In the shadow of various business scandals and societal crises, scholars and practitioners have developed a growing interest in authentic leadership. This approach to leadership assumes that leaders may access and leverage their “true selves” and “core values” and that the combination of these two elements forms the basis from which they act resolutely, lead ethically, and benefit others. Drawing on Heidegger’s work, we argue that a concern for authenticity can indeed instigate a leadership ethic, albeit one that acknowledges the unfounded openness of existence and its inherent relationality. On this basis, we propose an ethics-as-practice approach in which leaders respond to the situation at hand by being “attuned to attunement,” which cultivates an openness to otherness and a responsibility to others.

The puzzle of the self-torturer raises intriguing questions concerning rationality, cyclic preferences, and resoluteness. Interestingly, what makes the case puzzling has not been clearly pinpointed. The puzzle, it seems, is that a series of rational choices foreseeably leads the self-torturer to an option that serves his preferences worse than the one with which he started. But this is a very misleading way of casting the puzzle. I pinpoint the real puzzle of the self-torturer and, in the process, reveal a neglected but crucial dimension of instrumental rationality.