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Ethical issues and moral reasoning are important in the tax policy context because shared moral values create good societies (Paul et al., 2006). This study of the equitable relief subset of the innocent spouse rules is a good example of Congressional and IRS policy that has been substantially reformed twice (and continues to be reassessed) to create tax law that effectively treats innocent spouses equitably (Fleischman & Shen, 1999). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the degree to which subjects' moral reasoning, using the first two steps of Rest's (1986) ethical reasoning model, is related to perceived moral intensity (Jones, 1991) in several tax-based equitable relief situations. Integrative social contracts theory provides the study's theoretical lens.

Subjects evaluated a mailed-questionnaire containing two separate equitable relief scenarios about a spouse who was unaware of her husband's tax evasion – one scenario included verbal abuse and the other scenario contained no such abuse. The survey also contained a variety of ethics and attitudinal measures used to measure the study's focal variables. The results support the a priori hypotheses that moral intensity is positively related to recognition of an ethical issue, judgment that the ethical scenario is unethical, and judgment to grant equitable relief. In addition, the scenario containing emotional abuse was associated with increased levels of moral intensity as compared to the scenario that did not contain abuse. The paper concludes with a discussion of both professional and public policy implications.

While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

Information ethics, as is well known, has emerged as an independent area of ethical and philosophical inquiry. There are a number of academic journals that are devoted entirely to the numerous ethical issues that arise in connection with the new information communication technologies; these issues include a host of intellectual property, information privacy, and security issues of concern to librarians and other information professionals. In addition, there are a number of major international conferences devoted to information ethics every year. It would hardly be overstating the matter to say that information ethics is as “hot” an area of theoretical inquiry as medical ethics. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on these and related issues.

The paper presents a review of relevant information ethics literature together with the author's assessment of the arguments.

There are issues that are more abstract and basic than the substantive issues with which most information ethics theorizing is concerned. These issues are thought to be “foundational” in the sense that we cannot fully succeed in giving an analysis of the concrete problems of information ethics (e.g. are legal intellectual property rights justifiably protected?) until these issues are adequately addressed.

The paper offers a needed survey of foundational issues in information ethics.

This chapter investigates the effect of moral reasoning of tax professionals on the aggressiveness of their reporting recommendations. The findings of the study indicate moral reasoning influences the aggressiveness of tax reporting decisions separate from the influence of client pressure. As the level of moral reasoning increases, the aggressiveness of the reporting position is found to0 decrease. Contrary to prior research, client pressure is not related to tax reporting aggressiveness. Failure to observe this relationship may signal a shift in behavior resulting from the intense public and regulatory scrutiny at the time of data collection which was in the immediate aftermath of the Enron scandal.

Moral intensity is the degree of feeling we have about the consequences of moral choices, similar, for example, to those perceived for crimes, from petty larceny to murder. Moral intensity is thought to increase moral sensitivity and judgment. Because the accounting professions require members to respond to accounting fraud with more sensitivity and intensity, we examine this response in 220 professional accountants (mostly Certified Public Accountants) under a controlled experiment using two different cases. We examine the first three parts of the Rest (1986) model including ethical evaluation, judgment, and intention to act. We measure moral intensity in the accountant’s perception of overall harm and societal pressure. As in prior research, we find that the degree of moral intensity may be contextual. We find that the ethical evaluations may become affected by perceived overall harm, and whistleblowing intentions by perceived societal pressure. However, in both cases, the professional’s judgments are most affected by moral intensity. Consistent with prior research, whistleblowing intentions may involve many other mitigating variables, such as audit reporting or non-audit reporting limited by codes of conduct. These findings relate to the increasing attention paid by the SEC to finding accounting fraud.

This manuscript makes three important contributions to the existing literature. First, there are few studies in this area and Jones (1991) identifies that moral intensity is issue contingent; therefore, replication studies using different scenarios are needed. Second, Bailey, Scott, and Thoma (2010) have suggested that accounting ethics research has focused too narrowly on Component II of Rest’s Four-Component Model. None of the previous studies looked at all three steps in Rest’s Model; therefore, our manuscript provides an important contribution over the other previous studies. Third, our sample uses professionals and not students as surrogates for professionals.

This study aims to investigate the effects of attribution of responsibility (AOR) for layoffs on the components of ethical decision-making. Internal, external and no-fault AOR were examined using the model of moral intensity to determine if placement of blame for the layoff influences ethical awareness, judgment and intent.

Surveys were collected from 397 students. The survey provided a scenario about a layoff situation involving an African-American woman and a Caucasian woman. Respondents then answered questions about moral intensity, moral judgment and moral intent concerning the layoff and identified the reasons they believed the layoff occurred. We tested our hypotheses using multiple regression analysis.

Subjects were more likely to make a moral judgment about the situation when layoffs were blamed on the company’s actions (external AOR) and less likely to make a moral judgment when the layoff decision was blamed on employee performance (internal AOR) or on economic factors beyond anyone’s control (no-fault AOR). Results also indicate that layoffs blamed on employee performance negatively moderate the relationship between moral judgment and moral intent.

Previous studies of layoff ethics have not examined the influence of AOR for layoffs using the model of moral intensity. Thus, this paper extends the current understanding of these concepts in ethical decision-making.

This paper aims to examine the influence of individual internal principles and perceived external factors on the ethical attitudes toward environmental practices, on the part of Taiwanese environmental business managers.

The analysis of 295 pretest samples, moral intensity on environmental issues was divided into “perception of environmental harm” and “perceived immediacy and stress”. Following this, a questionnaire survey of environmental managers from the top 1,000 enterprises was conducted with 203 valid samples analyzed by a structural equation model.

The research findings demonstrated that moral intensity concerning environmental issues is not as significant as expected, and had less influence than environmental ethics. Assuming that part of the reason for this is that moral intensity is generally based on a viewpoint of teleology, the paper proposes some discussion and suggestions.

Some limitations existed during this research, especially in the data collection or analyzing process. However, besides teleology, there are many other viewpoints of moral philosophy.

Environmental ethics is regarded as an internal principle, whereas the perceived moral intensity of managers on environmental issues is treated as an external factor. People's ethical decisions might be based on different views of moral philosophy such as teleology, deontology, or virtue ethics.

Since there was no suitable questionnaire related to moral intensity on environmental issues in the past, the paper presents a new questionnaire which used exploratory factor analysis to allocate moral intensity concerning environmental issues into two components: “perception of environmental harm” and “perceived immediacy and stress”.

The purpose of this research is to explore the use of media as the basis for a social issues approach to promoting moral literacy and effective teaching in educational leadership programs.

Through a review of relevant literature, mass media sources, and observations, the authors use Starratt's framework of moral responsibility to identify ethical practice in response to dilemmas brought on by local, regional, national and international crises and conflicts. Regional, national and international crises and conflicts are regularly reported on the Internet, as well as in the local, regional, national and international media (e.g., Time, Macleans, Michigan Citizen, The Washington Post, Education Week, The Boston Globe, National Geographic).

The use of mass media venues, when compounded with moral grounding better equips educational leaders to act with ethical orientations. Professional organizations should encourage and support leaders who engage in public citizenship activities – answering critical questions, brokering views, encouraging discussion, and serving as resources.

Issues concerning the ethical usage of mass media are complex, often unique, and ought to be an integral component of teaching in formal educational leadership experience. Consequently, the authors advocate the use of the media in university teaching as the basis for a social issues approach to promote morally literate graduates in university educational leadership programs. Actual examples of reactions about the use of media from a class of graduate students enrolled in an ethics class and educational leadership are included.

Nurses and other professional caregivers are increasingly recognising the issue of moral distress and the deleterious effect it may have on professional work life, staff recruitment and staff retention. Although the nursing literature has begun to address the issue of moral distress and how to respond to it, much of this literature has typically focused on high acuity areas, such as intensive care nursing. However, with an ageing population and increasing demand for resources and services to meet the needs of older people, it is likely that nurses in long‐term care are going to be increasingly affected by moral distress in their work. This paper briefly reviews the literature pertaining to the concept of moral distress, explores the causes and effects of moral distress within the nursing profession and argues that many nurses and other healthcare professionals working with older persons may need to become increasingly proactive to safeguard against the possibility of moral distress.