Amoralman: A Master Illusionist’s Moral Illusions When we ran across Derek Delgaudio’s book AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies, we figured that the writers of an ethics blog should be reading a book with that title, and we’re glad we did. Given that we focus on behavioral ethics, we are always interested in learning how others made the moral and […] View
Doing Hard Time for Making the Hard Sell Incentives work. And no one seems to understand how to motivate human behavior via incentives better than pharmaceutical companies. This became clear to us as we read recent books on the opioid crisis, often focusing on Purdue Pharmaceuticals and the now infamous Sackler family—see Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the […] View
“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
Engineering Ethics and the Boeing Scandal When college professors have a bad day, their students don’t learn as much that particular day. When engineers have a bad day, many people can die and significant environmental harm can be done—consider the Volkswagen pollution control device scandal, the Deepwater Horizon fire, the Kansas City Hyatt walkway collapse, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the […] View
Optimism Bias: The Dark Side of Looking at the Bright Side On January 20, 2022, CNN reported that a well-known Czech folk singer, who also happened to be a vocal anti-vaxxer, had died of COVID-19 after intentionally exposing herself to the virus so that she could be “done with COVID.” She was confident that COVID-19 posed no serious threat to her health. Hanna Horka’s tragic death […] View
Elizabeth Holmes’s Conviction: Theranos and Loss Aversion A few years ago, one of our blog posts focused on Elizabeth Holmes and the massive Theranos fraud. On January 3, 2022, Holmes became the first Silicon Valley CEO to be convicted of securities fraud and she now faces years in jail for inducing investors to entrust her with $900 million or so based on […] View
The Doctor Who Killed At this writing (December 2021), the headlines are filled with stories of bad behavior. Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud trial arising from the Theranos scandal is ongoing. As is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial. Jussie Smollett was just convicted of faking a homophobic attack upon himself, presumably to drum up sympathy and publicity. Josh Duggar was just […] View
A Whistleblower Faces Down Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen’s October 5, 2021 testimony before Congress regarding her former employer Facebook’s practices was simultaneously riveting and deeply unsettling. Her overarching point was that Facebook consistently prioritizes profits over users’ safety, refusing to make product reforms that would protect users from the company’s products’ biggest harms. Facebook has, of course, faced several scandals […] View
Dirty Work and Moral Inequality Eyal Press’s 2012 book, Beautiful Souls, contained a fair amount of behavioral ethics material of the type that we emphasize here at Ethics Unwrapped. His new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, doesn’t emphasize behavioral ethics, but is very thought-provoking. Inequality of income and wealth in America is […] View
We Are Killing Ourselves with Cognitive Dissonance We just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new best-seller, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War. It’s a wild ride with surprising implications for one of today’s most significant problems. The “Bomber Mafia” was a group of U.S. airmen, led by General Haywood Hansell, who believed in […] View