Living With the Dragon: Acting Ethically in a World of Unintended Consequences

The book consists of a short introduction to the significance of unintended consequences and four chapters. The first chapter develops a typology of unintended consequences and distinguishes them from historical contingencies. The second chapter analyzes three types of causes of such consequences: worldly, practical and psychological causes. The third explores the significant problems these consequences pose for standard moral theories. The fourth and final chapter examines how we might begin both to think about and cope with unintended consequences in an ethically good way.

Bio

Ms. Daryl Koehn is the Cullen Chair of Business Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. She has a Ph.D. in ethics from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and an MBA in finance from Northwestern University. Her writings have been translated into many foreign languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian Bahasi.