I’ve been working with Tamara Lambert and Marietta Peytcheva to kick off a cross-cultural study. For data, we’re using Yale’s Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), which has collected anthropological writings about a variety of human cultures. Our question: Do cultures around the world, from the Artic to Africa to Micronesia, follow the 7 Moral Accountability Principles (The MAP)?
Our goal is similar to Oliver Curry’s project using the same data. Curry derives 7 moral principles from cooperative games in biology and argues that because these games are so general, the principles should be universally accepted. In lay terms, they are: love your family, support your community, reciprocate, show strength, defer to strength, be fair, and respect property rights.
Moral Accountability Principles (the MAP) are derived from accounting, not biological cooperation games, but the argument for universality is similar. Accounting has come up with principles to hold people accountable in high-stakes, high-conflict settings across many centuries (millennia!) and cultures, so they should be universal: every culture will seek to (1) hold the right people accountable for their obligations, (2) under society’s standards (not their own or the people they owe), (3) proportional to their performance in magnitude and kind, (4) on the basis of balanced moral books, (5) with good judgment, (6) in a way that is effective at improving performance, and (7) let accountability be handled by the person best able to live up to (1)-(6).
Our plan is to identify paragraphs in HRAF that depict what we call “governance”, because to hold someone accountable is to govern. If we can identify both governance and the behavior being governed, we then see which of the principles of the MAP are relevant, and determine whether the culture accepts or rejects them, and whether the paragraph offers a justification.
For example, here’s a paragraph:
Until their seventh year both boys and girls remain with their mother, going to their father only for an occasional talk. If their mother is not divorced by their father, they live in the women’s compartment and help with the lighter work. If they deserve it they are spanked with a stick, not only by their mother or father, but by the slaves both male and female. The Rwala believe that the rod originated in Paradise, al-’asa azharat min al-genna, and that it also leads man back to it. . . . Boys learn to shoot before they are fourteen and take part in at least one raid before they are sixteen. At this period the father would not think of punishing the disobedience of his son simply with a stick but uses a saber or a dagger instead. By cutting or stabbing them the father not merely punishes the boys but hardens them for their future life. In the opinion of the Bedouins the son who disobeys is guilty of rebellion, for which the proper punishment is the saber, as-seif lemin ‘asa’. (HRAF Document 2: Musil, pp. 255–56)
Several principles in the MAP seem to be illustrated here. Young children are spanked when they “deserve” it, so that would suggest the Entity and Bookkeeping principles (the right people are held accountable for obligations in their books). There’s also a clear justification, which we see as Effectiveness–spanking is the road to paradise. Treating older children more harshly seems part Proportionality (because then disobedience is rebellion, and thus a more serious offense) and Effectiveness again because the harsher punishment hardens them.
But this week we’ve been asking ourselves–how could we actually falsify the prediction that all cultures aspire to upholding the MAP? I recently proposed the following. First, our predictions are, more precisely:
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- No culture rejects any principle of the MAP
- Every governance behavior that is justified is done so by reference to one of the principles of the MAP.
We falsify the first one is
So we can falsify our theory if more than a trivial number of cultures reject principles of the MAP (e.g., they aspire to hold the wrong people accountable, or hold them accountable in ineffective ways). We can also falsify it if we find governance behaviors that justified by something outside the MAP–that would suggest that the MAP is incomplete.
As an example of the second type, consider this snippet from HRAF:
The Kapauku law states that a man’s property may be seized against his will if he has failed or refused to meet his obligations deriving from a contract or from damage he has caused (to property or life). A successful seizure of property, irrespective of its value, absolves the debtor whose property was taken from any further obligation….
Although used in few instances within a politically organized group, such as a confederacy or a localized lineage, seizure of property by force is especially applied in cases in which the entitled and obligated parties come from different political confederacies. Because no law applies beyond the confines of a political confederacy, such disputes and obligations are, strictly speaking, not legal. Thus seizure by force, together with feud, war, and diplomatic relations replaces the function of law in cases in which the latter does not apply.
Pigs are the favorite type of property for forcible seizure. They constitute valuable items, readily accessible because they roam freely in the swamps, grasslands, and secondary forests. The recently introduced chicken began in 1959 to assume the same functions as pigs.
My own reading is that the bolded phrase reflect a violation of proportionality–you hold someone accountable for not paying a debt by taking something of value that could be much more or less than what was owed. The italicized phrase explains why–proportionality would just be too hard, given the lack of law, so this is recognized as a second best.
One interpretation here is that the culture still aspires to proportionality–if they could be more proportional they would. But this still might falsify the MAP because the reason–it’s too hard!–isn’t part of the MAP. If I squint, I can see that as Effectiveness–with the lack of legal structure, letting someone confiscate a pig or chicken regardless of the debt owes is a more effective way to encourage payment of debts, so it’s worth sacrificing proportionality. But if I can squeeze this into Effectiveness, what can’t I do?
Alternatively, the MAP as currently laid out is incomplete, and we need a principle like Efficiency. This has a long history in accounting, as in the usual auditor’s concerns about having an audit be efficient as well as effective, and speaks to civic morality like “justice delayed is justice denied“.
I would be comfortable adding this one principle to the MAP to make 8. I worry that after coding another 10 paragraphs, how big will the MAP be? But that’s why were starting this exercise.
This is going to be a big project, so if you are interested in helping out, let me know!