Behavioral Ethics in Practice: Why We Sometimes Make the Wrong Decisions

This book is an accessible, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics. Often ethics education is incomplete because it ignores how and why people make moral decisions. But using exciting new research from fields such as behavioural psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, the study of behavioural ethics uncovers the common reasons why good people often screw up.

Scientists have long studied the ways human beings make decisions, but only recently have researchers begun to focus specifically on ethical decision making. Unlike philosophy and religion, which aim to tell people how to think and act about various moral issues, behavioral ethics research reveals the factors that influence how people really make moral decisions. Most people get into ethical trouble for doing obviously wrong things. Aristotle cannot help, but learning about behavioral ethics can. By supplementing traditional approaches to teaching ethics with a clear, detailed, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics, beginners can quickly become familiar with the important elements of this new field. This book includes the bonus of being coordinated with Ethics Unwrapped – a free, online, educational resource featuring award-winning videos and teaching materials on a variety of behavioral ethics (and general ethics) topics.

This book is a useful supplement for virtually every ethics course, and important in any course where incorporating practical ethics in an engaging manner is paramount. The content applies to every discipline –business ethics, journalism, medicine, legal ethics, and others – because its chief subject is the nature of moral decision making. The book is also highly relevant to practitioners across all sectors.

Cara Biasucci is Creator of Ethics Unwrapped, and Director of Ethics Education

for the Center for Leadership and Ethics, University of Texas at Austin. For more

than a decade, she made films for (among others) American Public Television, Discovery Times, New

England Patriots, National Gallery of Art, and Johns Hopkins.

Robert Prentice has for 40 years taught business law and ethics at the McCombs

School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He is also Chair of the Business,

Government & Society Department and Faculty Director of Ethics Unwrapped.