Keeping Your Ledger
A Framework for Moral Living
The Ledger
Imagine a room, a study. It is well appointed; tall mahogany bookcases are lined with rows and rows of beautifully bound books, a fireplace gently crackles casting dancing light across a plush Persian rug, small lamps with art deco green lampshades cast soft white light where it is needed.
In the center of the room stands a vintage slated top writing desk. It is constructed of heavy wood. Running your fingers along the top reveals a surface that has acquired a finish of dings, dents, and gentle scars; the record of existing across time and well used. Your mind constructs for it a history of ancient knowledge.
There are but two items on the desk. A pen, surprisingly heavy when picked up, but balanced between your fingers, it sings when it dances across a page. And a book… a ledger… bound with plush, soft leather, sitting open.
A long ribbon of a bookmark rests gently down the middle, on either side softly yellow pages containing columns. Double entry. Credits and debits. An accounting of all of the good and ill done by a person.
You flip backwards through the previous pages. Its records are not recorded in dollars, or numbers even. But morality. The entries are mostly small, interrupted on occasion by much larger transactions. Transactions you remember. Transactions that left a profound impact on you and your sense of self.
Transactions, for better or worse, that define who you are.
Who has been keeping this record? There is a chair, sturdy, made of oak, cushioned with leather. You sit down to have a better look, the chair feels distinctly bespoke for you, providing support just where you need, comfort where it feels best.
You lean forward onto the desk to get a better look. Your elbow rests in a groove, one that is precisely contoured to your arm. It feels home there. It belongs there. You pick up the pen, its heavy weight feels surprisingly natural in your fingers. As you continue to examine this book, you notice one additional item on the desk. A nameplate, etched copper with the patina of time.
A title can be read – The Accountant
Followed by a name. You thrill for a moment, finally able to know who has been keeping this record of your spending, of your earnings, of your morals. But you stop when you read it. Is that right?
The name is yours.
Introduction to Ledger Ethics
Origins of The Ledger: My Father and my moral awakening
I grew up as a sensitive child under the rule of a tyrannical father. Through his bouts of temper, unpredictable physical abuse, and mental manipulation, he struck a figure of pure terror for me going back to my earliest memories.
And I was not the only one subject to his reign. I watched as he tormented my mother into a near permanent depressive state, manipulated other women to sate his lusts, and committed petty crimes with absurd justifications.
“I steal cigarettes so I can afford to buy you milk,” was what he told my twin sister and I when he was arrested for shoplifting.
I lived in fear and felt the tension of everyone else around him. It was at the age of six, at the break of dawn on a bright Florida spring morning, that the epiphany hit me.
“My father was a bad person. The worst. To be a good person, all I needed to do was be the opposite of him.” This became my guiding principle.
But time moves on, and the moral framework of a six-year-old requires review and revision in order to be useful in the wider world. Actions have consequences.
From my father I saw many examples of what not to do. But from others I learned the powerful impact of kindness.
The teacher who gave my family furniture when we had next to nothing.
The friend’s father who took the time to listen and bought me the clothes and school supplies I desperately needed.
The family who made me feel like one of their own, creating a sanctuary for me where I could begin to grow.
The mentors who went out of their way to provide a guiding hand.
From these experiences and so many more, I learned how one can be a good person in a complicated world. And what began as feelings and thoughts slowly crystalized into a more formal means of evaluating my impact on the world. The Ledger.
Without intention I began to keep a tally in my mind, of the good I’d done, and the bad. And as I matured and developed in my empathy and understanding, I began to see the precedents of those good and bad things, and their wider consequences.
In future essays I will dive into the elements of Ledger Ethics in specific detail, wrestle with the arguments it raises, and discuss the influences that shaped it, both from my personal story and from the canon of western philosophy.
You Kant believe the hot takes I have about Aristotle… and Kant…
That was a bad pun, but I couldn’t help myself.
Core Tenets of Ledger Ethics
Here I want to lay out the core precepts of this framework. I think with any moral philosophy you need to start with the absolute basics. What is good?
The Nature of the Universe
The universe isn’t chaos, but it also isn’t ordered. It operates upon rules that can be known and discovered. But there is no guiding hand. Outside of sentient reasoning, there is no reason why anything happens. On a scale of sentience, the line where biological instinct becomes reason is blurry at best, and the human place in relation to that line may not be where we like to believe it is.
The Nature of Causality
The causality of the universe can be understood by the application of known rules within the cosmic order (Newtonian physics, for example), but there is a limit to human comprehension of these rules and applying them for the sake of knowledge, understanding, and prediction. While events that seem random are not beyond explanation, and the future is not entirely unknowable, the human mind lacks the ability to fully grasp the potentially infinite variables that make up causality. We are part of the same system, not above or apart from it.
Owing to our inherent fallibility, certainty of thought is an absurd notion. While we strive for understanding we must humble ourselves to the fact that nothing can truly be known with absolute certainty. There is always an exception, the mind always has blind spots.
The paradox being the certainty that we cannot be certain of anything.
As humans we have the blind spots in our abilities to attain knowledge, reach understanding, and apply reason.
Want to dive deeper into practical ethics and moral decision-making? I explore these questions every week in Radical Kindness: Empathy as Rebellion—philosophy grounded in real life, not textbooks.
Implications of “No Guiding Hand”
If we start with these ideas, then what makes some things better than others? From when do we derive good and evil? If nothing can be known by humans with certainty, are people simply free to do what they want, nihilism in a chaotic universe?
Did I just rediscover Moral Relativism?
No. Because while a person has their blind spots, those are different for different people. Even with over eight billion of us on the planet, no two people have precisely the same range of knowledge and experience. And we are nothing if not social creatures.
The best way to minimize the dangers of this blindness is to integrate into community. The natural social unit of humans is not the family, but the small community. Families can exist as communities, but even a large nuclear family is incomplete without extended family. We do not belong to “a” community, but several, family, our work cohort, religious groups, academic classes. Often, we place artificial limits on what is a community and who can be a part of it, to our detriment.
Good, Evil, and the Moral Spectrum
Good and evil are not explicit.
The closest to explicitly good are thoughts and actions that are constructive and bring benefit to others. Choosing destruction and to actively harm others is the closest to explicitly evil. But just as forest fires must be allowed to happen to prevent even more destructive fires, there is nothing that is wholly evil or wholly good, rather points on a spectrum that never reaches an end. Like Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox, we are always closing half the distance in an infinite process towards either good or evil.
Since we cannot understand and predict with absolute certainty, to achieve the best possible life we must make peace with what cannot know, and choose as often as possible to benefit and build up each other, and trust and hope that others do the same for us; we must embrace that inherent vulnerability, because, again, as creatures humans are social.
To be social means giving up something of yourself for the benefit of others, and in benefiting others you strengthen community and thus benefit yourself. Knowing that, there is no clearly defined criteria to make us choose when the benefit of the self clashes with the benefit of all; we must use what reason we must make the best of less than perfect choices, but over time ensure that the net balance accrues to the community.
What are good and evil?
Good is comprised of benefits. These are the things which are positive, affirming, constructive, that increase human dignity and freedom.
Evil is comprised of harms. Harms are those things which damage, induce pain, destroy, dehumanize.
· A good is a benefit actively chosen to be done through intent and or action.
· An evil is a harm actively chosen through intent and or action.
· An evil of indifference is a harm acknowledged and allowed to persist with no interference from one with agency.
· A good of acceptance is a benefit acknowledged and allowed to persist with no interference from one with agency
Moral Categories in Ledger Ethics
This is what The Ledger is recording. Even if no one witnessed it. Even if you choose to ignore it. No action, no thought, exists without an impact. Even the lightest feather makes ripples on a pond.
But this is just the beginning. And it raises so many questions.
Open Questions: What The Ledger Asks of Us
How do we navigate situations where different communities have conflicting moral frameworks? After all, in many cases people on both sides of an issue claim absolute moral clarity.
Does everything get recorded? Even a fleeting thought? If I imagine punching an annoying person in the face, but never betray that thought, have I done a harm?
What about agency and accountability? What if the situation I am in forces me to commit an act of harm, despite my desire not to?
Does intention count? After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intention.
If we are the accountants for our ledgers, how do we avoid self-delusion? So many people seem to live by “If it was done to me it was bad, if I did it I must have had good reason”.
Subscribe to this Substack and I will walk you through these questions and the further details of The Ledger, and how the entries over time build who we are, a core of Architectural Humanism. This framework came from a lifetime of joy and suffering, not the halls of academia. As such it has been tempered and tested in the fires of the real world, and these questions require answers.
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