Description

For instructors as well as producers, the ongoing study of professional ethics is a continuing education class struggle. By the very nature of the subject, ethics classes run the risk of being filled with platitudes or devolving into sermons. Platitudes and sermons do not make for good attendee engagement, which ultimately hurts the effectiveness of the class.

This seminar uses a few minutes to make this point and to explain what follows. The first hour is to demonstrate that professional ethics are worth studying – and worthy of continuing education – and do have a few objective characteristics to them. The hour concludes with a brief review of how professional ethics is good in theory and often quite bad in practice – it looks at the process of “moral disengagement” from an Insurance Journal article.

The second and third hour seek to engage the students by reviewing actual, case-based situations to determine the best ethical resolution and decide how the controversy could have been avoided. In each instance, the scenario presented is based on a real case. Students receive “resolution” of the dilemma by the discussion of the outcome of the case, but are also left to ponder some of the ethics quandaries that are embedded in each situation.