Practical Philosophy of Ethics

(Music) I'm Dr. Hernan Murdock, and I am very excited about this course related to the practical application of ethical principles and how we move from theory to practice. And with me is Rob Clark, who has a lot of experience in this subject area. Hello, Rob. Dr. Murdock, it's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to this. So tell us a little bit about this course and what it's all about. This is probably going to take people on a journey that they were not expecting to go down, which is a little bit of a revisit of philosophy class. One of those subjects that you took in school and you're thinking, why am I taking this? I'm never going to use this stuff in real life. Well, lo and behold, we as auditors need to understand that. So we're going to talk about the different ways in which we define ethics. And because quite frankly, you can use that term and people can pour different meanings into it and they might have different views. It's important that we kind of peel the layers back, understand not only the definition of that, but how we apply that to our organizations to build an ethical climate. So it sounds like it's going to be a blend between theory and practice. Yes. All right. In terms of who this course is for, is it for people within internal audit only? Is it for individuals within the organization and how they are driving the creation and maintaining an ethical culture? Who this course for? Oh, I think that's a great question. I think it's quite frankly for all of the above. If you consider, obviously auditors are likely to lap this up because we're talking about things that we as auditors should do. Who else might benefit from this? Quite honestly, C-suite executives, people who are on boards, what are the expectations of our organization to maintain an ethical climate? How do we establish that? Because quite frankly, the auditors can't do that. They can't operationalize some of these principles. We as auditors might be able to advise management as to how to do that, but ultimately it's the decision makers who perhaps are going to get some insights from this that are going to help them to reevaluate some of their current strategies and documents. Excellent. Well, I am very much looking forward to this course. Thank you very much, Rob. Let's learn together. Let's do it.