Restoring Responsibility Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare

Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. Thompson suggests that we stop thinking about public ethics in terms of individual vices (such as selfishness or sexual misconduct) and start thinking about it in terms of institutional vices (such as abuse of power and lack of accountability).

In this important collection of essays Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. He suggests that we should stop thinking so much about public ethics in terms of individual vices (such as selfishness or sexual misconduct) and start thinking about it more in terms of institutional vices (such as abuse of power and lack of accountability). Combining theory and practice with many concrete examples and proposals for reform, these essays could be used in courses in applied ethics or political theory and will be read by professionals and graduate students in schools of political science, public policy, law, public health, journalism and business.

Introduction; Part I. Demands of Institutional Politics: 1. The moral responsibility of public officials: the problem of many hands; 2. Ascribing responsibility to advisers in government; 3. Bureaucracy and democracy; 4. Judicial responsibility: the problem of many minds; 5. Representatives in the welfare state; Part II. Varieties of Institutional Failure: 6. Democratic secrecy: the dilemma of accountability; 7. Mediated corruption: the case of the Keating Five; 8. Election time: normative implications of temporal properties of the electoral process in the US; 9. Hypocrisy and democracy; 10. Private life and public office; Part III. Extensions of Institutional Responsibility: 11. Restoring distrust: the ethics of oversight; 12. The institutional turn in professional ethics; 13. Hospital ethics; 14. Understanding financial conflicts of interest in medicine; 15. The privatization of business ethics; 16. Democratic theory and global society.

In this important collection Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. He suggests that we should stop thinking so much about public ethics in terms of individual vices and start thinking about it more in terms of institutional vices.

Dennis F. Thompson is Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy and Professor of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.