Governor Cuomo: “The Creeps” as a Moral Emotion? You’ve probably seen the picture of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Anna Ruch at a 2019 wedding. She approached him to thank him for a toast he had offered. He put his hand on her exposed back, and then, as you can see in the picture, put his hands on both her cheeks and […] View
Seeking Virtue in Finance: A Futile Search? At the McCombs School of Business, we train thousands of undergraduate and MBA students to pursue careers in finance. For the most part, these are nice, honest, well-meaning youngsters who wish to lead honorable lives but face great trepidation as they prepare to enter the finance profession, which is often a moral cesspool. We don’t […] View
What’s up With White Collar Crime? We started reading Jennifer Taub’s book on white collar crime–Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime–on the December 2020 day that President Trump announced pardons for Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner and 26 other mostly white collar criminals. Coincidentally, Taub begins her book noting that: Just after Valentine’s […] View
What Didn’t Work for ‘WeWork’ In earlier blog posts, we have repeatedly told tales of grandiloquent young entrepreneurs and their downfall — Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos (“Elizabeth Holmes: Scamming Silicon Valley), Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy (“Under Fyre”), and Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road (“Silk Road: Paved by Grandiosity”). Reeves Wiedeman’s book the Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic […] View
Sexual Harassment, Networks of Complicity, and Newsrooms We at Ethics Unwrapped are pleased to be associated with the Press Forward movement (www.thepressforward.org), which aims to change the culture in newsrooms in order to create safe, civil, and diverse workplaces for women. We are pleased to have made a minor contribution by creating our own Me Too video. After scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, […] View
Coding Honor into Virtual Classrooms It’s that time of year when here at UT (and at colleges all across the country), we are concerned about academic dishonesty in a time of online (or mostly online) education. All teachers fear that despite their own best efforts and the utilization of some technological surveillance devices, it is virtually impossible to prevent cheating […] View
The Overconfidence Bias Comes Home to Roost Columnist David Brooks reviewed the scientific literature and concluded that “the human mind is an overconfidence machine.” As our videos indicate, the overconfidence bias often disrupts ethical thinking. Not one of us is immune from the impact of this bias. Consider the fact that Ethics Unwrapped creator Cara Biasucci and Ethics Unwrapped faculty director Robert […] View
Cyberstalking, Cockroaches, and eBay Being a young employee, a new employee, a low-level employee in an organization that wants to do evil can be a terrible situation to be in. As the New York Times reports it, Ina and David Steiner, an innocuous couple living in Natick, Massachusetts, ran a sort of trade publication called EcommerceBytes read by those […] View
Confronting the Causes of Racial Discrimination Some claim that the United States is not a racist nation, and that may be true in an important, but very narrow sense. The presence of conscious, intentional racial prejudice has subsided. And only a small percentage of Americans view expressed racially biased views as acceptable in open society. This trend is a welcome development, […] View
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