This blog entry is prompted by our having read Gabrielle Bluestone’s book: Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet—and Why We’re Following (2021). We’re a little late to the party, but better late than never because the book contains much of interest. Bluestone is an attorney, a journalist, and importantly for this post, the Emmy-nominated producer of Netflix’s Fyre documentary. We have blogged before about the infamous Fyre Festival fraud (https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/under-fyre), but Bluestone adds a whole new level of detail, naturally focusing on th ..read more

Bill Stenger played a role in what has been called “Vermont’s Biggest Fraud.” An interesting question is:  Why did Stenger do what he did? By most accounts, Bill Stenger is a good guy. In the early parts of this century, he worked as the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, a threadbare ski resort in far northern Vermont, an economically challenged region. He lived in the small, nearby town of Newport, and longed to both advance his beloved sport of skiing and revive the faltering economy in his region. Stenger was beloved in his community and well-respected. He was generous, loyal ..read more

The potential impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on our world–for good and for ill–continues to expand rapidly. On balance, the progress that science and industry have wrought over the centuries—think of the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, vaccines, penicillin, computers, and innumerable other advances–have made the world a better place. Some argue that the potential for good that AI carries makes its development a moral imperative. However, the deleterious effects of social media (e.g., harms users’ mental health, creates a detachment from the real world, stimulates disinfo ..read more

A judge’s most important job is to be impartial. Otherwise, the justice they dispense cannot be blind, as it must be. However, judges are also human beings, meaning that the influences and biases that make it difficult for humans to be impartial–most importantly the self-serving bias—affect judges just as they affect everyone else. The self-serving bias seems to have struck a heavy blow in the federal bankruptcy court of the Southern District of Texas. Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones was until recently one of the most respected bankruptcy judges in America. Along with his mentor and fellow ban ..read more

This blog post is prompted by a brand new article with the intimidating title “Variance in Virtue: An Integrative Review of Intraindividual (Un)Ethical Behavior Research” by professors Perkins, Podsakoff and Welsh (“PPW”). The article addresses the eternal question that often concerns us here at Ethics Unwrapped: why do good people do bad things? Indeed, it also addresses the question of why bad people may do good things? For us, it calls to mind our videos about moral equilibrium (https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/moral-equilibrium). This thoughtful article featuring a major literature ..read more

An interesting new book, Aaron Tang’s Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence is Destroying the Court and How We Can Fix It, prompts this blog post. Tang is a law school professor and former Supreme Court clerk who has developed an explanation for the historically low opinion that the American people have of the Supreme Court these days: our old friend the overconfidence bias. Although most observers believe that the Court’s unpopularity stems from its open partisanship, Tang points out that the Court has at other periods in its history been similarly partisan yet also managed to be relatively ..read more

On August 3, 2023, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Leon Liggins’ drug conviction because the federal district judge who presided over his trial had stated in open court that Liggins “looks like a criminal to me.” The judge later assured the defendant: “Just because I got mad does not mean I’m biased. I’m not, trust me.” We trust that the judge, like most people, is not explicitly biased. He most likely harbors no conscious views that are racially discriminatory. We also are concerned that the judge, like most people, displayed implicit bias, which can be just as poisonous. As our v ..read more

On July 27, 2023, Norwegian mountaineer Kristin Harila, with the help of her guide Tenjin Sherpa (“Lama”), became the fastest climber to scale all 14 of the world’s 8,000+ meter-high mountains—in just 92 days. This amazing feat was marred by allegations that as they summited K2, Harila and Lama…and about 50 other climbers…hiked past Muhammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter who was part of a separate team and had slipped on a ledge, falling several meters before becoming tangled in ropes and hanging upside down. Other climbers criticized Harila for treating Hassan, who died that day, as “a second-cl ..read more

Northwestern University’s athletics department finds itself in the big middle of a number of scandals breaking nearly simultaneously. Not a good look for perhaps the brainiest university of the fourteen (soon to be sixteen and perhaps more) schools in the Big 10. There are scandals everywhere one looks–in baseball, softball, volleyball, and even cheerleading–but we will focus on football. Coach Pat Fitzgerald, a former star player at Northwestern and one of its most successful coaches ever, was fired unceremoniously on July 10, 2023 as a hazing scandal broke into the open. It’s early times and ..read more

When we at Ethics Unwrapped make public presentations about ethics, we speak to a broad range of audiences—e.g., church groups, social groups, student groups, and many professional groups including teachers, doctors, engineers, geologists, construction contractors, and lawyers. Legal professionals are aware that the pressures of their work create numerous ethical challenges and the profession’s continuing education requirements appear to be a good-faith effort to respond. More remains to be done, however, as has been made obvious with the recent scandal involving the large (1600 or so attorney ..read more