Business Partnerships: For Donations or Profit? 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 […] View
Under Fyre 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 […] View
Admissions Scandal: When Entitlement Buys Acceptance 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 […] View
I Need a Hero: Why Others’ Good Deeds Make Us Better People 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 […] View
Confessions from a Wall Street Insider: The Real Lessons to be Learned 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 […] View
The Perfect (Mis)Match: Algorithms and Intentions 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 […] View
Temple University: The New Enron? As a university professor, I like to think that higher education can serve as a beacon of good behavior in a troubled world, but that’s optimistic. I’ve recently blogged about a university staff employee who went on trips while pretending to be working (“Doing the Crime, Not the Time”), about unethical research practices (“Systematically Analyzing […] View
Appiah on Identity: The In-group, Out-group, and the In Between Kwame Anthony Appiah, a prominent philosophy professor at NYU and the New York Times Ethicist columnist, recently appeared on our campus. His talk went well, though he did not delve deeply into the substance of his new book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Despite his omission, you should consider checking out this interesting and […] View
The MLB Scandal from Left Field The World Series is just around the corner, so it seems an apt time to revisit, as Sports Illustrated just did, one of baseball’s most intriguing recent scandals. Here are the facts. Chris Correa was a computer whiz who loved sports and worked in the scouting department of the St. Louis Cardinals. Two of his […] View
State Farm’s Judge State Farm just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to settle allegations that seem like a plot straight out of a John Grisham novel. You may remember that in The Pelican Brief, a wealthy and very shady character with a case heading to the Supreme Court paid for the murder of two Supreme Court […] View