Decision Aids for Business Ethics Education

Abstract

Two new decision aids have been developed to improve the moral awareness and moral judgment of students and practitioners of business. The purpose of these aids is to flag situations where there is high risk of making flawed ethical decisions due to biases and/or insufficient information. One of the decision aids is a general purpose template which can be used for case study analysis and can be customized by students for particular ethical decisions. Similarly, outside the classroom, the template can be customized to address specific ethical dilemmas or organizational values. The second decision aid was designed to help accounting students as well as practicing auditors evaluate whether self-serving bias may be distorting judgment.