Restoring Responsibility
Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare

Argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies.

Dennis F. Thompson (Author)

9780521547222, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 September 2004

360 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'… well-written and intellectually stimulating …'. The British Journal of Leadership in Public Services

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.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]