Author:
Barrett H. Clark,Bolyanatz Alexander,Crittenden Alyssa N.,Fessler Daniel M. T.,Fitzpatrick Simon,Gurven Michael,Henrich Joseph,Kanovsky Martin,Kushnick Geoff,Pisor Anne,Scelza Brooke A.,Stich Stephen,von Rueden Chris,Zhao Wanying,Laurence Stephen
Abstract
Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.
Funder
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Cited by
163 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Ethical Principles, Challanges, and Methodological Issues in Cross-Cultural Research;Methodologies and Ethics for Social Sciences Research;2024-04-05
2. Methods of Comparative Law;The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law;2024-02-01
3. Empirical Methods;The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law;2024-02-01
4. Cross-societal variation in norm enforcement systems;Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences;2024-01-22
5. Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks.;Journal of Personality and Social Psychology;2023-12