Synopses & Reviews
Why do leaders fail ethically? In this book, Terry L. Price uses a multi-disciplinary approach to an understanding of immorality in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. He argues that leaders can know that a certain kind of behavior is generally required by morality but still be mistaken as to whether the relevant moral requirement applies to them in a particular situation and whether others are protected by this requirement. Price demonstrates how leaders make exceptions of themselves, explains how the justificatory force of leadership gives rise to such exception-making, and develops normative protocols that leaders should adopt.
Review
"This is an excellent book. To my knowledge it is far and away the best treatment of the ethics of leadership. It engages the business ethics literature as well as relevant philosophical literature. The treatment is deep, well-balanced, and original. Overall the book is written in an exceptionally lucid and accessible style." --Prof. Allen Buchanan
Synopsis
This book brings a multi-desciplinary approach to bear on the general question of why leaders fail ethically. Its main thesis is that ethical failures in leadership are best understood in terms of mistaken beliefs that leaders hold about whether they are justified in making exceptions of themselves and excluding others from commonly accepted protections of morality. Although scholars within the social sciences and humanities have long sought to understand leadership behavior, this book takes as its rationale the need for a comprehensive ethical analysis that can be applied across leadership contexts---in public, private, and non-profit sectors.
About the Author
Terry L. Price is associate professor of Leadership Studies at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond. He has contributed to American Philosophical Quarterly, The Encyclopedia of Leadership, and The Journal of Political Philosophy, and is editor, with J. Thomas Wren and Douglas A. Hicks, of the three-volume reference set The International Library of Leadership.
Table of Contents
1. Volitional and cognitive accounts of ethical failures in leadership; 2. The nature of exception making; 3. Making exceptions for leaders; 4. Justifying leadership; 5. The ethics of authentic transformational leadership; 6. Change and responsibility; 7. Ignorance, history, and moral membership.