Introduction: Insurance and Business Ethics

Abstract

The study of the specific problems of insurance ethics remains relatively undeveloped, either from sociological or business ethical perspectives. More recently, sociologists and socio-legal scholars have given a sustained new wave of attention to insurance (see, e.g., Baker and Simon 2002; Baker 2010; Ericson et al. 2003; Doyle and Ericson 2010) while the particular problems of insurance ethics have also received fresh scrutiny (see, e.g., Flanagan et al. 2007). These disciplinary approaches begin to meet in the collection of articles in this special issue, which examine diverse contexts and dimensions of insurance business ethics at both empirical and normative levels. Insurance arrangements are very important to consider from an ethical perspective, as they not only reconfigure risk but also reshape ethical responsibilities (Baker 2002; Brinkmann 2005). As Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Jyrri Liukko explore in their article in this special issue, private insurance creates an important kind of social solidarity among those in the risk pool, although this solidarity is not necessarily evident to or understood by the insured; such solidarity was perhaps clearer to participants in early forms of insurance featuring small pools of people in relatively closely knit communities sharing risks, compared to the much vaster and more institutionally complex forms that insurance often takes today. Yet, insurance remains a crucial element of the contemporary social fabric, though this may be taken for granted by many, and is perhaps most evident to those who cannot afford adequate coverage. Indeed, micro-insurance in developing countries, as discussed by Ralf Radermacher and Johannes Brinkmann in their article, represents something of a return to the historical communitarian roots of insurance. On the other hand, several of the articles in this volume might be seen as beginning to suggest that the core values that were more easily evident in early, simpler forms of insurance may have sometimes become corroded as a result of the contemporary ways in which insurance is now organized. For example, Bill Lesch and Johannes Brinkmann raise important questions in their article about the responsibility of insurers as co-contributors to problems of insurance fraud. It is also important to note also that insurance ethics is not just about insurance: insurance also governs (Ericson et al. 2003) and reshapes responsibility among insured individuals and organizations in a huge variety of other social and institutional settings, for example, playing a crucial role in the evolution and direction of tort law as Christian Lahnstein argues in his piece, or facilitating risky technological megaprojects like the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil venture in the Gulf of Mexico, as Alexandros Kyrtsis examines in his article. Gathered at the world headquarters of Munich Re, near the famous English Gardens in Munich, for 2 days in February 2011, a small and interdisciplinary group of academics and insurance professionals from seven countries grappled with ethical questions in diverse contexts of the world of insurance. The articles that make up this special issue were all presented at that workshop. The remainder of this short introduction gives a quick overview of the issues that are addressed in each article, and then briefly ends with a call for dialog and future work to start to distill more general principles of insurance business ethics. The articles that follow are wide-ranging but can be broadly situated in three groups. A first group of articles addresses the particular ethical challenges facing different A. Doyle (&) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: aaron_doyle@carleton.ca