[Note: This post is targeted largely at moral philosophers and those interested in issues of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). If you are new to moral accounting, take a look at this post first.]
When is it moral for a group of people, like “Apple, Inc.” to be held accountable for the group’s performance? When can one person be held accountable for the behavior of a group. Can we hold Apple’s CEO accountable for what the company does? What about the janitor working at an Apple store? What about a group like “Everyone who owns an iPhone”? Can we hold one iPhone owner accountable for what another did?
When is it appropriate to hold two people accountable differently because they are members of different groups? Here, instead of the feature “owns an iPhone”, let’s define the groups by something more personal–race, ethnicity, religion, sex, height, age, and so on.
Moral accounting offers a way of answering these questions, but as I’ll show in this post, the answers don’t sweep away all forms of discrimination–primarily because it requires accountants to defer to society on crucial matters, like who has which assets and obligations.
Accountable Entities and The Entity Principle
I’ll start with the good news, which is that moral accounting has some fairly powerful tools for making sure we hold the right people accountable. Much of this power comes from the concept of an accountable entity:
An accountable entity is a group of parties connected by an internal accountability system that shapes the performance being evaluated.
This concept, which comes directly from the notion of a reporting entity, is crucial to understanding how moral accounting handles collective, shared, and distributed responsibility.
A group is defined as a collection of people with a shared feature. Lots of groups are also accountable entities (or entities, for short), because they are connected by an internal accountability system–a web of reports, incentives and controls that shape behavior.. A business is a group of people with the common feature that they are associated with it. It is also an entity because it uses reports, incentives and controls to hold group members accountable. The Entity Principle allows us to hold the organization as a whole accountable for its collective performance, or even for the performance of an individual member, if their moral performance was shaped by the accountability system. It also allows us to hold a single group member accountable if they played a sufficient role in designing or operating the accountability system. But otherwise, we can’t hold someone accountable for the moral performance of their groups or other people in them.
So for example, imagine the Lefthanders Advocacy Group works to enhance the rights of lefthanders everywhere. Even if this is a very informal, all-volunteer organization, it is still almost surely an entity, with LAG leaders holding one another and LAG volunteers accountable for what they do (and vice versa). So we can hold LAG as a group accountable for using sleazy fundraising tactics, or for making the world safer for lefthanders. We can hold a LAG leader personally responsible if they had a strong hand in the accountability system that is relevant to that performance. So that would probably include the CEO, but not the janitor.
However, we can’t hold one lefthander accountable for what another lefthander did, because it’s not like we lefthanders are out there policing one another’s behavior. In this way, the Entity Principle rules out many forms of discrimination–simply sharing a feature with others does not make one accountable for their behavior. You can’t take it out on me because another lefthander wronged you.
Groups, Social Recognition & Roles
Now the more troubling news, at least for those who want their society to be far more equitable than it currently is. A central part of the MAP is the Social Recognition Principle: when constructing someone’s moral books, the moral accountant must recognize assets and obligations as society sees them. Many societies tie recognition to features that also form the basis for groups. For example, many societies have until recently recognized property rights only for men, and not women. Some still do. Many modern Western societies still recognize obligations differently for men and women, on an informal (not legal) basis–women are widely seen to have greater obligations to be communal and supportive, while men have greater obligations to exercise authority in pursuit of resources. For example, Haines and Stroessner find that
Men and women are persistently associated with breadwinning and caregiving roles and related stereotypes. A role prioritization model (RPM) is presented that accounts for the conditions under which penalties and benefits arise due to perceived fulfillment or neglect of communal/caregiving roles (typically associated with women) and agentic/breadwinning roles (typically associated with men). …behaviors suggesting low prioritization of one’s traditional gender role—when women appear to neglect caregiving and men neglect breadwinning—produce particularly harsh judgments.
That paper refers to role prioritization, which fits well with the notion of moral revenue. Traditional (financial) revenue comes from fulfilling central and ongoing obligations to customers, which is typically one of the highest priority obligations a firm has. (Better a firm stiff its creditors than its customers!) Moral revenue obligations are similarly central and ongoing, and are tied to one’s role in society.
We can see the relevance of moral revenue in Philippa Foot’s famous Trolley Problem–or Problems, that is. The version everyone talks about is when someone pulls a switch to kill one person to save five, and most people think that’s fine. But she paired that version with another one in which a Judge frames (and ultimately condemns to execution) one to save five, because an angry mob has threatened to kill five hostages if the truly innocent defendant is found innocent. Moral revenue explains why most people killing one to save five is wrong in this case, but not in the trolley case: meting out justice honestly and impartially is a central and ongoing obligation of a Judge, so violating that is a far more serious failure of stewardship than someone who just happens to be near a switch when a trolley’s brakes fail.
More generally, we can hold Judges accountable in a moral way, while still holding them accountable differently from others, because society sees Judges as playing a certain role. With that role comes assets (like the powers to demand and exclude evidence, and render verdicts) and corresponding obligations (like wearing a robe in court, and using their powers with diligence and neutrality). Pretty straightforward and reasonable, right?
But what happens if we change “Judges” to “women” or “men”? Can a society treat women and men as playing a different roles, recognize different assets and obligations on their moral books, and thus hold them accountable differently–and still be holding them accountable in a moral way?
The short answer is “yes”, because in moral accounting, only a society has the power to set its recognition standards. Accountants don’t have the power to say “we think men and women play the same roles”, even if we think so in our personal like. In our professional life, we need to defer to society. If society sees men and women as playing the same roles, the task of moral accounting is constrained to making sure that everyone is held morally accountable in a moral way given that view.
Where do we go from here?
So far, this post has summarized the power and limits of moral accounting in addressing DEI issues. But that took long enough, so I’ll close with some open questions, which I’ll leave for future posts:
- Why am I (and I imagine many readers) more comfortable with holding Judges accountable differently from others, but not men differently from women? What other role distinctions seem more or less justified?
- If moral accounting defers to societies on roles and recognition, does it simply reinforce socially accepted but deeply immoral practices? How can moral accounting still be a force for good?
- How do we tell whether a society actually sets different roles and recognition standards for men and women? Just because some people say so isn’t enough. In most of today’s wealthy societies, some people seem to support this but others oppose it. How do moral
- How does a society determine who has which roles? The phrase “I identify as….” has become quite common in recent years. How does self-identification fit into group membership, role assignments, and thus recognition of assets and obligations?