AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ETHICAL OPINION IN GERMANY Robert W. McGee  Serkan Benk Adriana Ross Harun Kılıçaslan ABSTRACT This study examined six ethical issues that were included in the World Values Surveys. Participants consisted of 252 business students at a German university who were asked to determine the justifiability of six acts using a ten-point Likert scale. The survey found that there was more justification for some acts than others and that some forms of tax evasion were viewed as being more justifiable than others. INTRODUCTION Although much has been written about tax evasion from the perspective of public finance, not many studies have focused on the ethical aspects of tax evasion. One of the most comprehensive early studies on the ethics of tax evasion was done by Martin Crowe (1944), a Catholic priest who surveyed the philosophical and religious (mostly Catholic) literature that had been written over the previous five centuries. Crowe found that three basic positions had emerged over the centuries. Tax evasion was  Robert W. McGee, Florida International University; Serkan Benk, Zonguldak Karaelmas University; Adriana Ross, Florida International University; Harun Kılıçaslan, Uludağ University.