Abstract : <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s intention to suggest a historical lineage between them. Rather, it is the intention to clarify the interplay between grids and the\nprecepts or keys to their use. The first case is the so-called edger of merit and demerit that was propagated by Yuan Huang, a scholar and bureaucrat of the late Ming-period,\nwho recommended its use for moral improvement in four letters to his son, of which the most famous letter was on the improvement of one\u2019s own fate. The second is Benjamin Franklin\u2019s 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,\nor 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\u2019s (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\nprecepts to their use.
pr\u00e9ceptes \u00e0 leur utilisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n