Care, Contract, Relativism and Absolutism: The Second Set of Theories
Beyond the famous three lies a second set of theories, and they are where the interesting questions in this paper increasingly come from.
Author: Prince Luthra
Three Ways to Judge an Action: Duty, Consequence, Character
Almost every case study in this paper can be argued three ways. Knowing which three is the difference between an opinion and an answer.
The Determinants: Why People Behave Ethically, or Fail To
If consequences are the effects of ethics, determinants are its causes. This is the part of the chapter that explains why two officers in identical circumstances behave differently.
What Ethics Does to a Society
A society’s ethics is not measured by what its people believe. It is measured by what a stranger can safely assume about the next person he deals with.
What Ethics Does to Governance and Public Administration
Governance is where ethics stops being an idea about people and becomes a question about power — who holds it, how it is used, and whether anyone believes in it afterwards.
What Ethics Does to an Organisation: Infosys, Tata and Enron
Three names settle almost any question on organisational ethics: two that built value on it, and one that proved what its absence costs.
What Ethics Costs and Pays the Individual
Ethical conduct is usually taught as though it were costless. It is not, and pretending otherwise produces answers no examiner believes.
How a Civil Servant Practises Probity — and What Defeats It
Knowing what probity is settles nothing. The question that decides a career is what an officer actually does on an ordinary Tuesday, under pressure, with nobody watching.
The Two Components of Probity: Professional Integrity and Procedural Uprightness
Probity has two halves, and candidates almost always write about only one. The half they forget is the one that actually fails in Indian administration.
The Philosophical Basis of Probity: From Aristotle to Kautilya
Every ethics answer improves the moment it stops asserting and starts reasoning. These six traditions are where the reasoning comes from — four Western, two Indian, each giving probity a different defence.
