College Ethics Classes and Reducing Accounting Scandals
This paper investigates the relationship between college ethics education and the reduction of professional misconduct in the accounting field. Drawing on philosophical frameworks of moral responsibility — including Feinberg's models of collective fault and arguments by Velasquez, French, and Donaldson — the paper establishes that both individuals and corporations bear ethical obligations. It then examines how individual decisions drive corporate culture and why academic ethics instruction may help future accountants resist pressures to commit fraud or breach public trust. The study proposes a survey-based research design focused on college students' self-reported cheating behaviors and their exposure to ethics coursework, with the aim of informing curriculum improvements in accounting education.
- Introduction: Accounting ethics, public trust, and scandal context
- Background: Moral Responsibility and Corporate Culture: Morality, free will, and corporate collective responsibility
- Defining Moral Responsibility: Types of responsibility and their application to corporations
- Rationale: Individual Decisions and Corporate Ethics: How individual moral choices shape corporate ethical culture
- Hypothesis and Research Questions: Survey design and ethics course impact on students
- Literature Review: The Individual and the Corporation: Philosophical models of collective and corporate moral responsibility
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in a well-developed philosophical framework before moving to the applied accounting context, giving the hypothesis a credible theoretical foundation.
- It clearly distinguishes between related but distinct concepts — ethics vs. morals, causal vs. official responsibility, individual vs. collective fault — which prevents vague generalizations and sharpens the argument.
- The literature review engages directly with named theorists (Feinberg, French, Donaldson, Velasquez), demonstrating academic depth rather than relying on general claims.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses conceptual scaffolding effectively: it builds each term (responsibility, fraud, corporate agency) from first principles before applying it to the accounting context. This technique ensures that later claims about ethics education rest on a logically constructed foundation rather than assumption.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introductory frame connecting ethics to accounting scandals, then provides background on moral responsibility and corporate culture. A rationale section bridges philosophical theory to the specific research focus. Research questions are enumerated clearly before the literature review synthesizes competing philosophical positions on individual versus collective moral responsibility. The overall movement is from abstract theory toward a concrete, survey-based research design.
Introduction
"Ethical values provide the foundation on which a civilized society exists. Without the foundation, civilization collapses." — Smith
The ability to choose right or wrong — good versus evil — is a fundamental part of the human condition. While some decisions are relatively minor, such as stealing a pack of gum, others are larger and carry far more severe consequences. In the business world, the bottom line is often the only measure of success or failure. People are sometimes tempted to take shortcuts or intentionally omit certain information in order to accelerate their climb up the corporate ladder. In the accounting profession, however, such shortcuts and intentional omissions are unacceptable. They violate public trust and damage corporate reputations, as demonstrated by several well-known accounting scandals over the past two decades (Evans, 2003).
There has been considerable attention placed on corporate moral responsibility and on the obligation of accountants to maintain public trust. There has also been growing interest in the role that academic institutions can play in preventing accounting scandals. The purpose of this research is to examine the role and importance of ethics courses in college and their capacity to reduce professional breaches of public trust among those entering the accounting profession.
Background: Moral Responsibility and Corporate Culture
Morality is shaped by society, culture, and religion. Moral responsibility is the price that humans pay as a result of their capacity for intellect and free will. This concept becomes more complex, however, when one attempts to apply it to corporations or other formal groups of people. Recently, several scandals have raised the question of collective, or corporate, responsibility. The most prominent example was the Enron scandal, which eroded the trust of American citizens, employees, and shareholders alike (Webb, 2001).
Defining Moral Responsibility
Moral responsibility is the product of societal norms and expectations. Society, formally defined, is a group of people who agree to live by a certain set of rules and who accept punishments when those rules are broken. The purpose of these rules is to preserve peace and allow everyone within that society to live in relative happiness (Bentham, 1996). Like individuals, corporations possess their own personalities and internal cultures, defined by factors such as dress codes, hierarchical structures, and communication styles.
Like members of general society, employees within a corporation are expected to adhere to its established cultural norms. The corporation, in this sense, functions as a society within a society, and employees bear a moral responsibility to conform to those norms. Corporations, in turn, carry a broader responsibility to take actions that ensure and promote public trust (Coffee, 1998). The terms "ethics" and "morals" are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, "ethics" tends to refer to an individual's personal sense of right and wrong, while "morals" tends to refer to the norms of right and wrong held by society. For the purposes of this research, the distinction is minor, and the two terms will be used interchangeably.
Responsibility can take several forms. A general sense of responsibility refers to one's commitment to striving for a good outcome in a given endeavor — an investment in achieving or maintaining a certain result (Levy, 2003). This differs from causal responsibility, in which something is attributed to an outcome without any conscious choice being made. For example, one might say that an earthquake was responsible for damage, but this type of responsibility must be distinguished from responsibility arising from a deliberate act.
A third form is official responsibility (Radzik, 2001), which refers to the duties associated with one's job or position. Many individuals have used official responsibility to justify actions they knew were wrong, invoking the excuse that they were simply doing their job. Moral responsibility and official responsibility frequently conflict, forcing individuals to choose between their personal ethics and what they perceive their occupational duties to require.
Although corporations reflect the collective actions, morals, and ideals of individuals, their responses often mirror those of individuals (Radzik, 2001). Businesses must uphold certain standards in order to fulfill their obligations to society. Cases such as the Enron scandal brought the concept of corporate fraud squarely into the domain of business ethics. Fraud is an intentional deception carried out for the purpose of unfair gain, and individuals within a corporation can commit it.
This reality adds an important nuance to the discussion of moral responsibility. Fraud must be committed by an individual; a corporation as an entity cannot commit fraud, only the people within it. In this sense, the corporation functions as a collection of individuals, each capable of committing fraud to gain an unfair advantage. A corporation may bear moral responsibility, but it cannot itself commit fraud, since fraud requires intent and the intent to cause harm to another person through false representation.
This distinction matters because only individuals within a corporation can commit fraud. When an employee does so, it may also constitute a breach of corporate moral responsibility — unless a majority of the corporation's members oppose the act and take steps to stop it, in which case the corporation's moral standing may remain intact. For a corporation to fulfill its moral responsibility, it must have mechanisms in place to ensure that its members act ethically. While a business can establish policy and direction, individuals must ultimately carry out each action. On this view, a corporation can possess moral responsibility and behave ethically through the actions of the people within it.
Moral responsibility requires intent, which is typically an attribute of the individual. Acting intentionally requires understanding the significance of one's actions, the ability to predict outcomes, and a conscious decision to act or refrain from acting (Dwyer, 2003). Corporations lack a conscience and therefore cannot independently grasp the consequences of an action. However, a corporation can act intentionally through the collective agreement of its members — making a goodwill gesture to a community, for example, or entering into a cooperative agreement with another firm.
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