Artículo de John Francis McKernan y Minmin Du, University of Glasgow, con motivo del congreso internacional de Economía social celebrado en EOI y en colaboración con el Goldsmiths College. 27/28_05_2010

1. Moral maturity in accounting: between Moralität and Sittlichkeit
John Francis McKernan a & Minmin Dub
a
The Department of Accounting and Finance, The University of Glasgow.
b
The Department of Accounting and Finance, The University of Glasgow.
E-mail address for correspondence: j.f.mckernan@accfin.gla.ac.uk
Moral maturity in accounting: between Moralitat and Sittlichkeit
Summary
Our aim is to explore the relationship between reasoning, intuition and expertise in audit, and to
reflect on the implications for education and the organization of practice. Our study is at a very
preliminary stage. We intend to address the issues through experiment; through interviews with
audit practitioners concerning their experience of audit review and judgement processes; through
observation; through analysis of prior literature dealing with the phenomena of expertise and
judgement (intuitive and deliberate), and through study of prior research on audit practice and
expertise. This work is in progress, at an early stage, and we will not systematically report on all of
the above at this stage. We will primarily focus on the framework of prior research and thinking that
guides our analysis.
Much of the prior research that we draw on focuses on moral reasoning, intuition and expertise.
We are inclined to see accounting as an intrinsically moral practice (see Francis, 1990), and we
would argue that a considerable proportion of accounting and audit decision-making can
legitimately be categorized as moral. Our intuition is that the patterns of behaviour and
development found to be characteristic of decision-making in relation to moral issues has quite
general applicability in the domain of accounting and audit judgement. We will seek to demonstrate
this in subsequent empirical work.
Prevailing conceptions of morality and moral development inevitably have some impact on
education and, at least indirectly, on practice. Philosophical conceptions of morality have tended to
develop as a confrontation between Kant and Hegel, between Moralität and Sittlichkeit (Dreyfus
& Dreyfus, 1991, p.229), with the former camp looking for a detached critical morality based on
principles that tells us what is right and the latter an ethics based on involvement in a tradition
that defines what is good (p.229). The same division is reflected in psychological conceptions of
moral development. The dominant line has been the essentially Kantian rationalist views of moral
development expressed in the work of Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1969 & 1971). Kohlberg saw
moral development as a progression towards increasingly impartial and universal reasoning. This
line was strongly picked up in accounting, audit, and accounting education (see, for example,
Ponemon, 1990, 1992 & 1993, and Ponemon & Glazer, 1990). Kohlberg s rationalist view of moral
development and education made the pinnacle of moral maturity the ability to stand outside the
situation and justify one's actions in terms of universal moral principles . Kohlberg s rationalism
was directly opposed in the name of an intuitive response to the concrete situation (Dreyfus &
Dreyfus, 1992, pp. 229 230), perhaps most notably by feminist critics like Carol Gilligan (1982).
The ethics of care proposed by Gilligan has been applied to accounting and accounting education
by, for example, Reiter (1996 & 1997).
More recently rationalist views of moral psychology have been challenged by empirical studies
showing that moral judgements seem not to be caused by moral reasoning but rather to be the
outcome of intuition; see for example Haidt (2001 & 2007) and Haidt and Bjorklund (2008). This

2. Moral maturity in accounting: between Moralitat and Sittlichkeit
does not mean that reasoning has no role in relation to moral decision making, but it does seem to
occur if at all after the event of the decision. The basic claim of Haidt s social intuitionist model of
moral judgement is that moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions and is followed (when
needed) by slow, ex post facto moral reasoning (2001, p. 817). Haidt s model has a number of
elements which we will explore. He argues that, at least in the moral domain, people rarely change
their initial intuitions through private reasoning1 or reflection. The model does allow a causal, as
distinct from justificatory role, to moral reasoning but generally only where that reasoning runs
through other people (Haidt, 2001, p. 819).
There is also evidence from psychology that intuition can lead to better decision making; see for
example Dijksterhuis et al., (2006). Woodward & Allman (2007) argue that improvement in
decision-making is associated with the limitations of human cognition. The problem, as they see it
with purely analytical or rule based decision making is that in practice we are liable to pay
insufficient consideration, or leave out of consideration altogether, certain important considerations:
This is in part because it seems to be true, as an empirical fact about human beings, that the
number of different dimensions or different kinds of considerations that we are able to fully take
into account in explicit conscious rule guided decision-making is fairly small empirical studies
show that when presented with high dimensional decision problems that require the integration of
many different kinds of information, those who attempt to decide entirely by conscious rule based
deliberation often ignore all but a few dimensions of the decision problem. (Woodward & Allman,
2007, p. 194).
The quality of intuition is clearly vitally important: Intuition and heuristics may be wrong; see
for example Sunstein (2008). Woodward & Allman stress that intuition is not simply innate2:
moral intuition can be heavily influenced by learning and experience, although the learning in
question is often implicit and subjects often have difficulty formulating what is learned in the form
of explicit rules . The notion of intuition is clearly connected with that of expertise. The well
known five stage general model of skill development offered Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986, 1990,
1991, & 2005)3, makes expertise the final stage and takes intuitive judgement to be the hallmark of
expertise (2005, p. 779). We will discuss the five stages of development, in the process of
transition for the rule reliant novice to the intuitive expert, described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus, and
mindful of the warning that in bureaucratic societies, , there is the danger that expertise may be
diminished through over-reliance on calculative rationality (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005, p. 779), we
will consider the prospects for the development of audit expertise in the modern audit environment.
We will attempt to explore the significance of empirical research such as Haidt s for audit
practice which is is permeated by hunch and intuition, despite projects to introduce more formal
structure (Power, 2003, p. 389), and for audit education. A good deal of audit judgement seems to
involve high dimensional decision problems of a sort that we might prima facie expect to benefit
from the application of intuition, given the apparent limits of conscious reasoning (see Woodward
& Allman, 2007, p.194). Whether or not decision-making in audit can in fact be improved by
increased use of intuition is of course an empirical question; one we believe has not as yet been
clearly answered. Haidt s model seems, for example, to be reflected in the fact that to a significant
extent the use of reason in audit practice and the development and adoption of rational techniques
can be read as an attempt to supplement intuition with the legitimacy associated with rational
processes: Indeed, the history of sampling in its broadest sense is the history of a set of intuitively
based practices in search of both theoretical rationalisations and programmatic mobilization
(Power, 1992, p. 41). Furthermore the social persuasion link in Haidt s model seems to resonate
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Haidt suggests that the philosopher, trained to weigh both sides of the argument, or the neutral expert may be more capable of
shifting intuitions through private reasoning than the average person. The evidence seems to be that auditors act more like
advocates seeking to defend their client (and a point of view) than neutral scientists seeking after truth; See for example
Bazerman et al., (1997 & 2002) and Moore et al., (2006).
2
In this they differ from Haidt, for example, who sees the structures of moral intuition as primitive and set down by forces of
evolution.
3
The Dreyfus model of skill and expertise development is widely applicable - from activities like riding a bicycle, to nursing,
and moral judgement.
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3. Moral maturity in accounting: between Moralitat and Sittlichkeit
with an appreciation of audit as a process of negotiation; see for example Beattie et al., (2001) and
McCracken et al., (2008).
We recognize that the problem of finding the right balance in audit practice between on the one
hand intuitive judgement and on the other structure and rules is one that the profession and
academia have tried to grapple with for decades: Perhaps the gravest threat to the auditing
profession is the view that the Auditor s world is objective and concrete, and that an auditor's
behavior should be strictly regularized through a formal structuring of audit work processes or a
narrow socialization of the individual. Against this threat, auditors should direct a countervailing
effort toward further understanding the concept of judgment while keeping up appearances
(Dirsmith et al., 1985, p. 63). Near the root of the problem is the need for auditors to be able to
demonstrate the legitimacy of the judgements that they make4. Establishing the legitimacy of
intuitive judgements is problematic; see Musschenga, (2009). We will review the problems
associated with assessing the reliability of intuitive judgements, and using Musschenga (2009) and
discuss possible responses to the problem, in an audit context, and discuss the relationship between
intuition and deliberate reasoning in the context of audit expertise.
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This need for legitimacy clearly acts as a restraint on the development of audit practice. Legitimacy in this context, our society
which values rationality, tends to require a demonstrable inference chain: This concept of inference clarifies the problems
associated with the use of intuition or tacit knowledge of a company or industry and other types of soft evidence. Proponents
of the BRA claim that analysis of business risks and related controls is the best way to produce valuable assurance about the
veracity of financial statements and that an extensive amount of substantive testing actually produces little assurance if the
business risks are not managed. However, the case study suggests that relying on tacit knowledge or soft evidence, which
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4. Moral maturity in accounting: between Moralitat and Sittlichkeit
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