Framed: An Analysis of Wrongful Convictions We have enjoyed our collaboration with the good folks at the Illinois Innocence Project to create our video “Implicit Bias & Wrongful Conviction”. Their admirable work and the poor moral decision making on display in many wrongful conviction cases has caught our attention before in this blog (Ex: ‘He looks like a criminal to me’: […] View
A Geologic Ethics Lesson to Take to the Polls According to psychology professor Keith Payne in his new book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology behind America’s Dangerous Divide, during the Cretaceous Period’s 80-million-year run, microscopic plankton called coccoliths floated in the ocean by the trillions. As they died and settled, their calcium shells slowly added huge layers of chalk to the ocean floor. As […] View
Swindling the Poor in Mississippi We at Ethics Unwrapped often say that most white-collar criminals don’t begin by getting up one morning and saying to themselves: “Today’s the day I start my life of crime.” But some do. Witness the Mississippi welfare scandal chronicled in the new book Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America by […] View
A Good Man’s Fall “The history of this country, and the history of the world, I’m afraid, is full of examples of good men who do bad things.” –Judge Jed Rakoff (2012) Raj Rajaratnam is America’s most notorious inside trader. In 2011, the billionaire owner of the Galleon hedge fund was sentenced to 11 years in jail—at that […] View
Ethics, Energy, and the Climate of Contempt Ethics Unwrapped collaborating adviser David Spence—a professor at both the University of Texas School of Law and UT’s McCombs School of Business–has just published an excellent book titled Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the U.S. Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship (2024), which addresses one of the most important policy challenges we face. Spence takes […] View
“Fat Leonard”: The U.S. Navy’s Moral Disaster We just started reading philosophy professor Ryan Holiday’s Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds (2024). Professor Holiday often examines the lives of historical figures—from the ancient Greek philosophers like Plato to modern figures like Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk— in order to draw both inspirational and cautionary moral tales from […] View
Ethical Lessons Learned from the Challenger Disaster The U.S. space shuttle program, according to NASA’s website, was a marvel: NASA’s space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continued to set high marks of achievement and endurance through 30 years of missions. Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor, the spacecraft […] View
Canceling Lawyers and Role Morality Role Morality describes the fact that people sometimes apply different ethical standards, depending on what role they see themselves playing. [See our videos: Role Morality (Ethics Defined) and Role Morality (Concepts Unwrapped)] We all play different roles as we go through life. We are spouses, parents, siblings, neighbors, employees, citizens, and so forth. We have […] View
Worse than Enron: The Great Post Office Scandal (Part II) In our previous blog post, we did our best to summarize the facts of one of the biggest scandals in the history of the British justice system. In this post, we analyze the Great Post Office Scandal through the lens of behavioral ethics in an attempt to engage in a little informed speculation as to […] View
Worse than Enron: The Great Post Office Scandal (Part I) Few people on this side of the pond (and not nearly as many on the other side as you would think) know much about a decades-long scandal that puts Enron to shame. More people will likely come to know of the scandal because of the new ITV television series “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office” […] View