Dueling Bible Classes People often puzzle over the question of whether religious people act more ethically than not-so-religious people. The scientific evidence is certainly mixed. There is strong evidence that religious people self-report being more ethical than non-religious people, but less evidence that their actions actually match their reports (Xygalatas, 2017). For example, some studies indicate that “religiosity […] View
Oil, Indians, and Obedience to Authority Christopher Leonard’s new book Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America tells the story—the good, the bad, and the ugly—of one of the world’s most successful and most controversial companies. Koch Industries, like all large companies, has both ethical bright spots and low lights on its resume. Think of Johnson […] View
Debating Debate In an October 12, 2019 New York Times op-ed, philosophy professor Jonathan Ellis and law student Francesca Hovagimian lodged a one-sided critique of competitive high school and college debate on grounds that it teaches students to make one-sided arguments, which, they assert, helps create our current, unproductive political discourse where the goal is to win […] View
Garden of Leaders Not long ago, we blogged about a book on the philosophy of philanthropy edited by our friend, prominent philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/purdue-pharma-and-the-met-opioids-and-art. Paul has just published another book that caught our attention—The Garden of Leaders: Revolutionizing Higher Education (Oxford University Press 2019). The book emphasizes the importance of leadership and chastises modern universities […] View
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