When good things happen to bad people

"People seem to use shame as a way of capturing attention," he says. "It seems that there's little people can do that really leads to their banishment from the public sphere."

That ultimately may be the case with Jayson Blair, the young New York Times reporter who plagiarized and fabricated material in his stories. He was recently on the covers of both Newsweek and New York magazines, and is working on a book, according to an interview last week in The New York Observer.

Though admitting he feels guilty, a seemingly unapologetic Mr. Blair told that publication that he wants the story he's writing to be a "cautionary tale" for others who might be self-destructing in a job.

If his book does end up in bookstores, it would join that of another young, ostracized journalist, Stephen Glass, who made up stories while writing for The New Republic five years ago and recently published a novel about it, "The Fabulist."

"That is shameless," says Professor Lawry, who is less convinced that the lack of shame is one of the major causes of society's ethical problems - saying the drive to succeed seems like a bigger factor. But he admits that shamelessness "does break down barriers and inhibitions we otherwise might have."

Ethicists want to see more discussions about these issues - something they say has been occurring more often in the past few decades, perhaps because of the conflict between what people feel is right and the actions they see around them.

What might help, says Deni Elliott, director of the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana, is for society - including the media - to do a better job of tackling what happens after an ethical lapse.

"We do a lousy job in this society both in public and in private, in terms of moving beyond a moral mistake," she says. "Publicizing mistakes is fine and it's important, but unfortunately, that's where the story stops.... And that's where the story that citizens need begins," she says.

For starters, people need to be better about owning up to their mistakes, rather than excusing them - which is part of why the shamelessness comes about, she says. But she notes there aren't a lot of models for what it looks like to make things right again after a misstep. Getting past it can also involve society's understanding of forgiveness, another topic that doesn't get discussed much, she says.

In the end, cases like Blair's allow people to look at how they behave and learn from it, she says, noting that it's worth thinking about why more victims of Blair's erroneous reporting didn't come forward. "The best opportunity for moral growth and development for all of us," she says, "is in the presence of a moral mistake."

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