New College Scam: Giving Up Custody for Cash 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 […] View
Not-So-White Nationalists: A Story of Moral Dissonance 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 […] View
Purdue Pharma and the Met, Opioids and Art 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 […] View
Lost Wallet, Found Honesty 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. […] View
None of the Above 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 […] View
Tone(deaf) at the Top 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 […] View
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