Organizational Ethics and Moral Integrity in Secular Societies

This book explores an undeveloped area in postmodern thought:  organizational ethics.  Ethical debates and analyses usually focus on a particular act or action, an actor, and/or how a secular society should address any of those particular persons or events. In the Post Modern age, ethical decisions and policies are characterized by moral and cultural pluralism.  However, there is a second factor that complicates ethical and policy decisions even further.  This book argues that in the postmodern age ethical decisions often need to be understood as part of the decision making of organizations and bureaucracies.  Organizational decisions often have direct bearing on the choices made by individuals.  Two areas that exemplify postmodern issue are the areas of health care and education.  For example the decision making of Admissions Officers in American higher education, are influenced by decisions that have been made by the university about the size of the class and the diversity of the class.  Health Care organizations make policy decisions that affect every aspect of a patient’s care from admission to treatment and the types of care that are or are not offered. Both education and health care are the object of the significant investment of resources, both areas are value laden in postmodern, pluralistic societies, and yet we do not have a comprehensive method to understand them or evaluate them. This book is of interest to bioethicists, physicians, nurses, health care policy students, educational policy experts, students and government regulators.

Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., is a University Professor at St. Joseph’s University Philadelphia, PA. He joined the faculty at St. Joseph’s after completing fourteen years of service as the sixteenth president of Loyola University New Orleans.

Wildes entered the Society of Jesus in 1976 after graduating from St. Joseph’s University. He holds advanced degrees in theology and in philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1993 and his professional work is in the field of bioethics, a field in which he has published and lectured extensively.

Wildes has delivered a number of invited lectures and papers and has written widely on bioethics and public policy authoring over sixty referred articles. He authored Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2000), and is the editor or co-editor of four other books. He has lectured at Tulane University School of Medicine, LSU Medical School, and given grand rounds for the Ochsner Clinic Foundation.  He has delivered over ninety invited lectures on bioethics, medicine, and health care policy. Currently he is developing a new book on organizational ethics in health care.

He has also served as associate editor to and on the editorial board of a number of ethics and medicine journals and book series, and he is a founding editor of the Journal of Christian Bioethics. Prior to becoming President of Loyola University, Wildes was a member of the Department of Philosophy and a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University where he also held a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Wildes has served as a trustee of seven colleges and universities.  He is currently a member of the Boards of Trustees of Rockhurst University in Kansas City and a Trustee of Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. While in New Orleans, he was an active member of the New Orleans community and a leader in the post-Katrina recovery. He served on the board of GNO, Inc., which spearheads economic development for the ten-parish Greater New Orleans region. He was a member of the New Orleans Business Council and he served as Chair of the Board of Directors of Friends of New Orleans a national post-Katrina recovery organization. He was the founding Chair of the Ethics Review Board for the City of New Orleans. The ERB, created post Katrina, oversees the Office of the Inspector General for the city of New Orleans. He has served as a Commissioner of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad in 2010 and 2011 where he helped reorganize the governance of the Railroad. In July 2011, he was appointed to serve on the New Orleans Civil Service Commission. While serving on the Commission he was elected to Chair the Commission and he held that position until 2014 when he stepped down. During that time, he shepherded a major reform of the New OrleansCivil Service system.