More than a hundred and fifty books were published on morality in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire in Ottoman Turkish. The authors of these books came from various regions of the empire, were ethno-confessionally diverse, and subscribed to different yet fluid ideological politico-moral positions. Still, many shared a prescriptive and interventionist outlook as members of reform institutions who frequented the same institutions and social networks. Until recently, historiographic references to the Ottoman morality books portrayed them as expressions of social and political conservativism, loyalty, and piety. A new approach to the morality scripts and their authors is needed to understand the practice of writing and thinking on morality in the context of the Ottoman reform period’s social transformations and changing institutional structures. One way to distance ourselves from a normative, ahistorical, and static reading of these moral scripts would be to focus on things that are seemingly external to the content of these scripts: bureaucratic employment, proessfionalization, networks, and larger power relations. My presentation will examine the practice of writing on morality in the context of the imperial bureaucratic culture by focusing on networks based on institutional affiliations and the shifting grounds of state employment. I will focus on Mekteb-i Mulkiye as the formative context within which a network of moralists studied, taught, discussed morality, learned about their duty of being moral guides, and wrote morality books while working or seeking careers in the Ottoman bureaucracy. These networks included instructors, students, and administrators, whose political positions ranged from dissidents and exiles to conformists. Tracing the divergent (un)employment trajectory of a cohort of Ottoman moralists, this paper will demonstrate how the goal of advancing the moral conditions of the Ottoman public is entangled with the advancement of a bureaucratic career. This paper will utilize archival records (including personnel records), memoirs, and morality scripts. Juxtaposing archival records with autobiographies and morality texts will take us beyond a static approach to morality and expose, through the networks formed within the reform institutions, the social and economic meanings of writing on morality in the final decades of the empire.