Star Trek and moral accounting have a natural affinity, because both are so aspirational. Star Trek’s Federation expresses all sort of aspirations, from lauding knowledge and wisdom to eradicating poverty and war, but the Prime Directive overrides all of them–non-interference with outside cultures. This makes the Borg Collective the perfect Star Trek villain, because their entire purpose to to assimilate all cultures into its own.
Moral accounting has its own version of the Prime Directive: accountants are not permitted to impose their own morality on a society. Instead, they must accept that society’s definition of morality, and then evaluate whether people are being held morally accountable in a moral way according to that definition.
This makes for some uncomfortable moments. For example, Yale’s Human Area Relations Files describe the Aranda culture this way:
A recognized rule is that when a woman marries a man she becomes his absolute property, with the right to treat her as his slave, and to beat her as he likes until she conforms to his wishes. Relatives rarely interfere; when they do, several join in and the issue may be a battle royal. (Chewings, Charles. 1936. “Back in the Stone Age: The Natives of Central Australia.” id=oi08-039.)
The Social Recognition (SR) Principle of moral accounting states that only a party’s society can determine what assets and obligations are recognized on their moral books. Clearly, Aranda society recognizes that husbands have lots of assets on their books regarding their wives, including the right to treat them as property.
SR is basically the moral accountant’s prime directive, so however immoral we see this conception of a husband’s moral books we can’t let that taint our evaluation of their accountability practices. But we can still use Moral Accountability Principles (the MAP) to help Aranda culture live up to it’s own moral aspirations. As a first step, we can apply the Bookkeeping principle, which requires assets to be balanced by obligations. With such great power over his wife, a husband must also have great obligations, presumably to make sure she is provided for, and that she contributes to society. Similarly, since the wife has so little power, she must have relatively small obligations. We can also look at the Entity Principle, which says that someone can be held accountable for someone else’s behavior if they are connected by an accountability system. Because the husband is the primary one to hold his wife accountable, he must also be held accountable for her behavior.
So returning to the Aranda, a moral accountant couldn’t chastise them for letting husbands treat their wives like slaves. But they could encourage them to hold the husbands accountable for some major obligations, and for their wives’ behavior–aspirations I would argue they already have, because the MAP is universal.
I haven’t yet seen evidence of this in the Aranda culture (still looking!), but here’s a relevant story from the Truk people in Oceania, which gave great power to the hereditary patriarch of an extended family (“corporation”):
Whoever exercised authority over the corporation’s landholdings was called the sowuppwún (lord of the soil). No one else could harvest anything from it without his permission. At the same time he was responsible for the needs of his junior kinsmen within the corporation. This responsibility is dramatized in a story about the demigod Wonofáát, who selfishly refused to allow his sisters and their children access to food on their corporate property. One of his sisters lured him into incestuous relations with her, declaring that if he did not treat his sisters as kin then they need not treat him as kin either, so shaming him into more responsible behavior. Thus, failure to provide for one’s junior eterekes mates was portrayed as a violation of kinship responsibility on a par with incest. (Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1974. “Changing Social Organization on Romónum, Truk, 1947-1965.” In Social Organization and the Applications of Anthropology : Essays in Honor of Lauriston Sharp, 62–93. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. id=or19-030.)
Moral accounting’s Prime Directive isn’t as strong as Star Trek’s: we get to interfere, but only if we accept the society’s recognition of assets and obligations on its member’s moral books, and limit our interference to helping them hold everyone accountable in a moral way, as spelled out by the MAP.
I don’t think this makes us the Borg. But it does mean that moral accounting can be criticized one two sides: by those who oppose moral relativism, and by those who oppose cross-cultural interference. This seems like a sweet spot to me, but if you disagree, let me know!