Ethics Unwrapped Blog

Hillary Clinton wrote that it “takes a village” to raise a child. It’s not a one-person job. Few things are, including financial and political frauds, sexual harassment, and war crimes. Both the legal system and ethical analysis tend to focus on the actual perpetrators of wrongdoing, but often they are not the only ones who […]

The conformity bias is the tendency we all have to take our cues from those around us as to how to dress, what music to listen to, and, as it happens, what moral decisions to make. If we are lucky enough to be with people who generally try to do the right thing, then we […]

Although Ethics Unwrapped features videos, case studies, teaching notes and much more on many ethics-related topics, behavioral ethics—the science of moral decision making—gets most of our attention. Frequently, we focus on the question: “Why do good people often do bad things?” As with everything related to the brain, there is neither a simple answer nor […]

In our last post, “Impact Investing and the Damage Done by The Key Man,” we explored Simon Clark & Will Louch’s book (The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale) detailing Arif Naqvi’s billion-dollar fraud in the impact investing space. A billion dollars is a […]

We all tend to see what we wish to see and to believe what coincides with our pre-existing viewpoints. We at Ethics Unwrapped hope that impact investing can live up to its promise of helping to solve many of the world’s problems. We are kindly disposed to the practice, and think well of individuals engaged […]

Moral injury has been defined by Drs. Brett Litz and Bill Nash as “[t]he lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that can transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” It is a phenomenon strongly identified with military experience, but goes beyond that. Moral injury […]

This entry is being posted on October 19, 2022, the ninth annual Global Ethics Day which has the theme “Ethics Empowered.” Naturally, we at Ethics Unwrapped strongly support Global Ethics Day. And we have only to look at the news headlines to be reminded of the importance of ethical conduct and how far we have […]

We just finished reading Susan Liautaud’s new book: The Little Book of Big Ethical Questions (2022), in which she briefly explains her views as to the ethics of various ethical questions that might arise relative to family and friends (e.g. “Should you read your child’s or teenager’s diary?”), politics, community and culture (e.g., “Do we […]

Football fans know Jon Gruden. He coached the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Superbowl championship. He is handsome, articulate, folksy, and bright. He is also a walking embodiment of the overconfidence bias—the tendency people have to overestimate their own morality. Most of us believe that we are more moral than most other people. In one […]

Last week, Pennsylvania Congressman Glenn Thompson made headlines by opposing a bill to protect same-sex marriage and then attending his gay son’s wedding just three days later. He joined a long line of politicians who have embraced rights for their children after opposing them for others. In 2013, Ohio Senator Rob Portman opposed same-sex marriage […]

What might you do if someday you find yourself working for a boss that you slowly discover is not just a jerk but is truly morally abhorrent? Or maybe you find yourself selling a consumer product that you come to find out is harmful to its users. Or maybe your company tasks you with pushing […]

Kelly’s recent conviction for racketeering and sex trafficking crimes was long overdue. How in the world could he gave gotten away with this abuse for decades? An excellent analysis of the “whys” of this sad situation was recently published in The Conversation by our friend and colleague, Minette Drumwright of the University of Texas Moody […]

As with our last blog post, we write to recommend that those readers who teach ethics check out a new textbook. Neil Malhotra and Ken Shotts of the Stanford Graduate School of Business have written the relatively brief (149 pages of text) Leading with Values: Strategies for Making Ethical Decisions in Business and Life (Cambridge […]

If you are interested in behavioral ethics, and we hope you are, we have a book recommendation for you—G. Richard Shell’s The Conscience Code: Lead with Your Values, Advance Your Career (2021). Dr. Shell is the Chair of the Wharton School’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at Penn and the author of several popular […]

We just finished reading How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. This extremely entertaining book is a layman’s guide to morality. Schur is not an academic, but he is smart, thoughtful, well-read, and curious. Most important, he is also humble (he sought the guidance of several philosophy professors), […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Our blog posts are often prompted by books that we’ve read, but we seldom do book reviews. This post is an exception, because we wish to call your attention to the latest book in the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) series. Mary Gentile created the GVV program, the best platform on the planet for enabling […]

We wish it weren’t so, but cheating and sports seem to go hand-in-hand. In a time (summer 2021) when Olympic hopefuls are being disqualified after failing drug tests and baseball is coping with a major scandal involving foreign substances and pitch spin rates, we return to a subject we have blogged about before—the Houston Astros […]

The evidence is clear that the #MeToo movement has much work left to do. Although as we write this blog entry the headlines are filled with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment woes, with this post we focus on the video gaming firm Activision Blizzard, Inc. (ABI) (a group of companies responsible for “Call […]

One of America’s foremost legal scholars, Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein, has written a small, provocative book titled Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception (2021). Because Sunstein is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at the Harvard Law School, currently serves as Chair of the […]

As we prepared a recent blog post about the fintech start-up Robin Hood, we noticed that a worrisome number of articles have been published in recent years about lying by entrepreneurs. Many of them recount stories of entrepreneurs’ telling brazen lies to save their companies. Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield Farm) told the SBA that he had […]

You would think that rational human beings would gather all easily-acquired information that is relevant to a decision before they make that decision. Not so. Rather, people often prefer deliberate ignorance, defined by scholars Brown and Walasek as “the conscious individual or collective choice not to seek or use information in a situation where the […]

Over the years, ethicists have paid particular attention to entrepreneurs, partly because there is some evidence that entrepreneurs may be special folks with unusual appetites for risk, significant overconfidence, and optimism untethered to reality. And partly because the competitive pressures faced by entrepreneurs often create special incentives to commit unethical actions. One of the more […]

Whether it’s Donald Trump believing that he is a “stable genius” or Charles Barkley saying “I believe I’m the best-looking guy in the world and I might be right,” people (especially men) tend toward overconfidence. This overconfidence often manifests itself in the moral realm. As Bazerman and Tenbrunsel note: “It’s likely that most of us […]

“Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art” is an engaging crime documentary directed, co-written and co-produced by filmmaker Barry Avrich. It is the story of an $80 million art fraud in New York City. In rough outline, around 1995 a woman named Glafira Rosales appeared out of the blue and told Ann Freedman, […]

Violence against Asian-Americans continues to occur in unprecedented and unacceptable numbers. The New York Times recently reported on a “rising tide” of incidents where people of Asian descent were “pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs,” (Cai et al.) typically accompanied by a reference to the coronavirus, as if the victim had any more […]

Last month, legendary management consultant and McKinsey alumnus Tom Peters said he was “angry, disgusted and sickened” by McKinsey’s role in the opioid crisis that has killed roughly half a million people by overdose in the past 21 years. McKinsey may well be chastened by this strong criticism from an august former employee, but it’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

Although we have blogged about the Varsity Blues admissions scandal before, actress Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky” of “Full House” fame) and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli just entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and were sentenced to two months and five months in prison, respectively. It seems […]

We act immorally when we do unjustified harm to objects of moral worth, such as other people. In the midst of a pandemic, when we ignore the best scientific guidance and refuse to wear masks, physically distance, or avoid crowds, we act immorally unless the view “I’m going to do what I want to do […]

At this moment in time, it seems as though there is nothing more important than developing a vaccine for Covid-19, the coronavirus that has launched a worldwide pandemic. The world hungers for such a vaccine that might enable us to return to some semblance of normalcy. President Trump has named Dr. Moncef Slaoui to lead […]

Moral equilibrium is an interesting concept. The idea is that people tend to keep a running scoreboard in their heads that compares their image of themselves—usually as “good folks”—with their actions. If people do something that doesn’t live up to their normal moral standards, their mental scoreboard goes into deficit and they may actually look […]

In 2005, Jack Abramoff was the most influential lobbyist in our nation’s capital. He then suffered a fall from grace and today, with an amazing trifecta, may have cemented his reputation as the most infamous lobbyist of all time. First, Abramoff’s corrupt actions as the most powerful lobbyist in America in the late 1990s and […]

Thousands of Americans have been shocked over the past few days as they watched a video of a white woman near Torrance, California as she targeted a racist rant at a young woman of Filipino ancestry: Get the f*** out of this world, get the f*** out of this state and go back to whatever […]

These are trying and emotional times, which is to be expected after we have all seen videos of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering an unarmed black man, George Floyd, over the course of nine minutes right in front of our eyes. If this tragic event does not open all our eyes to the evils […]

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, […]

There is so much bad news caused by the pandemic these days—infections, deaths, depression (mental and economic)—that many of us find ourselves hunting for every little bit of good news.  In a recent blog post, attorney Jeffrey Kaplan found a silver lining in all our quarantining and social distancing by suggesting that working from home […]

On April 27, 2020, we learned that Dr. Lorna Breen, head of the ER at a New York City hospital, committed suicide after fighting on the front lines in the coronavirus battle. Just two days earlier, John Mondello, a Bronx EMT, also took his own life after witnessing the human tragedies that seem ubiquitous on […]

Many people spent Easter weekend worshiping in the Church of Anthony Fauci. These «Faucians» did not attend any actual services at physical places of worship, because their sacraments include self-quarantine and physical distancing rather than communion, wearing face masks and gloves rather than hijabs or yarmulkes, and baptizing delivered packages in disinfectant rather than new […]

As with so many of our blog posts, this one is prompted by a recent book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. This highly-regarded book is about the troubles (and more) in Northern Ireland.  The detailed descriptions of the violent struggles and political battles between […]

In 2017, the Houston Astros brought great pride to the State of Texas by winning the World Series.   It was especially satisfying, as a rags-to-riches tale.  In 2011, 2012, and 2013, the Astros were the worst team in baseball.  By 2015, however, the ‘Stros were in the Major League Baseball (MLB) playoffs, and won it […]

We ordered Krista K. Thomason’s book, Naked.  You can imagine our disappointment when it arrived and was not the coffee table book we’d envisioned. OK, that was the lame joke we were thinking about beginning this blog with until we realized that some people might take offense and we would be ashamed that we had […]

People often puzzle over the question of whether religious people act more ethically than not-so-religious people.  The scientific evidence is certainly mixed.  There is strong evidence that religious people self-report being more ethical than non-religious people, but less evidence that their actions actually match their reports (Xygalatas, 2017).  For example, some studies indicate that “religiosity […]

Christopher Leonard’s new book Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America tells the story—the good, the bad, and the ugly—of one of the world’s most successful and most controversial companies.  Koch Industries, like all large companies, has both ethical bright spots and low lights on its resume.  Think of Johnson […]

In an October 12, 2019 New York Times op-ed, philosophy professor Jonathan Ellis and law student Francesca Hovagimian lodged a one-sided critique of competitive high school and college debate on grounds that it teaches students to make one-sided arguments, which, they assert, helps create our current, unproductive political discourse where the goal is to win […]

Not long ago, we blogged about a book on the philosophy of philanthropy edited by our friend, prominent philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/purdue-pharma-and-the-met-opioids-and-art. Paul has just published another book that caught our attention—The Garden of Leaders: Revolutionizing Higher Education (Oxford University Press 2019). The book emphasizes the importance of leadership and chastises modern universities […]

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse!  Recently we wrote about the Rick Singer college admissions scandal where parents bribed college coaches to pretend to give their children athletic scholarships so they could be admitted to colleges that, absent the artifice, they likely would not be admitted to.  [See “Admissions Scandal: When Entitlement […]

What do you do if you are a white nationalist who takes a genetic ancestry test (GAT) from 23andMe or some other service and learns that you are not 99 and 44/100th percent white?  Awkward! When your entire identity revolves around your supposed white supremacy and you learn you are not white—at least not by […]

You would think that the matter of philanthropy would be relative free of controversy ethics-wise.  Giving to others is good.  Case closed.  But it turns out, as most of life does, to be more complicated than that. Ethics Unwrapped’s good friend, Prof. Paul Woodruff, a philosopher and classicist who has taught here at the University […]

The New York Times recently reported the results of a worldwide study of human honesty.  Across forty countries and six continents, researchers set up a “lost wallet” experiment.  To ensure the wallet didn’t truly get lost, an experimenter would go up to someone and hand over a wallet and say:  “Somebody must have lost it. […]

A few years ago in this space we posted an entry entitled “The Atlanta School District Scandal.”  In it, we explored the reasons why well-meaning public school teachers might get caught up in cheating scandals, focusing on the then-unfolding indictments and arrests in Atlanta. This post revisits this scandal in light of the recent publication […]

PwC just studied the world’s top 2,500 corporations and reported that in 2018 a record percentage of CEOs left their positions, either voluntarily or having been forced out.  And for the first time in the 15-or-so years of this study, more left because of moral failures than any other reason.  In the past, poor financial […]

Dr. Otis Brawley is one of the good guys.  He is a distinguished oncologist with all the professional awards and certificates that a physician could possibly want.  He has written more than 200 scientific articles and his brave and insightful book How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America led […]

One of the few truthful things that Billy McFarland says in either of two recent documentaries on his disastrous Fyre music festival—Fyre Fraud (Hulu) and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Netflix)—is something along the lines of: “If we hadn’t succeeded so big at the beginning, we wouldn’t have failed so spectacularly at the […]

The air is thick with schadenfreude as some of the wealthy and famous have been laid low by indictments in the ongoing admissions scandal that is rocking universities such as our own—the University of Texas at Austin. Assuming (while realizing that to do so can make an ass out of you and me) that the […]

Often this blog’s posts highlight bad moral behavior and attempt to explain it by referring you, dear readers, to one or more of our behavioral ethics videos. Repeatedly reading examples of bad behavior can be depressing, especially because there are so many in the news every day that we don’t even have time or bandwidth […]

Michael Kimelman was an alcoholic who got himself indicted, tried and convicted of insider trading.  After his jail term ended and his family had been reduced to near penury, he just couldn’t believe that his wife wanted a divorce.  In his own mind, he was definitely the wronged party in the marriage. Kimelman’s inability to […]

This post is prompted by a forthcoming article in the American Criminal Law Review by Melissa Hamilton, entitled “The Biased Algorithm: Evidence of DisparateImpact on Hispanics.”  Hamilton makes the point that because judges tend to be human beings and therefore subject to all the decision making foibles uncovered by behavioral psychology and related fields in […]

STOP READING! STOP RIGHT NOW! DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER! Unless you have already seen Tim Wardle’s new documentary “Three Identical Strangers.” In that event, you have my permission to read on. Otherwise, stop and go see the movie. This post contains spoilers and this movie should not be spoiled. Assuming that you have already […]

I seldom have an original idea, but from time to time I read things that prompt me to write a blog post nonetheless.  Recently I read an article in The Washington Post that explored how the members of a Southern Baptist church in Luverne, Alabama reconciled their religious beliefs with the words and deeds of […]

As I write this blog post, scuba divers are in the middle of a rescue effort to save twelve young soccer players and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand.  Eight of the boys are out.  Four players and the coach remain to be saved.  The story has the world’s attention; it is terrifying, […]

In 1996, I published an article in the Ohio State Law Library on “vaporware” in Silicon Valley.  Vaporware is the marketing ploy of preannouncing products that do not yet exist and may never come into existence in their described form.  This was a common marketing practice in Silicon Valley at the time, but it carried […]

Recently a fired employee at my university, UT-Austin, was arrested and charged with six counts of tampering with government records (his time sheets) as law enforcement officials investigated him for fraud.  It appears that Jason Shoumaker often claimed pay for hours worked in his job as a facilities director at the University of Texas School […]

There’s been a lot of talk about draining the swamp recently, but not a lot of swamp is getting drained.  According to our Ethics Defined video, “[c]orruption is the abuse of power or position for personal gain.”  In behavior that could not be swampier, Steve Cohen, the president’s “personal attorney,” has, according to Fox News […]

Recently I have used this space to report on new and interesting books I had read and I do so again.  Although most of my blog posts are behavioral ethics-themed, because that is my key interest and most of our Ethics Unwrapped videos are related to behavioral ethics, I am ranging farther afield today to […]

I just read a very scary book, Mark Godsey’s Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Conviction (2017). I’ve written the script for an Ethics Unwrapped video on cognitive dissonance that we have not yet had an opportunity to film. However, the concept clearly has much to do with ethical […]

My wife often tells people that there is nothing that I enjoy more than watching men argue with other men about sports. Therefore, I greatly enjoy ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” (PTI) with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. Both men are funny, passionate, and knowledgeable, though Kornheiser has the great misfortune of resembling me physically. On […]

The front page of the New York Times (Austin edition) on Wednesday, October 11 was particularly depressing. The stories on California’s fires and Puerto Rico’s post-Maria suffering were brutal enough. Depending on your views regarding climate change, you may or may not believe that humans played a role in the severity of those events. But […]

The commonly-held belief that ethical scandals are caused most frequently by “bad eggs” or “rogue actors” continues to take a beating as more and more literature supports the behavioral ethics research, featured in many of our Ethics Unwrapped videos.  This behavioral research shows that most ethical lapses feature good people doing bad things because they […]

My friend and former colleague, Eli Cox, a distinguished professor of marketing at UT-Austin for more than 40 years, has made a wonderful contribution to business ethics education by writing Seeking Adam Smith: Finding the Shadow Curriculum of Business. His book diagnoses perhaps the major shortcoming in ethics education across business schools today and nicely […]