We recently published a guest post on the ethics of the decision-making that led to the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster. That post was adapted from a new book called Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It. The authors are Max Bazerman, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Ann Tenbrunsel, a professor of business ethics at Notre Dame.
Blind Spots looks into the gap between our intended and actual behavior; why we often overestimate our ability to do what’s right; and how we convince ourselves to do what we want rather than what we should. The authors tie their theory to a string of recent blowups, including: baseball’s steroid scandal, Enron’s collapse, Bernie Madoff‘s fraud, and corruption in the tobacco industry.
Brazerman and Tenbrunsel have agreed to answer your questions, so fire away in the comments section. As with all our Q&A’s, we’ll post their answers in short course.
To prime the pump, here’s the Table of Contents from Blind Spots:
1. The Gap between Intended and Actual Ethical Behavior
2. Why Traditional Approaches to Ethics Won’t Save You
3. When We Act against Our Own Ethical Values
4. Why You Aren’t as Ethical as You Think You Are
5. When We Ignore Unethical Behavior
6. Placing False Hope in the “Ethical Organization”
7. Why We Fail to Fix Our Corrupted Institutions
8. Narrowing the Gap: Interventions for Improving Ethical Behavior
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Hello,
Here’s my ethical question: I believe the dairy industry is cruel, with the forced breeding of female animals, the crating of veal and the abuse and callous killing of male offspring. I do not eat meat and pretty successfully avoid other animal products, but I find it hard to get all the way off dairy, usually for convenience or out of consideration for people who are feeding me or eating with me. Why can’t I put the suffering and death of baby animals over convenience and social niceties?
I believe that legislators often have to choose between acting in the public interest or in the interest of major campaign contributors. In your book, you give the example of legislators who received large campaign contribution from auditing firms and then blocked legislation
to impose ethical standards on those firms.
As you also explain in your book, many people mean well but act in unethical ways because they are unaware of the ethical implications of their decisions.
Suppose, for a moment, that my Congressman sincerely wishes to act in the public interest, but that he has convinced himself that what is good for his campaign contributors is good for the public. (I can think of many reasons why this is unlikely to be true. One reason is that
corporations that can afford to make large campaign contributions desire legislation that will protect their market share, whereas legislation that promotes competition benefits the economy as a whole.)
Suppose further that I have 60 seconds to convince my Congressman that the policies he promotes benefit only his campaign contributors, not the American people whom he genuinely wishes to serve. What should I say to him?