Morality vs. ideology: Implications for accounting ethics research

The explosion of accounting ethics research in the past decade has been fuelled by the availability of the Defining Issues Test (DIT: Rest 1979–1993). Despite existing criticisms regarding the DIT (Emler et al., 1983) and research indicating that the measure is a biased reflection of accountants' moral reasoning (Sweeney & Fisher, 1998,(Sweeney & Fisher,1999), the validity of the instrument is rarely questioned. This paper discusses the evolution of the political attitude-moral reasoning debate. A between-subjects experiment provides further support for the existence of political bias, implying that ethics researchers may have confounded political ideology with moral reasoning when interpreting results.