Moral agency as victim of the vulnerability of autonomy

This paper draws upon a research study of accountants and HR specialists. The study eschewed hypothetical scenarios and focused upon those situations and scenarios that the interviewees defined as causing them ethical concerns. There are two distinct but related issues arising from the paper. The first is that the singular categorisations of moral reasoning attributed to individuals when faced with hypothetical scenarios by many who write on the issue of moral reasoning, did not correspond to the fluidity in moral choices faced by the interviewees as they experienced their unfolding moral dilemmas. The second issue relates to the unwillingness of the interviewees to give voice to their concerns, not only externally, but also within their employing organisations. The tensions within the two cases featured were held in check only by the diminution of the autonomy of the two principal actors. As a consequence, the exercise of moral agency was denied.     

Rational Moralists and Moral Rationalists Value-Based Management: Model,Criterion and Validation

This paper considers ethical decision making by blending three streams of related research: cognitive moral development of the decision maker, rational choice theory and a subjective expected utility model. Ethical dilemmas can be defined as situations where moral certainty is compromised by rational cognition. In this paper, the authors assume that some people use a morality-first perspective and others a rationality-first perspective. Ethical scenarios were written and used to test hypotheses derived from this perspective. The instrument developed was shown to be in need of further refinement. Results are discussed in terms of relationships between participant-characteristics variables overall and subscale responses to the ethical scenarios.     

Pay Inversion at Universities: Is it Ethical?

This paper examines an important issue facing academia-pay inversion. It discusses how inversion is accompanied by ethical issues including secrecy, moral dilemmas for faculty, honesty, and keeping promises. It then examines this issue from five ethical viewpoints: a legalistic perspective, ethical egoism, utilitarianism, distributive justice, and Kants deontological approach. As part of the discussion, the effect of the moral philosophy on the universitys corporate culture is examined, with attention given to morale and productivity. Finally, alternatives to pay inversion that universities may want to consider are discussed.     

Ethical decision–making: a multidimensional construct

Poor ethical decision–making costs industry billions of dollars a year and damages the images of corporations. Thus, by answering the question ‘Why do individuals behave as they do when confronted with ethical issues?’ ethical theory can provide businesses with a means to create a more ethical climate and a more successful operation. This study tested the Ethical Decision–Making Model with accountability (Beu & Buckley 2001), which uses theory that suggests that ethical behavior is influenced by the individual, the issue, social relationships (accountability), and the organization in which the employee is embedded (Brass, Butterfield & Skaggs 1988; Frink & Klimoski 1998). The results showed that individuals’ thought processes (cognitive moral development), personalities (locus of control, hostility and aggression, Machiavellianism), and gender influence how they respond to ethical dilemmas, as well as the salience of the moral issue (moral intensity) and the environmental context (work/school).     

In Defence of Principles? A Response to Lurie and Albin

This article presents a response to a recent article by Yotam Lurie and Robert Albin in which they discuss and present the merits of casuistry as a method for resolving moral dilemmas in business, principally by developing ‹edifying’ perspectives on the situation, and in doing so highlight the shortcomings of principles (such as the categorical imperative) in generating insights and thereby moral choices. The present article accepts the importance of cases and examples as a source of insight, but argues that the process of conceptualisation involved in understanding these necessarily involves some reference to principles. However, principles and cases are best seen as complementary to the ethical decision-making process rather than in opposition. The complementary functions of these are highlighted in processes such as reflection upon experience, in applications of moral imagination and in the integration of emotive and cognitive elements in ethical choice.     

Successful Psychopaths: Are They Unethical Decision-Makers and Why?

Successful psychopaths, defined as individuals in the general population who nevertheless possess some degree of psychopathic traits, are receiving increasing amounts of empirical attention. To date, little is known about such individuals, specifically with regard to how they respond to ethical dilemmas in business contexts. This study investigated this relationship, proposing a mediated model in which the positive relationship between psychopathy and unethical decision-making is explained through the process of moral disengagement, defined as a cognitive orientation that facilitates unethical choice. The results of the study supported this model, and implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

The regulation of virtue: Cross-currents in professional ethics

This paper argues that more attention should be paid to the civic functions of ethical discourse about the professions and to the moral virtues inherent in their practice and traditions. The ability of professional ethics to articulate civic ideals and virtues is discussed in relation to three issues. First, should professional ethics aim to enlighten ethical understanding or to motivate ethical conduct? Second, how should professional ethics define the professional's moral responsibilities in the face of ethical dilemmas — should the professional attempt to resolve the dilemma ethically or to change the social conditions that create the dilemma in the first place? The third issue discussed in the paper is whether professional ethics should be based on the model of regulation and rational self-interest or on the model of virtue and a fundamental personal commitment to the ideal of a certain form of life? In order for work in professional ethics to attain intellectual credibility among a non-philosophical audience, it must develop a coherent and convincing position on each of these issues.     

Considerations in Ethical Decision-Making and Software Piracy

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual's attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person's ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy.     

What Cognitive Science Tells Us About Ethics and The Teaching of Ethics

A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives.     

“Me” versus “We” in moral dilemmas: Group composition and social influence effects on group utilitarianism

The paper is one of the first empirical attempts that builds on the moral dilemmas and group rationality literature to explore the way in which group composition with respect to group members’ individual choices in moral dilemmas and social influence processes impact on group moral choices. First individually and then, in small groups, 221 participants were asked to decide on 10 moral dilemmas. Our results show that emergent group level utilitarianism is higher than the average individual utilitarianism, yet, lower than the highest individual utilitarianism within groups. We also show that average individual utilitarianism positively predicts group utilitarianism while group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism has a negative effect on group utilitarianism. Next to group composition, minority influence processes explain additional variance in group utilitarianism, cognitive dissent having a positive influence, while normative deviance a negative influence on group utilitarianism. Majority influence has no significant influence on group utilitarianism. Finally, our results show that the relationship between group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism and emergent group utilitarianism is mediated by the two forms of minority influence.     

Practical Problems and Moral Values: Things We Tend to Ignore Revisited

The purpose behind this paper was twofold: (i) to reflect on situations where management had acted in an improper i.e. unethical manner, and (ii) to re-examine moral values that ought to have been addressed in working through these situations. The study included appraisals of power and authority, and the way these qualities were used or misused in a range of managerial and organisational situations. The paper illustrates difficulties associated with deciding which activities are illegal, which are unethical, and which are neither. Examples of unethical administrative practices such as payments to expedite compliance on contentious issues, persuading people to make favourable reports on sensitive issues and massaging the figures in committee situations were some of the activities which were alluded to. It was thought that if moral values such as trust, honesty and integrity were completely ignored in organisations, then organisations would find it difficult to survive and prosper.     

The central distinction in the theory of corporate moral personhood

Peter French has argued that conglomerate collectivities such as business corporations are moral persons and that aggregate collectivities such as lynch mobs are not. Two arguments are advanced to show that French's claim is flawed. First, the distinction between aggregates and conglomerates is, at best, a distinction of degree, not kind. Moreover, some aggregates show evidence of moral personhood. Second, French's criterion for distinguishing aggregates and conglomerates is based on inadequate grounds. Application of the criterion to specific cases requires an additional judgment of a pragmatic nature which undermines any attempt to demonstrate French's thesis that actual conglomerates are moral persons and aggregates are not. Thus, French's theory is seriously lacking both empirical basis and empirical relevance.     

A Philosophical Framework for Case Studies

People who teach business ethics seem locked between two general approaches: an applied philosophy approach that emphasizes the application of abstract ethical theories and principles to specific cases, and the case method approach that leaves the students without any more general theoretical framework with which to approach ethical issues. Classical American Pragmatism, understood as a school of philosophical thought, links these two approaches by providing a new grounding for moral theory in which moral rules are understood as working hypotheses abstracted from concrete situations and moralreasoning demands the return to concrete situations as the foundation for moral decision making that is inherently contextual. Thus moral decision making is bottom up rather than top down, and a sense of moral rightness comes not from the indoctrination of abstract principles but from attunement to the way in which moral beliefs and practices must be rooted naturally in the very conditions of human existence.     

The Effect of Organizational Culture and Ethical Orientation on Accountants' Ethical Judgments

This paper examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture in two large international CPA firms, auditors' personal values and the ethical orientation that those values dictate, and judgments in ethical dilemmas typical of those that accountants face. Using an experimental task consisting of multiple judgments designed to vary in "moral intensity" (Jones, 1991), and unique as well as tried-and-true approaches to variable measurements, this study examined the judgments of more than three hundred participants in our study. ANCOVA and path analysis results indicate that: (1) Ethical judgments in situations of high moral intensity are affected by personal values and by environmental variables, such as the professional code of conduct (direct and indirect effects) and previous ethics instruction (direct effect only). (2) Corporate ethical culture, and a relatively strong firm rules-orientation, affect auditors' idealism but not relativism, and therefore indirectly affect ethical judgments. Jones' (1991) moral intensity argument is supported: differences in the characteristics of specific judgment tasks apparently result in different decision processes.     

The Impact of Personal Gains on Cognitive Dissonance for Business Ethics Judgments

When managers make business ethics judgments, the decisioninevitably has impact on them. Sometimes managers reluctantly putorganizational profit as their first priority and make decisions against personal values. Howmanagers are affected by their business ethics judgments has rarely been examined. The purposeof this paper is to explore such an issue.Cognitive dissonance experienced by managers after makingbusiness ethics judgments is studied in this paper. It is hypothesized that thedegree of cognitive dissonance experienced by managers after making business ethicsjudgment is contingent upon (1) the nature of the judgment (ethical or unethical); (2)the magnitude of personal gains involved in the situation; and (3) managers' moraldevelopment.Two hundred and thirty-eight managers who attendednon-degree graduate management classes offered by a university participated in thisstudy. A business ethics situation of unfair competition with different amount of personalgains was used in this study. First, participants were asked to make a business ethicsjudgment about one of the situations. After making the judgment, cognitive dissonance andmoral development were measured for the participants. The analysis revealed thatan interaction effect was found for the three hypothesized independent variables. Generally speaking, however, the degree of cognitive dissonance experienced by managers wassignificantly affected mainly by their moral development.     

Moral dilemmas,moral reasons and moral learning: interpreting a real case in terms of particularistic theory

The core of the paper consists of dialogue from a true case where an employee experienced moral dilemmas following a disquieting directive from his manager. The case is considered from the perspective of Dancy's particularistic theory of moral reasons (with some insight also from Ross's theory of prima facie duties). This case was chosen not to illustrate the theory, but rather to test the assumption that an approach to moral judgement based on Ross and Dancy has general applicability. It is suggested that, in its simplest form, that approach approximates to the manner in which people in organisations, without prior knowledge of ethical theorising, would ordinarily deal with comparable situations, and so it can be relatively easy to learn given practice. Based on this case, some insight is also offered into individuals' moral learning, including their need for personal qualities such as assertiveness and independence of mind. In that context a reciprocal relationship between Dancy's approach and Werhane's thinking on moral imagination is suggested.     

Differences in the Perceptions of Moral Intensity in the Moral Decision Process: An Empirical Examination of Accounting Students

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the impact of moral issues on the moral decision-making process within the field of accounting. In particular, the study examined differences in the perceptions of the underlying characteristics of moral issues on the specific steps of the moral decision-making process of four different accounting situations. The research results suggested that student's perception of the components of moral intensity as well as the various stages of the moral decision-making process was influenced by the type and intensity of the moral issue. In general, accounting student's perceptions of the importance of these variables varied between less unethical and more unethical accounting issues. The differences in perceptions of four moral intensity components: magnitude of consequences, concentration of effect, probability of effect and proximity stood out more in the accounting issues analyzed. The findings presented in this research extend the existing understanding about the importance of the components of moral intensity in the ethical decision-making process of accounting processionals. The results can be integrated into revised or newly adopted company codes of ethics to comply with the requirements of the newly enacted Sarbones-Oxley Act of 2002. They can also be used to enhance ethics coursework and training programs in educational settings and industry.     

Google,Human Rights,and Moral Compromise

International business faces a host of difficult moral conflicts. It is tempting to think that these conflicts can be morally resolved if we gained full knowledge of the situations, were rational enough, and were sufficiently objective. This paper explores the view that there are situations in which people in business must confront the possibility that they must compromise some of their important principles or values in order to protect other ones. One particularly interesting case that captures this kind of situation is that of Google and its operations in China. In this paper, I examine the situation Google faces as part of the larger issue of moral compromise and integrity in business. Though I look at Google, this paper is just as much about the underlying or background views Google faces that are at work in business ethics. In the process, I argue the following: First, the framework Google has used to respond to criticisms of its actions does not successfully or obviously address the important ethical issues it faces. Second, an alternative ethical account can be presented that better addresses these ethical and human rights questions. However, this different framework brings the issue of moral compromise to the fore. This is an approach filled with dangers, particularly since it is widely held that one ought never to compromise one’s moral principles. Nevertheless, I wish to propose that there may be a place for moral compromise in business under certain conditions, which I attempt to specify.     

A Typology of Moral Problems in Business: A Framework for Ethical Management

This paper develops a typology of moral problems in business. The cross-classification of two fundamental dimensions of ethical conduct: judgment and motivation, is employed to distinguish four types of moral problems: genuine dilemmas, compliance problems, moral laxity, and no-problem problems. Actual cases are brought to illustrate each type of problem, and corresponding coping strategies are presented. The paper highlights the need to design a dynamic strategy that will take into account the relationships among different types of ethical problems. In its capacities as both an analytical tool for identifying and clarifying an ethical problem and a strategic tool for handling it, the typology has direct implications for developing ethical awareness, assigning accountability, and unfolding typical rationalizations in business activity.Aviva Geva is senior lecturer in the Open University of Israel, with a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of two text books and a monograph (in Hebrew) relating to business ethics and consumer behavior, she has also published a number of articles on issues of attitude change and moral decision making in business.     

A Cognitive Elaboration Model of Sustainability Decision Making: Investigating Financial Managers’ Orientation Toward Environmental Issues

This empirical paper examines individual-level cognitive factors associated with developing an orientation to sustainable development issues among a population of business practitioners from France. Across two studies, we survey 180 financial managers and 83 finance students, as well as 144 managers from other business disciplines and 117 non-finance business students. We consider ability and motivation variables integrated and adapted into a cognitive elaboration model for sustainable decision making. Specifically, we examine the degree of influence of two factors on the ethical sensitivity to sustainability: the moral maturity of the individual, and the perceived moral intensity of a sustainability issue. Our investigation offers insights into how financial managers perceive the importance of sustainability for corporate strategy.