On his book The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior
Cover Interview of January 30, 2019
Lastly
My hope for the book is that it will push behavioral
research more into the ethical arena. Clearly, we live in a world with high rates
of ordinary unethicality. Though it affects the evolution of social and legal
norms, this area of study has been neglected because the legal system focuses more
on gross violations of the law, assuming that these present greater risks than
unethical behavior by ordinary people in ordinary situations.
Moreover, behavioral economics, having dominated conversations
between law and the behavioral sciences, has led academics and others in the behavioral
insights field to focus more on fixing biases and heuristics in areas such as
health, financial decision making, and energy, than on understanding the role
of fairness and justice. Behavioral ethics, on the other hand, though it is a
much younger field, has the potential to shift the attention of legal
researchers and policy makers to the importance of the behavioral sciences in
accounting for improvements in people’s ethical decision-making. Behavioral
ethics scholars have showed us how good people are constantly misleading themselves
about their behavior; they believe they are within the realms of law and
morality, when in reality, they are not. I hope that the book will lead more scholars,
behavioral insight units, managers and policy makers to focus on trying to make people
more ethical, not just more rational.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
My hope for the book is that it will push behavioral research more into the ethical arena. Clearly, we live in a world with high rates of ordinary unethicality. Though it affects the evolution of social and legal norms, this area of study has been neglected because the legal system focuses more on gross violations of the law, assuming that these present greater risks than unethical behavior by ordinary people in ordinary situations.
Moreover, behavioral economics, having dominated conversations between law and the behavioral sciences, has led academics and others in the behavioral insights field to focus more on fixing biases and heuristics in areas such as health, financial decision making, and energy, than on understanding the role of fairness and justice. Behavioral ethics, on the other hand, though it is a much younger field, has the potential to shift the attention of legal researchers and policy makers to the importance of the behavioral sciences in accounting for improvements in people’s ethical decision-making. Behavioral ethics scholars have showed us how good people are constantly misleading themselves about their behavior; they believe they are within the realms of law and morality, when in reality, they are not. I hope that the book will lead more scholars, behavioral insight units, managers and policy makers to focus on trying to make people more ethical, not just more rational.