Book Reviews

This is the second half of my look at Mary C. Gentile's 2010 book, Giving Voice to Values.

Naming and Framing
Framing is central to acting on one's values. So often ethics matters have already, effectively, been framed (and justified) by an organization. There are accepted truisms (this is the way it's always been done) and stories that everyone knows (the last time someone disagreed openly with Joe, she was on the streets looking for a job before the week was...

The failure to deal responsibly with conflicts of interest has many causes, but the principal cause is the silence of those who are not directly responsible. I've written several times about some of the reasons for this silence:  fear, justifications, lack of moral courage, and...

Two months ago, a book was published called The Jersey Sting, by two Star-Ledger reporters, Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin. It provides the history of an enormous federal sting operation which led to the arrest of dozens of government officials, most of them from local governments, on July 23, 2009 (see...

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), present several ways of dealing with the many problems they raise in their book.

I've noted on several occasions that indirect conflicts are among the most problematic areas in government ethics. 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 (Princeton University Press), looks into some of the psychological aspects of the indirectness problem. The authors' analysis is especially relevant to the use of...

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 in Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a new book by Max H. Bazerman...