EthicalSystems.org — The “Go To” Site for Behavioral Ethics

EthicalSystems.org, which we have discussed many times here at BLE, is a must-read for anyone interested in behavioral ethics.  Put it on your favorites list, add it to your browser, make a sticky note reminding yourself to visit often — in other words, do what you can to be a regular visitor to this site.  You won’t be sorry.

If you need more of a nudge (!), here is a sampling of three relevant recent posts from the EthicalSystems.org blog:

1. Framing the Language of Business:  This post, which discusses Scott Killingsworth’s excellent article on the power of framing in the business context, has clear implications for the legal community.  Just as the “business as war” frame can lead to ethical lapses, Killingsworth’s article provides a sober warning against the excesses that framing “litigation as war” can produce.
2. Testing, Testing: Drawing Conclusions From Test Environments: This post focuses on a recent work by Professor Donald Langevoort of Georgetown Law School, who was one of the first scholars to write about behavioral legal ethics (well before we had a name for it), beginning with his 1993 article, Where Were the Lawyers? A Behavioral Inquiry Into Lawyers’ Responsibility for Clients’ Fraud.  In his recent work, Prof. Langevoort describes the state of empirical research and its application in the compliance field, but his discussion of behavioral science has wide-ranging application for virtually any area of ethical decision-making.
3. An Executive Order Promoting Behavioral Science: This post provides a rich description of the importance of President Obama’s recent executive order mandating that federal agencies look for ways to apply the insights from behavioral science to promote public policy in executive branch decision-making.  Not that there was much doubt, but behavioral science has arrived — front and center — in policy discussions, now and for the future.

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