Ethical stance among senior business and marketing students at Macquarie University

This paper reports on an ethics survey administered to 234 final year business and marketing students at Macquarie University in Sydney. The research used Forsyth’s Taxonomy of Ethical Ideologies to classify respondents’ ethical ideology; respondents also evaluated the ethical nature of six scenarios. The large majority of students were Situationists; this group does not rely on formulaic moral rules but analyses situations to identify an appropriate ethical response. Additional analyses found a number of main effects and interactions between respondents’ demographic characteristics and their responses to the ethical issues they evaluated. These findings suggest that students already reflect on ethical issues; educators could respond to this by ensuring papers on ethics are a mandatory component in business degrees. Furthermore, identifying the type of ethical perspective prevalent among students will assist educators to refine the way in which they present material, enabling them to develop scenarios designed to challenge and extend students’ existing sensitivities.