I gave a talk to Cornell University’s Moral Psychology Brown Bag series on September 21st, 2021. Here are my slides. I’ll post the video once it’s available.
Category: Moral Philosophy
NOTE: This post is a self-contained description of moral accounting, intended as the basis for interviews with experts outside accounting, especially those focused on philosophy, religion, political ideology, or culture. Those who want more background (including a more scholarly justification of my claims) can read this. Please contact Robert Bloomfield at Cornell University if you are interested in discussing this. A companion piece about the practical uses of moral accounting is available here, intended as the basis for interviews, with activists, accountants, consultants, and organizational leaders.
How should people be governed? This central moral question has been addressed in philosophy, theology, and politics and many other fields, yielding much controversy and many conflicting answers. In this post, I present principles of moral governance, derived from accounting, that I claim will be supportable by anyone, regardless of their philosophy, religion, political ideology, or culture. I am testing this claim by interviewing a highly diverse set of thoughtful and knowledgeable people, who are willing to read this short document and talk with me about four questions, following up on each and otherwise letting the conversation take its course:
Business leaders often look to warfare for business strategy. Sun Tsu’s The Art of War is a business classic, quoted by everyone from The Drucker Institute to Tony Soprano. So I’ve been thinking about how this war-business connection fits into both traditional managerial reporting and moral accounting.
I came across a useful case study on this question as part of my preparation for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit. (I’m on the advisory board and editor of the Journal that will publish papers coming out of it). From an article on the Russian theory and practice of Reflexive Control:
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:
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.
[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.
Philosophers, especially moral philosophers, play a crucial role in moral accounting, so I’m hoping to find some who are willing to comment or collaborate. In this post, I lay out what philosophers need to know about moral accounting (not too much!), as background for this and other posts that lay out specific questions and challenges. Most of my points summarize or elaborate on my draft monograph, The MAP: Moral Accounting Principles for Moral Accounting Engagements.
So you know where we are headed, here is my first question for moral philosophers:
Accounting is famously “the language of business”. But linguist George Lakoff sees it as the language of morality as well.
We all conceptualize well-being as wealth. We understand an increase in well-being as a “gain” and a decrease of well-being as a “loss” or a “cost.” This is combined with a very general metaphor for causal action in which causation is seen as giving an effect to an affected party (as in “The noise gave me a headache”). When two people interact causally with each other, they are commonly conceptualized as engaging in a transaction, each transferring an effect to the other.
An effect that helps is conceptualized as a gain; one that harms, as a loss. Thus moral action is conceptualized in terms of financial transaction. Just as literal bookkeeping is vital to economic functioning, so moral bookkeeping is vital to social functioning. And just as it is important that the financial books be balanced, so it is important that the moral books be balanced.
Of course, the “source domain” of the metaphor, the domain of financial transaction, itself has a morality: It is moral to pay your debts and immoral not to. When moral action is understood metaphorically in terms of financial transaction, financial morality is carried over to morality in general: There is a moral imperative not only to pay one’s financial debts, but also one’s moral debts.
You would think Lakoff’s observations would generate some interest among accountants, but I guess not–I searched Google Scholar for papers citing Lakoff’s Metaphor, Morality and Politics and found none in accounting journals! But it’s definitely worth thinking about, and I’d like to make a few points.