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Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 67:1535 Springer 2006
DOI 10.1007/s10551-006-9002-zThree Views on the Ethics of TaxEvasion Robert W. McGeeABSTRACT. In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest,wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Moral Obligation ofPaying Just Taxes. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debateon this topic, much of which took place in Latin. SinceCrowes dissertation, not much has been written on thetopic of tax evasion from an ethical perspective, with afew exceptions. In 1998 and 1999, a few articles werepublished on the ethics of tax evasion in the Journal ofAccounting, Ethics & Public Policy. An edited book on thistopic was published in 1998. The present paper summarizes, updates and expands on Crowes work and theother more recent work that has been published on thistopic. Three basic views on the ethics of tax evasion haveemerged over the centuries. This article presents andcritiques those three views and raises some questionsabout points that have not yet been explored in the literature.KEY WORDS: ethics, tax evasion, dutyIntroductionMost articles written on tax evasion are published intax practitioner journals and take a practitioner orlegal perspective. The economics literature hasexamined tax evasion from the perspective of publicfinance. However, some authors have taken aphilosophical approach (McGee, 1994a). One of themost comprehensive analyses on tax evasion from aphilosophical perspective was a doctoral thesiswritten by Martin Crowe in 1944. The Journal ofAccounting, Ethics & Public Policy published a series ofarticles on tax evasion from various religious, secularand philosophical perspectives in 1998 and 1999.Most of those articles were also published in anedited book (McGee, 1998a). Since the publication
of that book a few other articles have addressed theissue of tax evasion from an ethical perspective.Those articles are discussed in the next section.The ethics of tax evasion can be examined from anumber of perspectives. Some of these are of areligious nature while others are more secular andphilosophical. One approach is to examine therelationship of the individual to the state. Another isthe relationship between the individual and thetaxpaying community or some subset thereof. Athird is the relationship of the individual to God.Crowe (1944) examined the literature on these approaches, which are the three main approaches thathave been taken in the literature over the past fivecenturies.Review of the literatureThe most comprehensive 20th century work on...