Doctored: A Behavioral Explanation of Research Fraud and Alzheimer’s It is sobering for anyone teaching ethics that it can be just so darned hard for even well-meaning people to act as they know they ought. Even academics and scientists. For example, we have written before about Francesca Gino, a behavioral ethics scholar at Harvard who has come out on the bad end of an […] View
Ethical AI: Moral Judgments Swamped by Competitive Forces Many of us have watched enough movies on the topic–“2001: A Space Odyssey,” “War Games,” “Terminator,” “Blade Runner,” “Ex Machina,” “The Matrix,” and the like– to be viscerally concerned about today’s rapid-fire development of artificial intelligence (AI). And this concern is not unwarranted, for many of the most-knowledgeable experts are themselves very apprehensive. In March […] View
Techno-Optimist or AI Doomer? Consequentialism and the Ethics of AI As our glossary video on the term indicates, “[u]tilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.” A famous limitation of any form of consequentialism, as the video also indicates, is this: “because we cannot predict the future, it’s difficult to know with certainty […] View
AI Ethics: “Just the Facts, Ma’am” In 2024, top language algorithms could “read” 2.6 billion words in just a couple of hours. This gives them a fighting chance of keeping up with the innumerable books and articles being written about the ethical implications of various aspects and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). In 2025, we here at Ethics Unwrapped intend to […] View
Judging the Seven Deadly Sins Consonant with the Fundamental Attribution Error, people tend to believe that other people’s actions are manifestations of their moral character. If someone drives past us on the highway at a rapid rate of speed, we tend to quickly conclude that the driver is a reckless jerk. Of course, we are good people and when we […] View
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