This is a guest post by Linnea B. McCord, JD, MBA, Associate Professor of Business Law
We are only just beginning to comprehend how bad an ethics mess we’re in—but it’s likely to be a real doozy.
Failing CEOs walk away with more than $100 million and Wall Street investment bankers pay themselves many billions of dollars in bonuses even as investors’ returns plummet. State and federal politicians with little or no money when they enter public life are worth tens of millions of dollars just a few short years after leaving office. All of this is against the backdrop of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression, a massive credit crunch that threatens to wreak havoc on our financial system, mounting layoffs, the possibility of millions losing their homes, rapidly declining state budgets, crushing personal, corporate and federal debt and jihadist Islamic groups that wish to destroy us.
While our first inclination may be to blame “them” for all of our current ethics fiascoes—and there are plenty of “thems” to choose from these days—as a free nation and a free people, we bear the ultimate responsibility for allowing ourselves to get into this ethics mess.
How did we do this you might ask?
The answer is simple—by allowing ourselves to become so ethically confused over the past forty years.
Continue reading ‘Our Ethics Mess’
