Financial Reporting and Ethics - The Institute of Chartered ...

FINANCIAL REPORTING AND ETHICSApplied ethics applies normative ethics to specific controversial issues.Many of these ethical problems bear directly on public policy. Forexample, the following would be questions of applied ethics: “Is gettingan abortion ever moral?”; “Is euthanasia ever moral?”; “What are theethical underpinnings of affirmative action policies?”; “Do animalshave rights?”Applied ethics has been sub divided into: bioethics, business ethics,environmental ethics, government ethics, military ethics, police ethics,legal ethics and sexual ethics.It is thus a term used to describe attempts to use philosophical methodsto identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of humanlife. Bioethics, for example, is concerned with identifying the correctapproach to matters such as euthanasia, or the allocation of scarcehealth resources, or the use of human embryos in research.Environmental ethics is concerned with questions such as the duties ofhumans towards landscapes or species. Business ethics concernsquestions such as the limits on managers in the pursuit of profit, or theduty of ‘whistleblowers’ to the general public as opposed to theiremployers. As such, it is a study which is supposed to involvepractitioners as much as professional philosophers.6.3.5 Normative Ethical Theories(a)Normative EthicsOne branch of normative ethics is theory of conduct; this is thestudy of right and wrong, of obligation and permissions, of duty,of what is above and beyond the call of duty, and of what is sowrong as to be evil. Theories of conduct propose standards ofmorality, or moral codes or rules. For example, the following122