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False Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths And Ethical Blind Spots, Crina Archer, Laura Hartman Jan 2012

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 …


Trust After The Global Financial Meltdown, P. Werhane, Laura Hartman, D. Bevan, K. Clark, C. Archer Jan 2012

Trust After The Global Financial Meltdown, P. Werhane, Laura Hartman, D. Bevan, K. Clark, C. Archer

Laura Hartman

Over the last decade, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown, there has been an erosion of trust and a concomitant rise of distrust in domestic companies, multinational enterprises, and political economies. In response to this attrition, this paper presents three arguments. We propose that the stakes of violating public trust are particularly high in light of the asymmetry between trust and distrust; we identify a constellation of key barriers to overcoming distrust that companies face in the current environment; and we argue that, notwithstanding these challenges, these phenomena are not fatal and can be addressed through a holistic …