Moral Reasoning & Research Design

Moral Reasoning & Research Design

In the context of a moral argument, moral reasoning is defined as the arguments about how people should act or give a reason to justify or criticize specific behavior. In the study, there are several presuppositions:

1. Consciousness of public accountants is defined as the extent to which the moral reasoning of public accountants influences ethical decision-making (judgments of good or bad and of right or wrong behavior) towards the upholding of a principal code of conduct.

2. The principles of a code of conduct contains seven ethical “standards” for professional accountants that address moral and ethical behavior regarding activities, attitudes, and procedures involved in most aspects of professional conduct.

3. The attributes of codes of conduct will be designed in such a way as to monitor and measure performance of public accountants.

4. The key factors of the level of moral reasoning of professional public accountants are defined in respect of the increase in the level of individual moral development of public accountants.

5. Key effectiveness is defined as the adherence of public accountants to appropriate codes of conduct, and consequently, the improvement in the implementation of codes of conduct is achieved.

The research comprised interviews of fifteen financial managers of three classes of companies in Indonesia. The company classes were “family owned companies” (FOC), “state owned companies” (SOC) and multinationals, or “foreign owned companies” (FrOC). The companies were not randomly chosen because of issues of access and availability. The financial managers of the companies were selected for interview because they are in effect the chief financial officers and as such would have been involved in appointing the external auditors as well as working sufficiently closely with them to be able to assess their performance. In addition, some internal auditors were interviewed as they too would have...