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This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

The moral ethos profiles (MEPs) of six Hong Kong companies were investigated via questionnaires and in‐depth qualitative interviews and analyzed according to the Kohlberg stages model. In five of the companies, the MEPs obtained via interviews were consistent with those obtained from the questionnaires. Interviews and questionnaires were also used to investigate how managers in these companies tackled ethical dilemmas (both real work‐based ones of their own and hypothetical ones). In the company with the consistently least virtuous MEP, managers used more lower‐stage ethical reasoning to tackle ethical dilemmas. There was, however, no difference between managers in companies with the most virtuous and moderately virtuous MEPs in terms of the stage‐level of ethical reasoning they used to tackle ethical dilemmas. The study helped to refine a moral ethos questionnaire.

According to Johnson (2001) and Rest (1979) a leader who has developed a high level of moral reasoning will tend to make decisions that are better from an ethical/moral perspective than a leader who has achieved a lower level of moral reasoning. The mission statement at this university states that graduates will be prepared through training in critical and creative thinking as well as moral reasoning to analyze problems, propose solutions, and make responsible decisions. This paper reports the results the of a four- year longitudinal study using the Defining Issues Test (DIT2) to evaluate the change in the level of moral reasoning demonstrated by undergraduate participants in the study.

This study aims to observe people’s decisions to commit fraud. This study is important in the current time because it provides insights into the development of fraudulent intentions within individuals.

The information used in this study is derived from semi-structured interviews, conducted with 16 high-ranking officials who are employed in Indonesian local government positions.

The study does not have strong evidence to support prior studies assuming that situational factors or social enablers have direct effects on fraud intentions. As suggested, individual factors which are related to moral reasoning (moral judgment and rationalisation) emerge as a consequence of social enablers. The significant role of that moral reasoning is to rationalise any fraud attempt as permissible conduct. As such, when an individual is capable of legitimising his/her fraud attempt into appropriate self-judgement, s/he is more likely to engage in fraudulent behaviours.

This study offers practical prescriptions in guiding the management to develop strategies to curb fraudulent behaviours. The study suggests that moral cognitive reasoning is found to be a parameter of whether fraud is an acceptable option or not. So, an understanding of observers’ moral reasoning is helpful in predicting the likelihood of fraud within an organisation or in detecting it.

This study provides a different perspective on the psychological pathway to fraud. It becomes a complement work for the fraud triangle to explain fraudulent behaviours. Specifically, it provides crucial insights into the underlying motivations that lead individuals to accept invitations to engage in fraudulent activities.

Studies on the moral judgment of offenders conducted within a neo-Kolhbergian framework found that offenders exhibit more primitive thinking about moral issues compared to nonoffenders. The purpose of this study is to explore, within the mental model theory, the role of reasoning in moral judgments of offenders, considering both similarities and differences with nonoffenders.

A series of moral scenarios were randomly presented to both offenders and nonoffenders. Participants were asked to report their reactions for each scenario. Their reactions were coded and assessed.

Findings show that moral judgments rely on the same reasoning processes in both offenders and nonoffenders: a moral scenario, in which propositions related to norms and values were manipulated, led to a scenario that generated a moral conflict (Study 1), but offenders had more intuitions about immoral scenarios than nonoffenders (Study 2). Moreover, the results partially confirm the prediction that offenders are more likely to deliberately reason about scenarios that described those crimes similar to the ones they committed (Study 3).

This study highlights the importance of understanding that moral judgments in both offenders and nonoffenders rely on the same reasoning processes, even though offenders tend to reason more on scenarios near to the crimes they committed. This has practical implications for interventions in so far as it could have an effect in how prosocial functioning could be promoted.

One way of looking at the association between ethics and stakeholder theory – of examining the idea that stakeholder theory has a strong moral foundation – is to consider how the stakeholder approach might in fact be directly driven by and guided by the moral obligations of business. An alternative perspective we offer is that stakeholder theory only indirectly derives from the moral obligations of business, with business purpose serving as a mediating factor. We work through the fairly straightforward logic behind that alternative perspective in this chapter. We argue that it is a better way to think about the association between ethics and stakeholder theory, particularly because it allows for a theoretical and practical distinction between corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory. Stakeholder theory can thereby continue developing as a theory of strategic management, even as it brings morals to the fore in ways that other approaches to strategic management do not.

It is no longer merely far-fetched science fiction to think that robots will be the chief combatants, waging wars in place of humans. Or is it? While artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable strides, tempting us to personify the machines “making decisions” and “choosing targets”, a more careful analysis reveals that even the most sophisticated AI can only be an instrument rather than an agent of war. After establishing the layered existential nature of war, we lay out the prerequisites for being a (moral) agent of war. We then argue that present AI falls short of this bar, and we have strong reason to think this will not change soon. With that in mind, we put forth a second argument against robots as agents: there is a continuum with other clearly nonagential tools of war, like swords and chariots. Lastly, we unpack what this all means: if AI does not add another moral player to the battlefield, how (if at all) should AI change the way we think about war?

Considers past research undertaken in the area of adult moral and ethics education, in order to establish whether moral judgement and ethical behaviour can be learnt by adults through an education experience. Also seeks to identify those education media which best facilitate learning of good moral behaviour and ethical judgement. Concludes that research to date has not adequately proved the widely assumed link between teaching and learning of moral judgement and ethical behaviour. This link is important, particularly when education is perceived by many to be the best means of developing good moral judgement and ethical behaviour in the modern business environment. Raises a number of additional issues related to the topic and suggests several areas of future research opportunity.

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.

Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of research has the possibility of creating significant new theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. We overview the major areas of behavioral ethics research concerning moral cognition and conation, and then we concentrate on existing neuroscience applications to moral cognition (moral awareness, moral judgment/reasoning, effects of moral emotions on moral reasoning, and ethical ideology). We also demonstrate the usefulness of neuroscience applications to organizational behavioral ethics research by summarizing a recent study on the neuroscience of ethical leadership. We close by recommending future research that applies neuroscience to topics such as moral development, group ethical judgments and group moral approbation, and moral conation (e.g., moral courage and moral identity). Our overall purpose is to encourage future neuroscience research on organizational behavioral ethics to supplement and/or complement existing psychological approaches.