February 2026
- Feb 24, 2026ConceptsEthical Tradeoffs Organizations Face in Decision-MakingMost business ethics writing assumes doing right and making money never truly conflict, and that the right course is obvious. Both assumptions are wrong: resources are finite and stakeholders hold legitimate but incompatible interests. Six recurring tradeoffs, from profit against people to efficiency against fairness, each with what is gained and what is sacrificed, and how Boeing's rushed 737 MAX certification shows the cost of choosing speed.
- Feb 24, 2026ConceptsWhat Is Ethical Decision Making?Consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and care ethics each illuminate a different part of a hard choice, and the disagreement between them is itself informative. The page walks a seven-step process from spotting the ethical dimension to reflecting afterward, then names the traps that defeat good intentions: incrementalism, ethical fading, normalization of deviance, and moral licensing.
- Feb 21, 2026ConceptsHow Values Shape DecisionsValues shape choices through five mechanisms: what you notice, which options you generate, how you weight outcomes, where you draw non-negotiable lines, and how you justify the result afterward. The stated-versus-revealed gap is measurable. Griskevicius, Tybur, and Van den Bergh found that activating status motives raised willingness to buy green products in public contexts but lowered it in private ones, evidence that environmental values can be partly instrumental.
- Feb 20, 2026Concepts4 Moral Frameworks That Explain Every Ethical DilemmaGreene's functional MRI work compared the lever trolley case with the footbridge variant, where you push a man to stop the trolley. Outcomes are structurally identical, but the personal version activated emotion-associated regions far more strongly and subjects refused it. Impersonal dilemmas pull toward consequentialism, personal ones toward deontology. This compares consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics and care ethics, then tests them on Milgram and Nuremberg.
July 2025
- Jul 22, 2025ExplainersIntroduction to Ethics: Understanding Right and WrongResearchers analyzed 219 violent public incidents recorded in Amsterdam, Cape Town and Lancaster and found at least one bystander intervened in 91 percent of them. Darley and Latane's lab work had suggested far less: 85 percent helped when alone against 31 percent with four other witnesses present. Real emergencies with visible harm appear to trigger intervention more reliably than ambiguous simulations, though the bystander effect remains documented in unclear situations.
- Jul 10, 2025ExplainersEthical Decision ChecklistJames Rest's Four-Component Model located the widest gap between intention and action at moral motivation, not moral reasoning: most people who acted unethically already knew it was wrong and prioritized competing interests anyway. That is why the checklist starts by naming the pressure and defeating what Tenbrunsel and Messick called ethical fading, where reframing a choice in technical terms makes its moral dimension vanish.
May 2025
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