Book Reviews

A chapter in Jonah Lehrer's new book, How We Decide, sheds some interesting light on ethical decision-making. The book shares the latest discoveries neuroscientists have made using hightech views of the brain at work, especially when it is making various sorts of decisions.

I recently read a fascinating classic study by Albert O. Hirschman (Institute of Advanced Study) called Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982). This book focuses on the various tensions between private consumption and public action. It only touches on government ethics issues,...

Adolf Eichmann is the iconic extreme of the government bureaucrat. Not that any of us will hopefully ever be given orders like the ones he was given, but his simply following orders makes anyone question his or her own simply following orders.

There’s a lot more about government ethics that can be learned from Adolf Eichmann, I found from reading Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). When one sees acts that are often done without...