Most teaching and research in accounting ethics focuses on individuals. The presumption, therefore, is that the locus of professional ethics is the individual practitioner. This essay presents an argument for considering the profession itself as a significant locus for understanding professional...

Experience with the 75 years of development of, and increasing reliance on, written standards of corporate financial reporting suggests that balancing them with community's social norms may be a better option. “True and fair” override of written standards could serve as the moral compass of...

Forty-five years ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of famous experiments on obedience and authority that tested individuals' willingness to administer electric shocks to a test subject under the direction of an authority figure. This paper discusses how Milgram's work on human...

This research is a 6-year extension of Bernardi's (2005) initial ranking of the top ethics authors in accounting; it also represents a broadening of the scope of the original data into accounting's top-40 journals. While Bernardi only considered publications in business-ethics journals in his...

This article proposes a model for justifying decisions that integrates both ethical theory and practice. The usefulness of basic theory and applied practice in justifying decisions is a subject of continued debate. This article sees both as useful. It approaches moral justification from the...