AI Ethics: If Someone Builds It, Will We All Die? Many interested in AI have been eagerly awaiting the just-published, provocatively-titled book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowski and Nate Soares. Yudkowski has been a major AI naysayer for 20 years and, with Soares, founded the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2005. The […] View
AI Ethics: What Duties Do We Owe a Sentient Digital Mind? In his new book, Mind Crime: The Moral Frontier of Artificial Intelligence (2025), Nathan Rourke analyzes many of the same questions that others paying attention to the AI revolution find concerning. Will fierce competition between corporations and between countries lead to creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) before humanity is ready to handle it? Will this […] View
AI Ethics: As If Human Oxford University computer scientist Nigel Shadbolt and co-author Roger Hampson (S&H), like so many others these days, believe that we must think carefully about the ethical issues surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI), so they’ve written As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (2025). S&H are AI Doubters. S&H point out a litany of […] View
Moral Challenges: When to Comply and How to Defy About a decade ago, Sunita Sah—a trained physician who is now teaching organizational psychology at Cornell’s S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management—had a pain in her chest and consulted a physician who ordered a CT scan. Sah asked the doctor why she was ordering the CT scan, and the doctor responded that she was checking […] View
AI Ethics: The Atomic Human Sound moral judgments must be based on facts. People court disaster when they make morally-tinged decisions based on nothing more than speculation. We believe that at this particular point in time, artificial intelligence (AI) presents the world with several of its most critical moral issues. We have addressed AI ethics in several recent blog posts […] View
The Dark Pattern of Corporate Scandals (Part Two) In Part One of this blog post, we summarized the efforts of Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage (professors of business ethics and decision theory, respectively) to explain why good people do bad things–an enduring question for those who study ethics–in their recent book The Dark Pattern: The Hidden Dynamics of Corporate Scandals (2025). We examined […] View
The Dark Pattern of Corporate Scandals (Part One) Why good people do bad things is probably the most important and most bedeviling question in business ethics. Many people have theories, and they often tread much the same ground. Here at Ethics Unwrapped, we focus on behavioral ethics, examining the psychology of ethical decision making. We stress the social and organizational pressures (e.g., obedience-to-authority […] View
Behavioral Science, Gun Violence, and “Unforgiving Places” Jens Ludwig is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and director of its Crime Lab. He studies the economics of crime and how behavioral science and data science can help solve social problems with a special focus on gun violence. Trained as an economist in a field that often disparages psychological research, Ludwig, […] View
Who Invented Good and Evil? Philosopher Hanno Sauer has written several interesting books on morality. You might not agree with everything in his newest book—The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (2024), but it is an ambitious work and well worth a read. Sauer’s approach to organizing a comprehensive summary of morality’s global development is a […] View
The Ethics of Gene Editing Dalton Conley is a professor at Princeton University and author of the recent book The Social Genome (2025). This is a fascinating book with many interesting facts (did you know that the average married couple is as close genetically as if they were first cousins once removed?) and an overall message that raises interesting and […] View