Omni College Plus Up to October 2019

they may say. ‘I’m just getting my fair share.’ They may even self-identify as heroic
Robin Hoods who are combatting an illegitimate system.
Bazerman discusses cases of people ‘stumbling into bad behavior’, saying that:
[M]uch unethical conduct that goes on, whether in social life or work life,
happens because people are unconsciously fooling themselves. They overlook
transgressions — bending a rule to help a colleague, overlooking information that might
damage the reputation of a client — because it is in their interest to do so (Bazerman,
1).
And surely what Bazerman is saying is true of many cases of misconduct—but not
of the sort of misconduct involved in organized crime. Organized crime is not about
lacking clarity; it is having it abusing it.
Anand et al. mention various rationalizations and ploys used by wrong-doers:
denial of responsibility (‘I didn’t do it’), denial of injuries (‘nobody was hurt’), denial of
victim (‘nobody was hurt’), social weighing (‘in the big scheme of things, what I did
wasn’t wrong and may even have been good’), appeal to a higher morality (‘petty laws
are less important than existential fulfillment/religious dictates/…’), and the metaphor