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False Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths And Ethical Blind Spots, Crina Archer, Laura Hartman

Laura Hartman

While unethical actions may arise from conscious, deliberate and reflective choices to do ‘wrong,’ many unethical decisions emerge instead from an absence of awareness of ethical responsibility. The metaphor of ‘blind spots’ has been deployed productively to describe mental obstacles that impede ethical responsibility at the individual level, but do not rise to the level of conscious awareness. Blind spots prevent us from attending to relevant data, different points of view, alternative solutions, and foreseeable consequences crucial to forging an ethical response. We identify three common myths that tend to foster ethical blind spots at the individual level by rendering …