February 2026
- Feb 23, 2026ConceptsEthics in Complex Systems ExplainedAn examination of why consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics all strain in systems with feedback and emergence, where harm appears without anyone intending it. Six working principles, from precaution to internalizing externalities, are grounded in documented cases: Perrow's normal accidents, Ostrom's design principles for long-lasting commons, Rana Plaza's 1,134 deaths against roughly $30 million in compensation, and Flint's lead exposure.
- Feb 22, 2026ConceptsUnderstanding Ethical Failures: The Incremental ProcessEnron, Wells Fargo and the Boeing 737 MAX get told as bad-apple stories, but most ethical failures involve normal people in systems that reward harm and punish dissent. Diane Vaughan's Challenger analysis showed how O-ring erosion became routine because nothing had gone wrong yet, which she called normalized deviance. Theranos escalated from overpromising to false patient results one justified step at a time, and Bandura's eight mechanisms of moral disengagement explain how.
- Feb 20, 2026ConceptsResponsibility vs Accountability ExplainedResponsibility is the duty to do the work and can be split across many people; accountability is answerability for the result and stays with one person, which is why a RACI matrix permits multiple Rs but only one A. The page explains why accountability without authority or consequences is performative, and contrasts Amazon's single-threaded owner model with the failures at Challenger, Wells Fargo, and Grenfell Tower.
- Feb 19, 2026ConceptsRule-Based vs Principle-Based EthicsDworkin's distinction is the hinge: rules apply all-or-nothing, while principles state a reason that must be weighed against competing ones. The page sets out when each wins, traffic law and harassment policy against medical and journalism ethics, then six failure modes including rule proliferation, letter-not-spirit gaming, and principles vague enough that opposite actions both claim them. It closes on the layered hybrid.
- Feb 2, 2026ConceptsThe Limits of RulesRules fail in recognizable ways: they cannot cover infinite situations, they get gamed, they ignore context, they pile up, and they still need judgment to interpret. Andrew Haldane's 2012 Jackson Hole speech traced Basel from roughly 30 pages to about 347 and then 616, and argued a simple leverage constraint predicted which banks failed better than the risk-weighted version. The article sets out where rules genuinely work and where principles serve better.
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