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.
Fortune favours the bold
Almost every case study in this paper can be argued three ways. Knowing which three is the difference between an opinion and an answer.
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.
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.
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.
Three names settle almost any question on organisational ethics: two that built value on it, and one that proved what its absence costs.
Ethical conduct is usually taught as though it were costless. It is not, and pretending otherwise produces answers no examiner believes.
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.
Abstract virtue persuades nobody. These five careers are the ones worth carrying into the hall, because each demonstrates a different face of probity.
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.
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.