Personal Moral Philosophies and the Moral Judgments of Salespeople

During the last decade, Donelson R. Forsyth has developed a taxonomy of personal moral philosophies of relevance to sales managers and sales researchers concerned about the ethicality of salespeople's decisions. Forsyth's Ethical Position Questionnaire (EPQ), which measures a respondent's tendency to consider injury to others (idealism) and/or to disregard universal moral rules (relativism) when making moral judgments, can be used to classify salespeople into one of four personal moral philosophies: situationists, subjectivists, absolutists, and exceptionists. After a brief overview of Forsyth's work and its place within sales research on ethics, the results of an empirical study of life insurance agents show that agents with different moral philosophies a la Forsyth's taxonomy differ in their moral judgments about some ethically- questionable actions by life insurance agents.