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.
Category: Ethics
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.
Probity in Indian Public Life: Five Careers Worth Quoting
Abstract virtue persuades nobody. These five careers are the ones worth carrying into the hall, because each demonstrates a different face of probity.
What Probity Actually Means (And Why It Is Not Honesty)
Most candidates define probity as honesty and move on. That sentence costs marks, because the examiner is asking about something honesty does not cover: uprightness that can be shown to a stranger.
The Collector Who Asked Why 90% of Her Students Were Dreaming of Careers They Could Never Reach
In Tonk, a District Magistrate found a gap between what children wanted and what their arithmetic allowed. Her response says something important about aptitude in public service.