Book Reviews

Moral Disgust In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses Richard Shweder's theory regarding three major clusters of moral themes:  autonomy, community, and divinity. Our culture, unlike most cultures, gives precede…

You may not have realized it, but if you are reading this, you are most likely WEIRD, that is, a member of a culture that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The features of WEIRDness can be summed up in the following sentence from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Go…

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is a book that does not, from its title, appear to have much value for government ethics. But Haidt's approach to morality, and his look at how people approach morality, provides a lot of food…

I recently read Judith N. Shklar's book The Faces of Injustice (Yale U.P., 1990). This excellent essay about the difference between misfortune and injustice would not appear to have much to do with government ethics. But there turns out to be much relevant food for thought. The principal difference…

The great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' 2006 novel, The Eagle's Throne, translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero, is one of the best political novels I've ever read. I highly recommend it. The novel also happens to contain some great quotes that touch on government ethics. The government …