Merit

True Grid: Three Case Studies of Moral Accounting Volume 14, Issue 2 Harro Maas

This article examines and compares three grids that were designed to serve explicit moral accounting goals: the calculation and improvement of character. The examples are tables which fall under a broad definition of diagrams. The examples follow another in time, but it is not the article’s intention to suggest a historical lineage between them. Rather, it is the intention to clarify the interplay between grids and the precepts or keys to their use. The first case is the so-called ledger of merit and demerit that was propagated by Yuan Huang, a scholar and bureaucrat of the late Ming-period, who recommended its use for moral improvement in four letters to his son, of which the most famous letter was on the improvement of one’s own fate. The second is Benjamin Franklin’s Art of Virtue, which Franklin in his autobiographical letter to his son equally described as a tool of moral improvement. The third is the so-called moral thermometer, or biometer, a tool developed by the French revolutionary and pedagogical innovator Marc-Antoine Jullien, who described this tool as a moral mirror and compass that would be especially of use in preparing and educating adolescents for their adult lives. All three represent generic methods of producing knowledge about an individual’s (moral) character, knowledge on which the users of these tables could act. Their differences have to do with the perceived relation of moral conduct to other spheres of life, religious, social, and economic, or all of these combined, but also with the different precepts to their use.

"The texts were written in the form of letters to his son and published under his scholarly name, Liaofan, which he had adopted after being converted to the use of the so-called ledgers of merit and demerit. The ledgers served to calculate the moral balance of a person’s deeds by registering their numerical values. Yuan Huang originally probably intended his letters only for use within the family circle, just as the Yuanshi jiaxun (Yuan Family Instructions) of his ancestor Yuan Ho was likely intended but which was also published, around 1479. Both are examples of the Chinese genre of morality books, a genre that sought to educate readers about the rules of proper moral conduct. 2"

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2020) 14:309–330 DOI 10.1215/18752160-8538670