Do Universal Moral Intuitions Shape and Constrain Culturally Prevalent Moral Norms?

There is much evidence to suggest that humans everywhere recognize the virtues of kindness, fairness, loyalty, respect, sharing, courage, and obedience and abhor cruelty, cheating, betrayal, subversion, hoarding, cowardice, and disobedience^2,5,10. But people are often obliged to prioritize one virtue over others or condemn some vices more than others, depending on a wide range of contextual factors and goals. And this variability is apparent also at the level of entire cultural groups, some tending historically to emphasize certain virtues more highly or punishing particular vices more harshly than others. Social scientists have presented countless examples of moral values that serve to reinforce locally prevailing social structures – for example, that egalitarian hunter-gatherers value sharing¹⁴, armies demand loyalty and self-sacrifice⁴, chiefdoms emphasize respect for natural superiors¹¹, and affluent liberal democracies value kindness⁹.

Universal moral intuitions are like anchors, invisible from the surface but immovably secured to the seabed, whereas culturally prevalent moral norms are like buoys on the surface of the water, available to direct observation.

At an even cruder level, it is possible to distinguish two main kinds of societies from a moral perspective: those that privilege individual rights (even at the cost of collective safety and security) and those that prioritize devotion and conformity to the group (even at the cost of personal freedoms and privileges). Durkheim associated the first kind of society with a highly elaborated division of labor in which a great diversity of human skills and abilities needed to be integrated into an organic whole, whereas deference to the group was more prominent in simple societies in which individual qualities mattered less³. A modern variant of this argument is presented by Moral Foundations Theory which associates the individualizing virtues of care and fairness with Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (aka WEIRD) societies⁸ and more groupish and authoritarian moral values with traditional societies^6,7. It is possible also to characterize the whole of human history in terms of shifts of moral emphasis. For instance, despotism has been said to follow a U-shaped curve in cultural evolution: while our ancestors were egalitarian apes, valuing compassion and fairness, the rise of agriculture heralded increasingly cruel and repressive empires based on conquest, slavery, and the absolute power of rulers, but in the wake of the Axial Age and the rise of more ethical religions the tide turned again in the direction of increasingly liberal and democratic social formations¹.While the details of such theories could be wrong, they all suggest that moral systems are variations on a set of universal themes.

To use a nautical analogy, the relationship between universal morality and its cultural expressions may be compared to the way in which invisible anchors and chains constrain the movements of visible buoys floating on the surface of the sea. Universal moral intuitions are like anchors, invisible from the surface but immovably secured to the seabed, whereas culturally prevalent moral norms are like buoys on the surface of the water, available to direct observation. The same analogy might apply to numerous other domains of culture. For example, there is much evidence that explicit religious beliefs, including so-called ‘theologically correct’ teachings of a given tradition¹², are similarly analogous to visible buoys while more intuitive, or ‘cognitively optimal’ religious concepts¹³, are analogous to hidden anchor points. A key question would then become whether there is some kind of interaction between different kinds of anchors and buoys. At the risk of over-extending this metaphor, we might ask whether the lines linking religious buoys and their anchors somehow get tangled up with normative buoys and moral anchors. For example, do theologically correct religious representations somehow activate our foundational moral principles and thereby amplify or constrain their expression? Efforts to investigate questions of that kind would also need to take into account the effects of environmental factors on religion and morality, ranging from drought and pestilence to institutional innovation and warfare, analogous perhaps to the effects of wind and tides on the position of buoys. Efforts are only now beginning to explore the massive battery of empirically tractable research questions such an approach inevitably generates.

References

1. Bellah, Robert N. & Joas, Hans (2012). The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Boston: Harvard University Press.
2. Curry, Oliver, S., Mullins, Daniel, & Whitehouse, Harvey (forthcoming). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies.Current Anthropology. (https://osf.io/9546r/)
3. Durkheim, Émile (1893) [1933]. The Division of Labour in Society. New York: MacMillan
4. Durkheim, Émile (1897) [1951]. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press.
5. Graham, J., & Haidt, J. (2010). Beyond beliefs: Religions bind individuals into moral communities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 140–150.
6. Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1029 –1046.
7. Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., & Haidt, J. (2012). The moral stereotypes of liberals and conservatives: Exaggeration of differences across the political spectrum. PLoS ONE, 7(12), e50092.
8. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61– 83.
9. McCarty, Meladee & McCarty, Hanoch, (1996). Acts of Kindness: How to Make a Gentle Difference. Florida: Health Communications.
10. McKay, Ryan and Whitehouse, Harvey (2014). Religion and Morality. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038455 Printed 2015, 141(2): 447-73.
11. Sahlins, Marshall D. (1963). Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and. Polynesia . Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 285-303.
12. Slone, D. J. (2004). Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. Oxford University Press
13. Whitehouse, Harvey (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Rowman Altamira
14. Woodburn, James (1982). Egalitarian Societies, Man (NS), Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 431-451.

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