Ethics and Decision Making: The Problem of Hard Questions

Speaker

Peter Conti-Brown

Class of 1965 Associate Professor of Financial Regulation

The Wharton School

Peter Conti-Brown’s Biography

CIMA®, CPWA®, CIMC®, and RMA℠ Eligible

Duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes

Option 1: Thursday, February 11th at 3:00pm ET

Option 2: Thursday, March 25th at 9:00am ET

This session will be interactive with group discussion and Q&A.

Course Description

In the final required ethics session, Professor Conti-Brown builds on previous discussions of ethics and culture to discuss how to operationalize these principles. Conti-Brown introduces the concept of easy, medium, and hard questions. Easy ethical questions are those that essentially belong to the criminal law. Nearly everyone agrees on right and wrong on these questions and while the financial industry has had more than its share of individuals and firms getting these questions wrong, these are not worth our main attention. Medium questions are those where most people agree on the same ends but disagree on the appropriate means. And hard questions are those where people in good faith disagree on what constitutes ethical behavior. After developing this framework, Conti-Brown guides participants through its application to several examples in several aspects of the financial services industry.