Personal Morals and Professional Ethics

Moral philosophy can vary significantly among individuals, depending on such factors as personal development and relative degrees of altruism and self-interest. Upon joining professions, however, individuals may be expected to conform their moral behavior to professional ethics codes. In such circumstances, the ethics of the professional group are imposed upon the ethics of individual practitioners. This may occur through a mentoring process whereby novices learn ethics of the occupational group from authority figures who act as mentors [1], In complying with a professional ethics code, some practitioners may be constrained by the ethics rules, which prevent certain acts that might be performed if the code did not exist. Other practitioners may comply with conduct rules by following their personal moral standards which may be more restrictive than the professional code or may coincide with the occupational norms. Such an association between personal morals and professional ethics may be attributable to many explanatory criteria, such as practitioners' beliefs that the rules benefit the profession and society, or the eventual absorption of the code into individuals' personal morals through long-term compliance and familiarity. This paper includes discussions of personal morals, professional ethics codes, and the relationship between the two. Empirically, the morals of public accountants are compared to the Code of Professional Conduct of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The effects of rule modifications and employee rank are also considered.