Evolutionary and Cognitive Science

When interpreting the actions of people from other societies from a moral point of view, we often err. Two types of errors are of particular relevance here. One consists in overestimating the similarity across cultures of the moral judgments that guide people’s actions and interactions. The other consists in underestimating this similarity. Arguably, the first kind of error is common among psychologists who, since Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1981), have studied the stages through which children acquire moral competencies and tried to identify basic principles and components of human morality. Although psychologists do not entirely ignore cultural diversity, they, as a matter of course, approach morality as a general human disposition and competence. The bulk of their evidence is experimental and most of their experiments are carried with Western or at least Westernized participants. Anthropologists object to these theoretical, methodological and sampling biases (Westermarck, 1906; Benedict, 1934; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987). Anthropological studies of morality based on participant observation in a great variety of societies show how much moral judgments can vary across cultures, casting doubt, most anthropologists think (but see Laidlaw, 2002; Lambek, 2010), on the existence of universal moral norms, or even on the very existence of morality as a universal trait of the human mind. After all, ‘morality’ might just be one of these ‘family resemblance’ category—a notion that Wittgenstein (1953) introduced and illustrated with the category of games—where items are lumped together because each resemble some of the others, without there being any characteristic trait shared by every item in the category. Still, while the richness and relevance of anthropological evidence is clear, its interpretation is not. Moreover, anthropologists’ focus on cultural differences and local idiosyncrasies may result in errors of the second type, that is, in underestimating similarity of moral judgments across cultures.