Restoring Responsibility

Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. Thompson suggests that we stop thinking about public ethics in terms of individual vices (such as selfishness or sexual misconduct) and start thinking about it in terms of institutional vices (such as abuse of power and lack of accountability).

Introduction; Part I. Demands of Institutional Politics: 1. The moral responsibility of public officials: the problem of many hands; 2. Ascribing responsibility to advisers in government; 3. Bureaucracy and democracy; 4. Judicial responsibility: the problem of many minds; 5. Representatives in the welfare state; Part II. Varieties of Institutional Failure: 6. Democratic secrecy: the dilemma of accountability; 7. Mediated corruption: the case of the Keating Five; 8. Election time: normative implications of temporal properties of the electoral process in the US; 9. Hypocrisy and democracy; 10. Private life and public office; Part III. Extensions of Institutional Responsibility: 11. Restoring distrust: the ethics of oversight; 12. The institutional turn in professional ethics; 13. Hospital ethics; 14. Understanding financial conflicts of interest in medicine; 15. The privatization of business ethics; 16. Democratic theory and global society.