Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar

Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar

In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or n...

The causal cognition of wrong doing: incest, intentionality, and morality

The paper concerns the role of intentionality in reasoning about wrong doing. Anthropologists have claimed that, in certain non-Western societies, people ignore whether an act of wrong doing is committed intentionally or accidentally. To examine this proposition, we look at the case of Madagascar. We start by analyzing how Malagasy people respond to incest, and we find that in this case they do...

The Biological Foundations of the Incest Taboo

Incest avoidance, the incest taboo, and social cohesion: revisiting Westermarck and the case of the Israeli kibbutzim.

During the past 50 years, a consensus has been forming around Edward Westermarck's idea that incest avoidance results from an aversion that develops when individuals are brought up in propinquity. The argument here presented counters this emerging consensus. Reexamining the case of the Israeli kibbutzim, the authors show that individuals who grew up in the kibbutzim's communal education system ...

Intentionality, Morality, and Their Relationship in Human Judgment

This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality affect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affec...