Central to moral accounting is a set of Moral Accountability Principles, which I call the MAP. The MAP spells out seven rules for holding people accountable in a moral way. You can read about them in detail here, but that’s for an audience of accountants. If you are new to moral accounting, especially if you are a philosopher, you should probably start here first, but here’s the MAP in plain English:
We need to hold parties accountable:
- for only and all they do, encourage and discourage (Entity);
- in proportion to their moral performance (Proportionality);
- on the basis of their balanced moral books (Bookkeeping);
- under the right moral standards (Social Recognition);
- in a way that supports those standards (Effectiveness);
- with good judgment (Judgment); and
- if someone else can uphold these principles better, let them do it (Subsidiarity).
As the names indicate, each principle is derived from accounting itself. That in itself is a strong endorsement, since accountants have been brought in to settle high-stakes, high-conflict disputes for thousands of years across many cultures. But each one also has widespread support among a range of religious and civic moral authorities.
For example (and again, you can read the details in the paper linked at the top of this post), the Entity Principle is similar to the Hague’s proscription against collective punishment of civilians in war, while holding officers accountable for the crimes of their subordinates. Proportionality is, of course, everywhere! Bookkeeping is basically the Spider-Man principle, slightly revised to “With greater assets come greater obligations”, along with the corollary that you can’t punish someone for failing to accomplish the impossible. Social Recognition gives society the power to determine what is moral (see here for the tricky aspects of that). Judgment goes back to importance of knowledge and virtue in classic philosophy. And finally, Subsidiarity is a foundational organizing principle of both the Catholic Church and the European Union–leave power in local hands unless they can’t do the job.
That’s why I made a strong claim for the universality of the MAP when I summarized it in a recent talk:
Think about something controversial, like prosecutions and other sanctions related to the killing of George Floyd. We may disagree on a lot of things about this, but I’m pretty sure we can agree on seven points.
First, we should hold the right people accountable, and hold them accountable under the right standards. We should hold them accountable to the right extent, and on the right basis, by which I mean our response should reflect the assets they had to work with, and the obligations they faced. If anyone wants to argue we should hold the wrong parties accountable, under the wrong standards, to the wrong extent, on the wrong basis or under the wrong standards, now would be a good time to speak up.
If you think these are just word games, that I’ve somehow framed this strategically in a way that makes them hard to disagree with, I say ‘you bet’. That’s exactly why accountants settled on principles defining reporting entities, recognition, proportionality, and bookkeeping—so that we can debate principles and application, rather than just engaging in a power struggle.
Now, how do you make sure these four principles in the middle of the MAP are upheld? You need to exercise good judgment, which if you look across a range of standards, boils down to a mix of having good knowledge, like you would get by conducting a good analytical review, and gathering data from well-planned substantive testing, and by demonstrating what I will call the accounting virtues—expertise, independence, professional skepticism, and so on. These are just basic auditing principles, and I just don’t think many people are going to say ‘we should hold people accountable with poor judgment!”
Now for some people, it just isn’t feasible for them to be knowledgeable, expert, or independent, or it might just be that no one trusts them to be so. So we also need parties to be held accountable by the right people. This is basically a decentralization principle—give the job to the people in the best position to do it well. I follow the political scientists by calling it Subsidiarity.
Finally, we get to the principle of effectiveness. Accountability sounds like it means punishment, but it’s more forward looking than that. In accounting, moral or otherwise, we want to encourage good performance and discourage bad performance. If you get the other six principles right, you are well on your way to effectiveness—if people know they will be held accountable well, they will behave well.
I’m not saying we will all agree on how these principles apply to the killing of George Floyd. But again, if you want to argue we should hold people accountable with bad judgment, or by the wrong people, or in an ineffective way, now’s the moment to speak up.
If you do want to argue against the MAP, now’s the moment to speak up!