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Traditionally, the kinds of ethical inquiry that one encounters in program and policy evaluation involve two broad matters: Evaluator (mis)conduct – that is, concerns such as conflict of interest, contractual obligations, competence, integrity and honesty, and so forth – and protection of evaluation participants’ rights to autonomy, privacy, informed consent, and so on. Ethical inquiry in both cases is typically guided by a set of ethical theories, standards, guidelines, or principles that an evaluator must interpret and apply in the situation at hand (Newman & Brown, 1996). For example, the Joint Committee's (1994) Propriety Standards speak to matters of both evaluator conduct – with respect to formal agreements/contracting, conflict of interest, and fiscal responsibility – and to matters of participants’ rights. Similarly, the Guiding Principles for Evaluators, endorsed by the American Evaluation Association (see www.eval.org), address these two ethical concerns stressing the evaluator's duty or obligation with respect to methodological competence, integrity and honesty, and respecting people. These are important matters in professional ethics in evaluation, situated largely within the discussion of the ethics of principles or rules. However, this view of ethical inquiry in evaluation is not my concern here.

International development and humanitarian work, including research and evaluation practice, relies upon the development of strong and trusting relationships between practitioners, researchers, local partners and communities. Due to these relationships, research conducted in developing countries and particularly in relation to development practice raises distinct ethical issues and dilemmas. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the importance of the consideration of ethics in international development and humanitarian research and how organisations can incorporate a culture of ethical inquiry into research and evaluation practice. It will highlight that good intentions and policy documents are alone not enough for when practitioners are working in development. It will also examine how principles and guidelines drafted expressly for and by the Australian international development sector is being used as a facilitator of ethical inquiry and good practice.

The humanitarian principle of impartiality requires that assistance be based on need alone. In order to ascertain needs, and later to assess whether assistance has been effective in meeting those needs, we need to gather evidence. In humanitarian crises this is generally done through assessments, monitoring and evaluation, and it generally involves seeking information from those we seek to assist. In the fast-paced environment of humanitarian crises, the question of whether the collection of this information is ethical is frequently overlooked. For research participants, the consequences can be extremely severe.

This chapter examines the ethics of research, primarily in the form of assessments, monitoring and evaluation, in humanitarian crises. The chapter first considers the question of what constitutes research in humanitarian crises, and why it is needed. It then examines the general principles of ethical research (respect, beneficence, research merit and integrity, and justice), and highlights three key considerations that require particular attention in humanitarian crises: the justificatory threshold, the vulnerability of research participants, and safety and security. The chapter also examines key components of the research process that are particularly important (and frequently overlooked) in humanitarian crises, including the privacy and confidentiality of research participants, informed consent and feedback to research participants. It concludes with the suggestion that basic instruction in the principles of ethical research should be included in the orientation and training provided to humanitarian practitioners, including to emergency response teams who are commonly involved in carrying out assessments in the early stages of a humanitarian response.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe an accounting ethics course whose purpose, in part, is to short circuit the process that leads to foolish ethical decisions by professional accountants. In addressing how to make ethical decisions, the course deliberately includes processes intended to develop wisdom and to impede reflexive decisions that reflect the five fallacies of thinking. The approach described represents an active, engaging approach to increasing dialogical and dialectical reasoning in students’ pursuit of wisdom through individual selection of outside reading, engaging speakers, and the use of ethics accountability groups. The course is adaptable to large and small class settings where the professor desires extensive interaction among students, and it creates an environment designed to help students develop self-chosen principles to guide their professional lives. Students take responsibility for developing self-determined principles to guide their professional lives. Clearly identifying these principles provides students a basis for resisting ethical compromises in their careers. The course focuses students on developing wisdom and recognizing the weaknesses in a purely calculation-based moral reasoning.

This research follows Emerson and Conroy (2004) by examining student attitudes regarding a number of ethical vignettes, and extends their research to incorporate an investigation of the effects of different ethical prompts (including the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Code of Professional Conduct) on responses. We explore relationships within the responses and identify significant patterns in attitudes by gender, major, and experimental treatment. While female subjects consistently view unethical behavior less favorably, our results suggest that status as an accounting major also may lead to less acceptance of the unethical behavior portrayed in the vignettes. For example, male and female accounting students were less accepting of padding expense accounts and insider stock trading, indicating that ethical training in accounting classes may be delivering some desirable results.

This study uses several business situations to explore the impact of moral intensity on the identification of an ethical problem and reasons for making moral judgments for questionable ethical business dilemmas. This study asks 173 accounting students, those who will become our future professional accountants, to evaluate four situations involving product safety, sharing software, expensing personal items as business expenses, and manipulating earnings. The results of this study confirm beliefs that Jones’ (1991) model of moral intensity affects ethical evaluations and moral judgments. Accounting students appear to use the overall harm and societal pressure components of moral intensity when evaluating ethical dilemmas and making moral judgments.

This study investigates whether exposure to a previous client’s earnings management behavior will impact experienced auditors’ judgments of the risk that a current client’s financial statements are materially misstated. Contrast theory predicts the context of previous information can have a priming effect on a current judgment scenario, where the information for the current judgment is contrasted with the previous information. Guided by contrast theory, we exposed auditors to either positive or negative client ethical earnings management behavior. We found the existence of contrast effects, with the positive (negative) context of the previous client resulting in auditors judging a higher (lower) likelihood of material misstatement in the current client’s financial statements. The results have implications for the effectiveness and efficiency of auditors’ judgments as well as provide insight into auditor training efforts.