This blog post is inspired by Ian Fritz’s new memoir: WHAT THE TALIBAN TOLD ME, a book with many lessons for those hoping to be good people. Starting around 2011, Fritz served as a U.S. Air Force cryptologic linguist who rode in large aircraft in the skies of Afghanistan listening in on the people below, […] View
Post: Football Players Behaving Badly: The Ethics of Hazing at Northwestern University Northwestern University’s athletics department finds itself in the big middle of a number of scandals breaking nearly simultaneously. Not a good look for perhaps the brainiest university of the fourteen (soon to be sixteen and perhaps more) schools in the Big 10. There are scandals everywhere one looks–in baseball, softball, volleyball, and even cheerleading–but we […] View
Post: Lessons from Paul Woodruff’s “Living Toward Virtue” As he recently indicated in a column in the Washington Post, Paul Woodruff–our friend, colleague, and University of Texas emeritus professor of philosophy and classics–is nearing death after a long and fruitful life. As he also indicated, he plans to spend every day he has left sharing his considerable wisdom. His recent book Living Toward […] View
Post: “Why did I do it?” Varsity Blues Scandal, Part III “Why did I do it? I go to bed and wake up each day asking myself the same question. I had to convince myself that I somehow deserved the money.”—Coach Michael Center You may be tired of thinking about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and of reading our blog posts about it (See: Aunt Becky […] View
Post: The Silk Road: Paved by Grandiosity All of us are prone to overconfidence regarding all manner of skills and characteristics, including ethicality. (See our video: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/overconfidence-bias). When that overconfidence approaches grandiosity, danger lurks. We just read Nick Bilton’s engaging and moderately terrifying American Kingpin — the story of “Silk Road” founder Ross Ulbricht, who’s website became the Amazon for drugs, guns, […] View
Glossary Item: Ethical Fading Ethical Fading occurs when people focus on some other aspect of a decision so that the ethical dimensions of the choice fade from view. View