Mathias Risse, Harvard University
June 2026
Leadership development has produced a remarkable set of frameworks — adaptive leadership, principled negotiation, public narrative among them — that have not only long been among the flagship teaching areas at Harvard Kennedy School, but that also share a characteristic double claim: each presents itself as simultaneously more effective and more principled than the alternatives it displaces. Adaptive leadership contrasts with the exercise of positional authority; principled negotiation contrasts with positional bargaining and power-based imposition; public narrative contrasts with brand management, performed identity, and emotional manipulation. The Moral Architecture Project examines what those claims mean ethically — and finds, across all three frameworks, a consistent structure.
Certain ethical requirements are built into each framework: they are constitutive of what the practice is, such that systematically violating them means using the vocabulary and procedures of the framework in service of purposes that invert its foundational commitments. But each framework also leaves substantial ethical questions open — about the defensibility of the goals being pursued, obligations to those outside the immediate process, power asymmetries that the framework cannot address from within its own logic, and the prior question of when this practice is the appropriate response at all. This consistent structure — ethics built in, judgment required — I call Limited Ethics, and the method for mapping it I call moral architecture, borrowing from the built environment the distinction between load-bearing walls and open walls. The convergence of findings across three independent frameworks is not coincidental: it reflects structural features that all three share.
The project is developed at three levels for each of the three frameworks. A theoretical essay of approximately 12,000 words provides the full analytical treatment: developing the moral architecture method, analyzing four positions on the relationship between the framework and ethics, defending Limited Ethics against alternatives, working through test cases, and situating the findings in broader conversations in professional ethics and moral philosophy. A practitioner-facing essay of approximately 6,000 words translates the core findings into guidance for those doing the work: explaining what the framework demands, mapping what it leaves open, and developing the practical habits of ethical practice that mastery of technique alone cannot supply. A shorter nutshell piece captures the essential argument for readers who want the main points without the full analytical apparatus. Together the three levels of treatment reflect a conviction that runs through the project itself: that the ethical questions these frameworks raise matter both for those who think about the theory of professional ethics and for those whose daily work puts the frameworks into practice — and that serving both audiences well requires not abbreviation but genuine translation.