Resources & Learning

The denial of unethical behavior, which usually occurs long after the behavior itself, is usually the worst part of an ethics scandal, the adding of insult to injury. The public is faced with two possibilities when an official denies that he did something unethical. This dilemma is well described i…

Government ethics involves itself primarily with the formal norms set forth in ethics codes. But as the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), point out, "It is through informal mechanisms that employees learn the 't…

Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), point out that egocentrism is in our nature. We naturally see the world from our point of view. We squeeze what we see and experience …

"Most of us dramatically underestimate the degree to which our behavior is affected by incentives and other situational factors." This is one of the most important sentences in Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a new book by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel (…

Although we have more trouble seeing our own unethical behavior than we do seeing others' unethical behavior, Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, have found that people have a tendency "to overlook t…

Although it is not a book about government ethics, Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel (Princeton University Press) is a must-read book for government ethics practitioners. This new book (it came out just a couple of weeks ago…

Violence happens. The world is violent. People are naturally violent. This is what people say. Politicians are all crooks. Government ethics is an oxymoron. Don't be so naïve. This is what people say. As Michael N. Nagler says in his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, "when we have negative e…

In his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler talks about two models for looking at violence that are also relevant to government ethics, the medical model and the educational model. The Medical Model The first is the medical model, which sees violence as disease, and peace as h…

Another way in which violence and unethical conduct are similar is the way they are handled by the news media. Just as violence is generally discussed in terms of separate battles and wars, day by day, unethical conduct is discussed in terms of separate scandals and individuals, day by day. And une…

Despite the title of his essay "What Chance of Ethics in the Globalized World of Consumers?" Zygmunt Bauman has some valuable things to say that are relevant to government ethics (the essay appears in his 2009 book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Harvard University Press)). The…