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If individuals exhibit less ethical behavior in the workplace than in their personal decisions, this may constitute evidence of role morality behavior. Role morality can be defined as “claim(ing) a moral permission to harm others in ways that, if not for the role, would be wrong” (Applbaum, 1999. Ethics for adversaries: The morality of roles in public and professional life (p. 3). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.) To investigate this issue, 55 practicing accountants completed and returned the experimental survey. Results show that in many situations, business decisions were less ethical than personal decisions, consistent with the theory of role morality. The implications and limitations of this study as they relate to practicing accountants are discussed.

This chapter questions the role of virtues in health professional medical ethics. It distinguishes between the ethics of conduct – usually expressed as moral principles – and the ethics of the character – expressed as virtues. It questions whether virtues are intrinsically valued or valued instrumentally as the means to right conduct. It poses two problems for virtue theory: (1) The “naked virtue” problem – whether instilling virtues increases the probability of correlative morally right conduct, and (2) the “wrong virtue” problem–which of many sometimes controversial virtues should be promoted. The chapter ends by arguing that these are less serious problems for the morality of conduct.

This chapter covers basic concepts, ethical theories, and moral paradigms of corporate ethics for identifying, understanding, and responding to the turbulent market challenges of today. The concept, nature, and domain of ethics, business ethics, managerial ethics, and corporate executive ethics are defined and differentiated for their significance. The domain, scope, and nature of related concepts such as legality, ethicality, morality, and executive spirituality are distinguished and developed. Among normative and descriptive ethical theories that we briefly review and critique here are teleology or utilitarianism, deontology or existentialism, distributive justice, corrective justice, and ethics of malfeasance and beneficence. Other moral theories of ethics such as ethics of human dignity, ethics of cardinal virtues, ethics of trusting relations, ethics of stakeholder rights and duties, ethics of moral reasoning and judgment calls, ethics of executive and moral leadership, and ethics of social and moral responsibility will be treated in a later book. The thrust of this book is positive: despite our not very commendable track record in managing this planet and its resources, our basic questions are: Where are we now? What are we now? Where should we as corporations go, and why? What are the specific positive mandates and metrics to corporate executives to reach that desired destiny? This chapter explores responses to these strategic corporate questions.

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

Western societies are not “a-moralized.” We could observe “ethical etiquette” everywhere, in every social institution and concerning every human activity or field of research (codes of ethics, ethics committees, Government ethics laws and so forth). The moralization processes of Western societies appear to be actualized in a dialectical way, and that process involves three patterns of actions undertaken by most of the social groups and institutions: (1) to get rid of an external (heteronomous) morality; (2) to adopt an inner (autonomous) morality; and (3) to safeguard two equivocal attitudes: (a) excluding any moral issue from one's decision-making and paradigmatic beliefs individuals adhere to (in order to explain the systemic reality of their self, world and Nature); and (b) letting to the given social groups and institutions (professions, for instance) the responsibility to provide the moral foundations of social life. In neo-liberalistic societies, where individualism has reached its peak, moral responsibility is more and more considered as a constraint to the “desire to do what we wish to do.” Indeed, such a desire serves to define the meaning of freedom in neo-liberalistic societies, although the meaning expresses a distorted form of freedom: to do whatever we like, except if it tends to reduce others’ freedom. Such a meaning does not imply to serve society or to love each other.

Religion and philosophy satisfy the basic human needs of understanding, belonging, and finding meaning. They provide tranquility of mind and satisfy the desire to be loved and lovable. However, they present their own failings and can counter each other in positive and negative ways, that threaten the communities of beliefs they form and their interactions. An appropriate institutional framework can control the fanaticism and sectarianism that can come with established religion and philosophy.

The contribution intends showing that theorizing and research on risk is enriched by integrating concepts from the developmental theory of moral judgement. It is argued that in the context of different moral orientations the perception and conceptualization of risk changes. To integrate both research traditions (risk and morality) a common action theory framework is proposed and applied to the theory of moral development and risk conceptualizations. By integrating “levels of actions” into “levels of moral judgment” four “ideal types of everyday morality” are constructed theoretically and tested empirically by means of semi-structured interviews (N = 80) on risks in agricultural settings. The types differ in maturity and complexity. The results demonstrate: (a) the empirical validity of the four types, and (b) that in fact the risk concepts of these types differ. Some similarities to other types of “risk cultures” are discussed and practical consequences (for behavior and education) are elaborated.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.