Finally, while the focus of our study is on the principled moral reasoning scores of CPAs,
some studies e.g., Massey 2002, Thorne et al. 2003 have suggested that despite low moral
reasoning scores, CPAs’ context-specific ethical judgment/behavior may not suffer. Since the focus
of our paper is on generic moral reasoning as measured by the DIT P-score, we cannot address CPAs’ context-specific moral judgment or behavior. Future studies may be needed to investigate
whether the results of our study might be different if context-specific instruments are used for
measurement of moral reasoning.