A concept of merit is used for spiritual accounting in many religious traditions, seemingly a substantial point of connection between religion and ordinary morality. Teachings of “merit transfer” (as in Buddhism and Roman Catholicism) might make us doubt this connection since they violate the principle that merit must be earned. If we examine the structure of ordinary schemes of desert, however, we find that personal worth is posited for a variety of reasons; the basic requirement in this realm is not earning by individuals but rather a community’s program for cultivating desirable collaboration among its members. There are strong enough parallels between religiously envisioned merit transfer and socially normal conferrals and sharings of worth that we can conclude that the religious posits of transferred merit are indeed comprehensible as merit, whatever other problems of comprehensibility they pose.

功绩概念在许多宗教传统中用于精神会计，这似乎是宗教与普通道德之间的实质联系。“功绩转移”的教义（如佛教和罗马天主教中的教义）可能使我们怀疑这种联系，因为它们违反了必须赢得功绩的原则。但是，如果我们研究一下普通的沙漠计划的结构，就会发现个人价值是由于各种原因而存在的。这个领域的基本要求不是个人赚钱，而是一个社区计划，目的是在其成员之间培养理想的合作关系。从宗教角度考虑的功绩转移与社会正常的授予和价值分享之间有足够的相似之处，我们可以得出结论：转移的功绩的宗教观点确实可以理解为价值，