Ethics and Crisis Management

A volume in Ethics in Practice
Series Editors Robert A. Giacalone, Temple University
and Carole L. Jurkiewicz, Louisiana State University
The daily process of public service provision and administration is filled with value judgments and
value trade-offs, and the safeguarding of just and fair processes is key to the public's trust in governing
institutions. In crises, public decision-makers face complex ethical judgments under great uncertainty, timepressure,
and heightened public scrutiny. A lack of attention to the ethical dimensions of crises has lead
decision-makers to long-shadow crises that never reach closure. Furthermore, crises triggered by unethical
conduct by public officials steadily feed people's cynicism about politicians and bureaucracy. The fact that
decision-makers often are judged on how they dealt with ethical issues in crises further underlines the
importance of this topic.
Little scholarly attention had been paid to how ethics play into and are dealt with in situations when
they matters most - in crises. In order to improve government performance we need to analyze the ethical dilemmas and normative challenges that face
practitioners in crises. This book meets this challenge by presenting a public policy framework for analyzing the ethical dilemmas in crises and
introduces ten empirical chapters written by prominent public administration and crisis management scholars. The cases reviewed include Abu Ghraib,
the 9/11 Commission, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Memorial Hospital Tragedy during Hurricane Katrina. Building off the empirical focus on
inherent ethical challenges in crises and actor ethics in evaluation and judgment, the concluding chapter outlines important lessons about criteria for
crisis decision-making and strategies, the poisoned apple of bureaucratic discretion, and the nature of post-crisis evaluations.
The book is geared toward students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with public management, public sector ethics, public policy, crisis
management, and the implication of these factors on business and corporate crisis management.