Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership

Price brings a multi-disciplinary approach to an understanding of why leaders fail ethically.

Terry Price (Author)

9780521545976, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 22 August 2005

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

"This is an excellent book. To my knowledge it is far and away the best treatment of the ethics of leadership. It engages the business ethics literature as well as relevant philosophical literature. The treatment is deep, well-balanced, and original. Overall the book is written in an exceptionally lucid and accessible style." --Prof. Allen Buchanan

Why do leaders fail ethically? In this book, Terry L. Price applies a multi-disciplinary approach to an understanding of immorality in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. He argues that leaders can know that a certain kind of behavior is generally required by morality but nonetheless be mistaken as to whether the relevant moral requirement applies to them in a particular situation and whether others are protected by this requirement. Price articulates how leaders make exceptions of themselves, explains how the justificatory force of leadership gives rise to such exception-making, and develops normative prescriptions that leaders should adopt as a response to this feature of their moral psychology.

1. Volitional and cognitive accounts of ethical failures in leadership
2. The nature of exception making
3. Making exceptions for leaders
4. Justifying leadership
5. The ethics of authentic transformational leadership
6. Change and responsibility
7. Ignorance, history, and moral membership.

Subject Areas: Business & management [KJ], Political science & theory [JPA], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Social & political philosophy [HPS]