Moral Reasoning and Value Statements Assessment – Professional Code of Ethics Paper

Review

The key point of this class was to practice finding (and weighing) morally relevant reasons to support a value claim. A value claim has to have a human individual (or corporate agent) who acts knowingly to focus on. Our case offers a couple of places to turn our attention, but we decided on Donald Bevalaqua, founder of the healthcare consulting firm, who was hired by Andover Management, a health care hedge fund firm to help them understand changes in government policy. Scouring the text, we came up with several reasons to support the claim: “Bevalaqua acted reprehensibly (thumbs down).” We then ranked the reasons, coming up with something like the following.

Bevalaqua acted reprehensibly (thumbs down) because…

He received material non-public information from a former colleague in the government, and passed it on

He was paid handsomely by his employers at Andover

He bragged to folks at Andover about his “superior” services…

There could be more reasons, but it was important also to rank reasons so we gradually got in focus what’s really crucial.

Each of these reasons, combined with the value claim, constitutes a “Value Statement” or ethical argument. But in addition to claims and reasons, arguments operate with a third part: warrants. Try yourself to make explicit the warrant that connects each of these reasons to the Value Claim (i.e., Bevalaqua acted reprehensibly). Bring you Schwab Investment Advisors code to class again on Friday, along with the reading, so we can continue where we left off.