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McCombs School of Business

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We blog about current events, new books (and sometimes movies), and other happenings that have an ethical slant.

We also share on social media and encourage you to follow us @ethicsunwrapped. Links to our channels are in the footer of this (and every) page.

Moral Challenges: When to Comply and How to Defy

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 […]

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AI Ethics: The Atomic Human

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 […]

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The Dark Pattern of Corporate Scandals (Part Two)

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 […]

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The Dark Pattern of Corporate Scandals (Part One)

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 […]

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Behavioral Science, Gun Violence, and “Unforgiving Places”

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, […]

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Who Invented Good and Evil?

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 […]

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The Ethics of Gene Editing

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 […]

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AI Ethics: Is AI a Savior or a Con? – Part 2

AI Ethics: Is AI a Savior or a Con? – Part 2

To make sound ethical judgments, people must know the facts. In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), it is difficult to ascertain with certainty a key fact—whether AI is the most consequential technology in the history of the world as claimed by its proponents (“AI Boosters”) or is mainly snake oil and hype as claimed […]

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AI Ethics: Is AI a Savior or a Con? – Part 1

AI Ethics: Is AI a Savior or a Con? – Part 1

Several months ago, our blog post titled “Techno-Optimist or AI Doomer?: Consequentialism and the Ethics of AI” made the point that despite the ubiquitous attention being paid to artificial intelligence (AI), a technological concept that dates back at least 75 years, expert opinions regarding its utility and dangers were all over the map, ranging from […]

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Why Are We All Outraged?

Why Are We All Outraged?

Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written an important new book—Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (2025). Gray […]

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