Modern Moral Philosophies
The ancient Greeks believed that reason and thought precede the choice of action and that we deliberate about things we can influence with our decisions. In making decisions, most people want to follow laws and rules. However, rules are not always clear, and laws may not cover every situation. Therefore, it is the ethical foundation that we develop and nurture that will determine how we react to unstructured situations that challenge our sense of right and wrong. In the end, we need to rely on moral principles to guide our decision making. However, the ability to reason out ethical conflicts may not be enough to assure ethical deci- sion making occurs in accounting as discussed in Chapters 2 through 5. This is because while we believe that we should behave in accordance with core values, we may wind up deviating from these values that trigger ethical reasoning in accounting because of internal pressures from supervisors and others in top management. In the end, a self-interest motive may prevail over making a decision from an ethical perspective, and unethical behavior may result. This is the moral of the story of Betty Vinson’s role in the WorldCom fraud.
Moral philosophies provide specific principles and rules that we can use to decide what is right or wrong in specific instances. They can help a business decision maker formulate strategies to deal with ethical dilemmas and resolve them in a morally appropriate way. There are many such philosophies, but we limit the discussion to those that are most appli- cable to the study of accounting ethics, including teleology, deontology, justice, and virtue ethics. Our approach focuses on the most basic concepts needed to help you understand the ethical decision making process in business and accounting that we outline in Chapter 2. We do not favor any one of these philosophies because there is no one correct way