Identification of ethical theories adopted by accounting professionals

Abstract

As in all professions, accountants have particularities in their daily work in their way of acting and thinking, however, the way each collective gives meaning to them is unique. Considering psychological and social relationship aspects, it is considered relevant to identify the profile of a person's thinking and ethical tolerance trends in order to understand the actions he takes before society and the corporate environment. These profiles can be identified according to four existing ethical theories, each with its particularities in decision making and the construction of ethics in actions and intellectual positions. The present paper aimed to evaluate through the application of the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) in accounting professionals working in the city of Foz do Iguaçu/PR to verify the perceived ethical profile of the category in a general and stratified way. As a result, it was found that the surveyed accounting professionals build their ethical interpretation in a way more tangent to the theories of Moral Equity and Relativism, with perceived differences between age groups and gender. There were also significant differences in the interpretation of ethics involved in an action between genders when analyzing the probabilities of the group to which they belong to practice.