The questions asked in practical ethics most often take this form: What is the right thing to do? But equally important is a question that is less often asked: What is the right thing to do when others do not do what they ought to do? The ethics of oversight addresses this question. It focuses on the moral responsibility for seeing that other people act rightly and, when they do not, the responsibility for acting to correct the problem.

Overseers now play a more important role than ever, and so, therefore, should the ethics of oversight. In modern society, particularly in organizations, we have to trust the decision makers to act rightly because we cannot monitor everything they do. We trust them in part because we trust the people charged with overseeing them. When both the decision makers and their overseers betray our trust, the violation is more than just a double failure of individual responsibility. It points to a systematic problem of institutional responsibility.

the scandals: the failure of oversight

We have seen some striking failures of this kind of responsibility in recent years. I concentrate on three cases from the United States – involving a corporation, a church and a government agency – but their general features, especially the responses to the failures, are relevant to organizations in many other countries. What is striking is how similar the responses are, even though the organizations and the wrongs are quite different.