Moral Imagination And Ethics For The Accounting Professional

Abstract

The accounting professional, whether s/he be in the private or public sector, faces many situations in his/her day-to-day activities that require thoughts and actions that have ethical overtones. One needs only look at the Enron situation to verify this idea. While the accounting profession has long had established codes of ethical conduct, these codes are by no means the be all and end all of ethical decision-making. So while accounting professionals can certainly refer to and use the relevant code of ethics for a particular situation, it is clear that these by themselves are not usually sufficient in depth and detail to solve all but the most straightforward, if there is such a thing, situations. To address most ethical situations calls for thinking far beyond the tenets of a code of ethics. It requires significant intellectual capacities and specific skills. Specifically, it requires moral imagination.