Category: Cross-Cultural

How do you make a sculpture of an elephant?  Start with a huge block of marble, and chip away at everything that doesn’t look like an elephant!

It’s an old joke, but a good summary of how moral accounting works toward its twin ambitions for accountability systems:  to improve moral performance, and to do so in a moral way.

It’s really hard to sculpt an elephant from the inside out, and it’s also hard to improve moral performance from the inside out.  Let’s start with the very center:  moral character.  Sure, people can be selfish, cowardly, sadistic, or otherwise fall short of most people’s moral aspirations.  But good luck changing that!  Character attacks (like calling someone racist) create predictable resistance.  And even if people will listen, can you really change them?  After all, the very definition of character is that it is a persistent trait of a person.  One of most important rules of a moral accounting engagement is that it doesn’t evaluate anyone’s character–ever!  That’s like trying to sculpt an elephant from the inside out.

If we take one step away from the center, we have social norms.  These come up a lot as an alternative to character attacks, especially when we are talking about people from cultures long ago or far away, who fall short of today’s moral aspirations.  Sure, that famous dead writer, or that international business partner, might have some pretty awful views, but that just reflects their society.  Again, good luck changing that!  Moral accounting doesn’t try to change a society’s morality.  Instead, a moral accounting engagement just attempts to document that society’s moral aspirations, and then works from there.  If they differ from our own, so be it.

But as we move to the next step, we can finally see the parts of the marble that don’t look like an elephant–how does that society enforce their moral system?  Now we are talking about accountability systems (which we can also call “governance”), and that’s something that we can actually work with–people will listen to us without too much defensiveness, and change is actually possible.

Sometimes what we’re doing does cut into some pretty sensitive parts of the elephant, because it reveals that a society doesn’t fully understand its own moral aspirations.  Lots of accountability practices that feel like morality are actually just a collection of loosely related norms, like “when someone does this bad thing, do that to them.”  And those norms can conflict in ways that violate the Moral Accountability Principles (The MAP).

For example, consider the case of abortion.  Moral views on abortion vary quite a bit from society to society, and moral accounting has nothing to say about whether one view is better than another. But it does have something to say about a society that, for example,  takes a lax approach to rape, punishes women severely for having abortions, punishes them very severely if they fail to take care of their children, provides women with little support for raising children.

Taken separately, each of these accountability practices might reflect moral aspirations that reflect the moral elephant we’re trying to sculpt. But taken together, they represent an accountability system that (in my estimation, anyway) violates the Bookkeeping,  Proportionality and Entity principles.  A poor mother who has become pregnant without her consent has two pressing obligations–to bring her unborn child to term, and to care for her other children–but no assets with which to settle both obligations.  Bookkeeping says that it’s not moral to punish someone for not accomplishing the impossible, and Proportionality says that punishment must fit the extent of the moral failing.  But despite the high stakes, the woman can’t fail much, because no one could possibly live up to these competing obligations with no assets.  And the person who actually caused this problem–the father–is not being punished at all, violating the Entity Principle.

These violations of the MAP have many solutions that don’t require changing the society’s moral aspirations.  Instead, moral accountants can just evaluate accountability practices, show that collectively they conflict, and show the range of ways they could be changed.

Of course, societies change their moral aspirations over time, and some activists might work to change them. But moral accountants only chip away at the edges, to reveal the elephant of a particular society’s current moral aspirations, whatever they may be.