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Despite the accounting profession having a long history of promoting ethical behaviour globally, with a robust Code of Ethics and formal International Education Standards which include training in professional values, ethics, and attitudes, the accounting profession still regularly features as the lead villain in many corporate failures. Training in ethics has been a core topic in Australian accounting undergraduate degrees now for many years, but the responsibility for teaching ethics still largely falls on faculty from within the business and accounting schools. Although these academics have a strong moral compass and know right from wrong, most do not have ethics-related research experience or professional ethics training. When ethics is taught by academics with little or no formal philosophical ethics training, our students will continue to have limited opportunities to cultivate and deeply internalise the professional values, ethics, and attitudes required of professional accountants in a multicultural world before embarking on their careers.

I review the 2019 film Bombshell, directed by Jay Roach. The film presents a fictionalized account of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes’s sexual harassment of his employees. Bombshell’s focus on the experiences of three women illuminates that sexual harassment affects individuals but that collective action can combat it.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept and the content of courses on ‘social ethics’. It will present a dilemma that arises in the design of such courses. On the one hand, they may present versions of ‘applied ethics’; that is, courses in which moral theories are applied to moral and social problems. On the other hand, they may present generalised forms of ‘occupational ethics’, usually professional ethics, with some business ethics added to expand the range of the course. Is there, then, not some middle ground that is distinctively designated by the term ‘social ethics’? The article will argue that there is such a ground. It will describe that ground as the ethics of ‘social practices’. It will then illustrate how this approach to the teaching of ethics may be carried out in five domains of social practice: professional ethics, commercial ethics, corporate ethics, governmental ethics, and ethics in the voluntary sector. The aim is to show that ‘social ethics’ courses can have a clear rationale and systematic content.

Approximately a decade ago, at the commencement to what has now become my vocation – namely teaching local government managers – a close colleague and myself ‘discovered’ the theory of public value creation that was initially set out by Mark Moore in his 1995 book Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government and subsequently published a few articles on it. Reflecting on teaching the theory for the ensuing decade, three consistent themes emerge from my engagement with students. First, the appeal of the theory as we originally encountered it, in both its parabolic form and in its more advanced articulation, as a theory of public management; also, as a theory of the state. Second, students are consistently drawn to the ethical dimension of the theory. Here, the author demonstrates this appeal by way of an example from the work of one of his recent students. Third, the author provides an account of what has emerged as a potential problem – that the theory has an emotivistic appeal. The author argues that this potential problem can be countered by a thorough understanding of the work, and ensuing developments.

Three aspects of teaching ethics are discussed. It deals with reflection, multicultural classrooms, and narrative. The first aspect acknowledges that trying to help people recognise moral issues and have the courage and capacity to respond is harder than teaching and examining theoretical learning. The second, whether we seek to develop a ‘new’ ethical framework that fits all situations and recognises the differing traditions of global classrooms and marketplaces or we acknowledge that there are different underlying values which are hard to reconcile. The third aspect, somewhat provocatively, is whether we would be better off using novels or TV series rather than textbooks for the teaching of ethics.

This paper is a brief reflection on teaching bioethics to students and practitioners in science and other applied disciplines. After identifying relevant key questions and acknowledging that a variety of approaches to the teaching of applied ethics can be successful, the authors outline why interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers and discipline experts is our preferred way to teach (and practice) bioethics (and applied ethics). The authors suggest that the reason for the effectiveness of sensible collaborations can be explained by reference to a virtue ethics ‘philosophy of place’ influenced ‘distinct ethics’ approach to understanding the nuanced nature of applied ethics and its relationship to moral philosophy.